“A Swamp Becomes the Capital”: Urban ecologies of empire in Suva (Fiji)

Abstract

The nineteenth-century expansion of colonial port cities onto land reclaimed from the ocean generated both material and conceptual shifts in the relations between land and water. Focusing on the history of Suva, which was established as the British capital of Fiji in 1882, this article shows how, despite colonial accounts of successful efforts to ‘drain the swamp’, the city’s history has been narrativised as a series of urban disasters. From local critiques of the original unsuitability of ‘malarious swampland’ to indigenous oral accounts of the catastrophic consequences of abandoning hill forts, through to post- independence literary narratives of urban flooding, the reclaimed city has been imagined by its inhabitants as a shifting and precarious space whose terraqueous qualities undermine colonial narratives of a progressive ‘swamp to city’ trajectory. Showing how local accounts anticipate environmental concerns across coastal zones, this article proposes a ‘reclaimed’ urban method that connects colonial pasts to ecological futures, tracing the oceanic connections leading out from the Pacific city to other postcolonial sites.