The political status of the Cocos-Keeling Islands, a group of twenty-seven small atoll islands in the Indian Ocean about 1,700 miles west of Australia, remained unresolved from the time of the islands’ settlement in 1827 until their effective incorporation into Australia in 1984. For a century and a half, protection shopping helped to create and sustain the islands’ condition of suspended sovereignty. During the nineteenth century, the ruling family actively cultivated the protection of Dutch and British imperial agents and played one empire against the other. Imperial agents veered between intervention and restraint, and Cocos-Keeling islanders invoked protection to blunt rulers’ power over them. The politics of protection continued into the twentieth century. Despite international attention to self-determination, the Cocos-Keeling Islands were not positioned for statehood, and full and effective integration into the British empire or Australia was perennially delayed. The territory’s history as a place of seemingly permanent semi-autonomy illuminates a global pattern in which protection politics worked to suspend sovereignty and in some cases perpetuate social and racial inequalities, both inside political communities and across the international order.

中文翻译：

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帝国之间的保护购物：科科斯-基林群岛的主权暂停

科科斯-基林群岛是印度洋上 27 个小环礁岛屿，位于澳大利亚以西约 1,700 英里处，从 1827 年这些岛屿定居到 1984 年有效并入澳大利亚，其政治地位一直没有得到解决. 一个半世纪以来，保护购物有助于创造和维持岛屿主权悬而未决的状况。十九世纪，统治家族积极培养对荷兰和英国帝国代理人的保护，并以一个帝国对抗另一个帝国。帝国特工在干预和克制之间摇摆不定，科科斯-基林岛民诉诸保护来削弱统治者对他们的权力。保护政治一直持续到 20 世纪。尽管国际社会关注自决，科科斯-基林群岛没有为建国做好准备，完全有效地融入大英帝国或澳大利亚的工作被长期推迟。该领土作为一个看似永久的半自治地方的历史揭示了一种全球模式，在这种模式中，保护政治致力于暂停主权，并在某些情况下使政治社区内部和整个国际秩序中的社会和种族不平等永久化。