My main concern in this essay is to show how these two crude types — value conversion and non-conversion systems — respond quite differently to colonial contact in its early typically Oceanic form of trade with European ships seeking provisions and commodities such as sandalwood, tortoise-shell, and bêche-demer. Before discussing these histories, however, it is important to raise a larger issue about how these systemic types are thought to be associated. This is necessary in part because my substitution/non-substitution opposition is drawn from debates about New Guinea Highlands societies where analysis has usually been frankly or explicitly evolutionist. Feil, in particular, suggests that western highlands societies are more evolved than those of the east (1987), and Godelier (1986, 1991) assumes that big man societies develop out of great men rather than vice versa. Although the analyses have undergone a good deal of refinement (Lemonnier 1990) and have been criticized in various ways (Strathern 1990), it is not clear that there is any positive formulation of a multilinear or cyclical transformational model that actually replaces a logic of from-to. The evolutionary view becomes particularly problematic if a broader range of Oceanic societies are considered since the Marquesas on the basis of some traditional criteria would have to be seen as a relatively “evolved” society: craft specialization was elaborate, there was hereditary leadership, notable inequality and so on. The Tongan and Hawaiian kingdoms are often classed together as the most developed and stratified Polynesian societies; in opposition to this evolutionary view, both Friedman (1981) and I (Thomas 1989) have emphasized not the degree of centralization or hierarchization from which perspective they may well be similar but instead the form of hierarchical reproduction which is distinctly different.

An alternative view could note the strong correlation between substitution or conversion systems and external exchange; the groups in which there is the most elaborate scope for conversion, say of services and kinship debts of various kinds into shell valuables, were also most densely associated with external trade: this is notable, for instance, for the Tolai, in New Georgia, in western Polynesia and in parts of the Massim region. On the other hand, the groups in which the life-for-life principle is most rigorously applied are also those excluded from wider exchange relations, such as the Umeda, the Kamula, and the Baining. This may not be true to the same degree of the Baruya, but they are not, in any case, on an extreme point of the continuum. If a regional-systemic perspective is adopted, it appears that the character of internal exchange is dependent on external articulations (cf. Gell 1992); this appears to be true, at least in a gross sense, where a wide range of cases rather than only the societies of the eastern and western highlands are considered. But my interest is not in proposing that it would be ultimately useful or informative to trace precise correlations on this point. The implication is rather that if the extent to which value conversions can be effected is linked with external exchange, then the systemic characteristics of particular societies can be related to the dynamics of regional trade systems rather than to some hypothetical and unilinear evolutionary index. Groups that were not in the early contact period engaged in trade may well have earlier been integrated into wider systems and were subsequently excluded for military reasons or because the nature of trade changed — the demands for certain articles may have ceased; routes may have shifted. While little will ever be known about such developments, it can safely be said that there were many changes — in demography, in production systems, in material culture — over time, that would have implied different configurations in trade routes. This would, in itself, imply the possibility of change in both directions — toward great men systems as well as from them — but would only be part of a broader processual model that privileged the variety of possible systemic forms and transformations rather than evolutionary direction.