Communautés canaques et société coloniale

Canaque Communities and Colonial Society. Canaque nationalism in New Caledonia results from the spread of mercantile relations of production, growing urbanisation and the forced unification of the cultural field ; each of these factors has helped to undermine the bases of the domestic economy of the native reservations and encouraged a process of social differentiation incompatible with the colonial order. These transformations lie behind the specific forms taken by Canaque resistance, which has moved from the «refusal» of European culture to the political «demand» for national independence.