FRONTIER SPACE AND THE REIFICATION OF THE RULE OF LAW: COLONIAL NEGOTIATIONS IN THE WESTERN PACIFIC, 1870-74.

The article focuses on colonial frontier in Pacific, west of Fiji, as part of the expansion of European empire. It explores the factors of colonial performance that leads to the production of the authority of the Rule of Law in colonial societies, particularly the lawless, liminal and disordered status of the frontier in colonial legal narrative of expansion. It contends that frontier of the Pacific lawless is not due to the original absence of law amongst Indigenous peoples and societies but rather on the intensification of colonial interest in the absence of explicit state sanction. Moreover, it presents case-studies which illustrate the changes in the international law of empires and colonies and moments wherein legal and spatial dimensions of frontiers were defined or articulated.