James Wightman (Jim) Davidson was born in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1915. Davidson completed his PhD at Cambridge on trade and settlement in the South Pacific 1788–1840. In 1947 he was sent as an emissary of the New Zealand government to Western Samoa. On 1 December 1950 he became founding Professor of the Department of Pacific History at the Australian National University and Dean of the Research School of Pacific Studies. His work and publications on Samoa included Samoa mo Samoa: The Emergence of the Independent State of Western Samoa (Oxford University Press, 1967). He was a Constitutional Advisor to Samoa 1959-1961, the Cook Islands 1963, the Nauru Local Government Council 1967-1968, a Consultant to the Congress of Micronesia 1969-1973 and Constitutional Planning Committee of Papua New Guinea 1972-1973. It was during this last assignment that he died in Port Moresby on 8 April 1973.