In the first place and for a long time the increasing pressure for expanasion in the Pacific and China areas which was so prominent a feature of the last third of the nineteenth century did not come from the European governments. Before 1894 it came almost entirely from Asian governments and their foreign advisers or from European settlers and officials in Australia and New Zealand, the Pacific islands and Asia. For special reasons the latter received strong official support from Europe for a brief period between 1882 and 1885; but apart from this the European governments remained reluctant to extend their responsibilities and their rivalries to this area until the last few years of the century.

Among the earliest problems to arise in the area were those created by the expansion of European trade and settlement in some of the Pacific islands. Clashes between Europeans and between Europeans and natives were becoming serious as early as 1870 in consequence of the growth of trade and plantation agriculture, the improvement of communications and the effect of these developments in dislocating native social and political systems. In Fiji the British Colonial Office had already rejected, twelve years before, a suggestion from the British settlers, who were also afraid of annexation by France, that these problems should be solved by annexation by Great Britain. It had felt reluctant to risk a quarrel with France. Since then the number of settlers, predominantly British, engaged in trade and cotton production had continued to grow despite the lack of effective government and increasing disorder.