Re-Mining Makatea: People, Politics and Phosphate Rock

This thesis is a study of the processes involved in the making, unmaking and potential remaking of a Pacific phosphate island. It is a history of Makatea, an uplifted coral atoll in the Tuamotu Archipelago (French Polynesia), mined by a French private company from 1908 to 1966 and presently coveted by an Australian-financed re-mining project called Avenir Makatea.

Using predominantly French, and English-language archival sources, I excavate aspects of the island's past, re-visiting important moments in time before, during and after the mine to demonstrate how phosphate islands are not just born but consciously, and often painstakingly, made. In presenting this history, I am concerned with exploring the relationship between human agency and broader environmental, economic or political circumstances; emphasizing through the extended case study of Makatea that phosphate islands exist only insofar as they belong to a complex set of local and global interrelationships involving landowners, labourers, companies, markets, governments, and environmental conditions, with each of these contingencies being open to contestation and negotiation.

Like recent historical studies on guano and phosphate islands, this thesis reinforces the link between extractive colonialism in the Pacific and input-intensive agricultural production in the neo-European nations of the Pacific Rim. However, unlike the examples of Nauru and Banaba, the particular historical circumstances of Makatea - belonging to a French colony, for one; mined by a private company, for another - meant that the island was subjected to both a shorter and less extensive period of mining, providing space for a different, more hopeful kind of historical narrative where the phosphate imperialism of the 20th century does not necessarily define the island's past or future.

As the first extended study of an island relegated by some Anglophone commentators to the status of the 'third phosphate island', this thesis adds to a growing historiography on the Pacific phosphate industry. It adds nuance to a French historiographical tradition that overlooks the British influence on the making of the industry and downplays the significance of the Makatea experience for the later nuclear era in French Polynesia. Over six chapters, this thesis traces Makatea's development from a lush Polynesian island, to a quintessential mined land and back again. It seeks to provide much needed context for present debates within French Polynesia about Makatea's future identity and whether it will revert once more to a phosphate island or continue to develop in a sustainable and self-defined direction with less reliance on the natural resource that nonetheless put the island onto the world map. Ultimately, this study is a reminder that in an era that has witnessed a movement towards global history, stories of small places, and islands in particular, still matter.