Arthur Gordon
Arthur Gordon was the first substantive governor of Fiji, and two decisions he took in his five years there are the reason the country has the population it has. He was the youngest son of the Earl of Aberdeen, the prime minister of the Crimean War, and had been his father's private secretary, a Liberal member of parliament for a year, and governor in turn of New Brunswick, Trinidad and Mauritius before he arrived at Levuka in June 1875, eight months after the chiefs had ceded the islands to Britain. A measles epidemic carried in on the ship that brought the cession party home had just killed about a quarter of the Fijian population. He governed through the chiefs rather than over them, created a Great Council of Chiefs that met for the first time in 1875, made the provinces follow the old chiefdoms, and let taxes be paid in produce rather than cash so that villagers did not have to sell their labour to the planters. The first decision was on land: he prohibited its sale by Fijians outright, and the ordinance of 1880 that followed left about five-sixths of the country in communal Fijian ownership, where it remains. The second decision followed from the first. The sugar planters needed labour that the villages were no longer obliged to supply, and Gordon, who had seen the indenture system in Trinidad and Mauritius, brought it to Fiji; the Leonidas landed the first four hundred and sixty-three Indian labourers in May 1879, and sixty thousand followed before the system ended in 1916. Their descendants were a majority of the population by the 1940s and the coups of 1987 and 2000 were about them. He was also, from 1877, the first High Commissioner for the Western Pacific, with a jurisdiction over British subjects on islands Britain had not annexed. He left in 1880 to govern New Zealand, where he was disliked, and then Ceylon, was made Lord Stanmore in 1893, and died in 1912. He thought of himself as the protector of the Fijians and was; the consequences of the protection were someone else's problem.
- Lived: 1829 CE – 1912 CE
- Nationality: British
- Roles: colonial_administrator, governor
