European Society for Oceanists 2025 Conference

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Session Detail (parallel)

Labour Regimes within and beyond (Post-)Colonial Boundaries: Future Perspectives

Coordinator(s)

Tobias Wagemann, Nicholas Hoare

Session presentation

This panel aims to link the concept of connections in Oceania to the notion of indentured or unfree labour across the Pacific Ocean in both the past and the present. From the 1960s, major contributions in Pacific history and anthropology have focused on the question of mobility as a key perspective to interrogate networks of coercion linked with the labour trade, but also the agency of Pacific Islanders, sometimes as brokers, go-betweens, or otherwise willing participants. More recently, scholars have focused on the “immobility” of labour and the interplay between locally recruited actors and networks of transportation. Colonial indenture regrouped systems of workforce exploitation which crossed boundaries and forced Islanders and others to work for the colonial authority. Colonisers used legal tools to this end—such as the “Indigénat” system in the French empire—but also frequently went beyond regulations, as seen by the persistence of unfree labour after the 1917 end to indentured labour systems in the British empire. Deeply embedded in important scholarly debates over resistance and accommodation, our understanding of labour regimes has recently benefited from new ideas that seek to open the field to wider contributions from a range of perspectives. Work on gendered mobilities and the lively debates over contemporary labour schemes, such as PALM and RSE in Australia and New Zealand respectively, have injected new life into old scholarly terrain and the interplay between the past and present—history and anthropology—has created possibilities for further comparative and transdisciplinary inquiry. This panel’s intention is to regroup papers on colonial or post-colonial labour regimes throughout the Pacific Ocean and would thus greatly benefit from contemporary perspectives from different disciplinary and linguistic backgrounds. We particularly encourage work that considers contemporary developments from a historical perspective, or vice versa, connecting scholarly approaches as well as case studies.

Paper submissions are closed

Accepted papers

Labourers or patients?: HIstories of Indian and Pacific labour on Makogai Island, Fiji

Jane Marion Buckingham (University of Canterbury)

Contemporary notions of the South Pacific as a ‘labour reserve’ for European, New Zealand and Australian commercial interests have historical roots in pre-colonial European commercial and British colonial interventions in the Pacific. Histories of indentured labour migration to the Fijian islands tend to focus on the movement of Indians through British colonial labour networks to work on substantial sugar plantations. On Makogai Island, purchased from European commercial interests in 1907 as a site for the isolation and medical care of leprosy affected people from Fiji, histories of indentured labour and health migration intersect. By 1911, primarily a hospital site, Makogai was also a site of indentured labour where Indian and other workers managed the island’s small plantation and contributed to building hospital infrastructure. At the same time, Indian indentured labourers on Fijian plantations who demonstrated leprosy symptoms were isolated on the island and treated primarily as patients rather than as indentured workers. This paper considers Makogai island as a space where colonial and pre-colonial labour and health histories come together. Indian experience of indenture and displacement is considered within the wider Pacific history of unfree labour. Legacies of family dislocation, violence and infirmity were aspects of unfree labour histories shared by Indian and other Pacific island communities isolated on Makogai.

Chinese indentured labor and phosphate mining on Christmas Island

Claire Lowrie (University of Wollongong)

Christmas Island, located in the Indian Ocean, became an Australian external territory in 1958, and is well known today as the site of a controversial Immigration Detention Center. Yet Christmas Island was at the center of another story of regional significance. Like the Pacific Islands of Nauru, Banaba, and Makatea, Christmas Island is a phosphate island. Phosphate was (and continues to be) of major economic significance to Oceania and to the world. Phosphate-based fertilizers underpinned the second agricultural revolution, resulting in massive increases in agricultural productivity, especially important for countries with poor quality natural soils like Australia. On Christmas Island, the extraction of phosphate relied on the labor of indentured Chinese workers. In 1914, in response to international criticism, legislative reforms designed to bring an end to Chinese indenture were introduced. Yet, as this paper will show, it was not at all clear that indenture had in fact been abolished. This study of Chinese labor on Christmas Island is part of a larger project that seeks to historicize the abolition of Chinese indenture across the Asia Pacific region. The case of Christmas Island calls into question the assumption made by historians that the end of Chinese indenture was rapid and uncomplicated.

The impacts on Gilbertese/I-Kiribati of their involvement in the European trade in labour in the informal, formal and post/global colonial periods (1820s to the present)

Keith Dixon (Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha)

I-Kiribati people have worked away temporarily from their home atolls since at least the 1820s. Using historical and other primary sources, we contrast the present impacts on demographic, socio-economic and other circumstances of participating I-Kiribati families with past impacts. Certainty of repatriation is now greater, and long-term separation is shorter, despite repeat assignments being common. Travel is much quicker but more costly per day of work, including that workers bear it in pay “deductions”. Family issues are more common because workers reside away alone and kinship support ties on urban Tarawa are weaker than in residentiary units typical of Gilbertese atoll social organisation. As residents of Tarawa, people are competing for assignments, including returning workers expecting offers of repeat work from the recruiters. Most expectant past workers are part of families who have become dependent on the cash they earn from assignments. They endure the uncertainty and anxiety of seeing their cash reserves running out without knowing if they will receive repeat work offers. The drain on their cash is exacerbated by interdependencies between households within extended family/kinship units. This makes some returned workers think they might prefer being part of the independent, self-reliant nuclear family units they saw in New Zealand. We consider these present-day findings from the perspective of the receiving country being accountable to the sending country.

Silent Witnesses – Forced Labour and German Colonialism in the Pacific (1912-1913)

Sara Müller (University of Erfurt)

Ethnographic objects in German museum collections are witnesses to Germany's colonial past. Their analysis reveals the structural networks on which colonialism in German New Guinea was based on. Furthermore, ethnographic objects unveil how the scientific practice supported the colonial endeavor. The University Collection in Göttingen holds eighteen objects from the Sepik River. They were collected between 1912 and 1913 by members of the scientific "Kaiserin-Augusta-Fluss-Expedition"(KAFE) employing strategies of colonial violence.
Hence, the analysis of these objects highlights how the KAFE's acquisition strategies were based on the same colonial networks used by German officials. The members of the expedition relied heavily on the exploitation of labourers from across the Pacific and Asia. They forced the local population to serve as police soldiers, house boys, cooks, ship personal, shouting companions, housemaids or carriers. My research uses provenance research as an approach to make visible the violence behind the context of this appropriation of material culture. The analysis of travel accounts, missionary publications, and official correspondence shows colonizers´ violent recruiting strategies and reveals other actors within this colonial network. Furthermore, this analysis highlights how science intertwined with colonialism and how the KAFE expedition not only benefit from already present colonial networks and forced labour, but also participated in extending them.

Negotiations, Desertions or Re-Engagements? New Perspectives on Police and Labour Recruitments in ex-German New Guinea (1914-1921)

Tobias Wagemann

On 11 September 1914, the Admiral George Edwin Patey launched an attack on the colony of German New Guinea. The main military objective was to put down the newly installed radio tower at Bitapaka (East New Britain) and to take over the German colony. Yet, he did not suspect to meet resistance in the form of 55 German reservists and more than two-hundred Pacific Islanders – recruits of the German colonial police force. After fierce combats, the Bitapaka radio tower was destroyed and the German administrator Edouard Haber subsequently surrendered on 17 September 1914. Article 7 of the Treaty of Surrender stipulated that colonial policemen previously under German authority had to be transferred to the Australian military administration. But were Pacific Islanders really interested in re-engaging with another colonial administration?

This paper examines a moment of transition in imperial policies of labour recruitment. It interrogates to what extent Australian occupation forces drew on German policies and practices to engage colonial policemen and labourers affiliated to the former colonial state. It also investigates the agency of colonial policemen and labourers within these processes. Far from accepting unilaterally to enter new contracts, cases brought about by local station files help to determine how colonial policemen and labourers deserted, decided to enter new contracts or negotiated new terms with the Australian military administration.

Working in Coconuts Plantations: An Ethnographic Perspective from Colonial Control to Political Claims in Kanaky-New Caledonia

Greta Maria Capece (Università degli studi di Milano Bicocca)

This paper contributes to the panel by examining the entanglements of colonial labor systems, claims of access to sovereignty, and lines of construction of a “local development” in Kanaky-New Caledonia.
In the historical and political context of New Caledonia, the everyday work activities based on coconut plantations, mostly located on the island of Ouvéa, are entangled with individual and collective desires, future-making practices, and the actual post-colonial situation “in the making” as a process of progressive decolonization. Coconuts were and are spoken of as a “pacific resource”, but their labor organization, trading, and commercialization were managed by structures of colonial derivation until the gradual construction of a Kanak political space after World War II. Everything was centralized in the urban area of the capital Nouméa, giving very little possibility to rural areas to produce and exploit their local wealth. Projects of re-balancing the strong inequalities of New Caledonia were also projects of de-centralizing the sources of income, and of developing them on site.
Through a transdisciplinary approach, that combines ethnography and archival analysis, the paper aims to retrace the political journey that brought the coconut oil and soap factories from urban Nouméa to rural Ouvéa, highlighting the dynamics of social change in the mechanism of labor organization of copra production from a tool of colonial governance to an instrument of political claim.

Scandals and non-Scandals: Publicizing Labour Abuse Within and Beyond Oceania

Nicholas Hoare (The Australian National University)

In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s 2024 election victory, scholars around the world could be excused for wondering whether scandals still matter. Powerfully theorized as a ‘weapon of the weak’, the rhetorical and material power of scandal has nonetheless diminished in many parts of the world just as mainstream media has become less central to the functioning of representative democracy. Gone might be the days when a scandalous revelation could derail an election campaign or topple a government, yet discourses of scandal seem more prevalent than ever in our clickbait era. For many workers, mobilizing scandal and publicizing abuse will remain an effective industrial tool as long as they can find a receptive audience. However, as we know, for those men and women working in colonial situations or across borders, such audiences can be harder to access. By focusing on historical labour relations on several of the Pacific’s phosphate islands, this paper is concerned with understanding what constitutes a labour scandal in Oceania. First, I examine the conditions that were needed for labour abuses to be acted upon before moving to highlight the kinds of scandals and responses that led to change. Finally, in moving from the specific to the general, I join a growing body of scholars who suggest that paying attention to what is deemed scandalous – and what gets overlooked – across time, space and culture can lead to valuable insights on the nature of agency and radical change in society.

Working at the CEP: the resistible lure of modernity? (with Florence Mury)

Renaud Meltz (CNRS - Centre National pour la Recherche Scientifique)

Decided by France in 1963, the establishment of the Centre d'Expérimentation du Pacifique (CEP) in French Polynesia led to 193 nuclear tests until 1996. The hiring of Polynesian workers and the mobility associated with the CEP have often been considered from the angle of irrepressible attractiveness (the lure of “high” salaries and “rural exodus” towards the Pape'ete urban area). This kind of analysis assumes that these workers have little capacity to make choices regarding their mobility. Here, the signs of a technicist colonization sure of its triumph converge, concealing concerns about the dangerousness of the tests, renewing a civilizing mission in which constraint would no longer be necessary as the attractiveness of the Western model would suffice to elicit adherence and participation. From then on, any deviation from the model (concerning, for example, the volatility of the workforce) could only be acknowledged, on the European side, in the form of incomprehension or disappointment, all emotional dispositions found in the CEP archives. The interviews we have conducted on various islands in the territory allow us to consider the possibility that former Polynesian CEP workers were not determined in their mobility solely by the lure of modernity. This legitimizes an analysis that focuses on the way in which CEP employment may have been integrated and articulated with other motivations, considered as traditional, or even with open protests against nuclear tests.

Connecting Shifting Labour Regimes and Un/Freedom in Epi, Vanuatu

Rachel Smith (University of Aberdeen)

In this paper, I discuss connections drawn between shifting labour regimes and un/freedom in the Lamen island and Lamen Bay communities in Epi, Vanuatu, which have a high degree of engagement in New Zealand’s ‘Recognised Seasonal Employer’ (RSE) Pacific seasonal labour programme. Epi has a long history of entanglements with unfree and indentured labour regimes: Epi was one of, if not the most, blackbirded islands in the region (Price and Baker 1976: 114; Siegel 1985: 48). West Epi was to become a primary location for notorious plantations during a “land grab” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, while missionaries tried to persuade their congregants to remain home, and work the land. The residents of Lamen experienced a range of labor regimes in the later decades of the twentieth century, from conscription during World War II to circular contractual labour to Espiritu Santo, and Noumea in the mid 20th century. Islanders welcomed the launch of the RSE programme in 2008 as a renewed opportunity for mobility and access to goods, using their ingenuity to actively make and multiply connections with potential employers despite the fact that overseas labour is often experienced as exploitative, akin to colonial labour regimes. Meanwhile kin and community members back home complain that it is they that are being exploited, through performing increased unpaid reproductive and community labour in the workers’ absence.

Factory in the forest: A preliminary study of labour relations inside a Malaysian Chinese logging enterprise in Papua New Guinea.

I-Chang Kuo (National Chengchi University)

Malesian Chinese logging corporations have dominated logging operations in Papua New Guinea (PNG) since the 1990s, owing to the Malaysian government's restrictions on exporting rainforest wood from Malaysia. As several Malaysian Chinese logging corporations become significant players in PNG, the situation affects the people who reside near the forestry sites and the local contract workers hired by these firms. These factors have indicated a need for more ethnographic studies into Malaysian Chinese forestry corporations' activities in PNG. Furthermore, Hendriks (2022) notes that there have been far fewer ethnographic studies about labour relations in rainforest industrial logging in his research on Congolese logging camps. This study illustrates cross-cultural labour interactions at a Malaysian Chinese logging company in Madang Province, PNG, to fill this research gap. This paper shows how ecological landscapes and interactions with local populations impact logging enterprises' labour practices, technology utilization, and logging activity planning and modifications, in contrast to seeing logging firms as dominating actors. This paper discusses how race and gender relations are mirrored in wages, living circumstances, and job advancements, focusing on labour relations. Since this project is still in its early stages, this paper's presentation aims to gather feedback from others and ultimately develop into a more mature endeavour.