Description: Some fifteen hundred years before the birth of Christ, voyaging people first reached the group of islands in the Pacific we now know as Fiji. Today after nearly a century of British colonial rule, their homeland is shared by others besides these original Polynesian settlers, and its history reflects the circumstances of their arrival and involvement. The original settlers communicated with Tonga and Samoa, invoking defied ancestors to control their environment, installing great chiefs who were themselves living gods, harvesting land and sea and startling their neighbours with their ferocity in battle. In the early nineteenth century the first European traders began to arrive, together with Wesleyan and Catholic missionaries: European residents increased traders and cotton planters seeking to control land and labour, until the early 1870s outside interference led to the failure of a new mixed race independent government and put the islands into the hands of Britain. British rule led to the introduction of Indian labour for the new sugar industry which over the next hundred years transformed both the economy and the demography of Fiji with the Indians dominating the recent history. Since the country’s independence in 1970, consensus in the interest of nation-building has been a major goal.