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How Chinese Migrant Workers Resisted Coconut Colonialism in Samoa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Holger Droessler
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Abstract

At the turn of the twentieth century, Euro-American colonialism remade the lives of thousands of Samoan, Melanesian, and Chinese workers on coconut plantations in Samoa. Since plantation discipline was strict, workers resisted the heavy demands on their bodies through a broad arsenal of behaviors, ranging from keeping crops for themselves to making appeals to the state to waging violent attacks on overseers. Resistance against colonial subjection turned workers in Samoa into subjects of their own lives and allowed them to forge bonds of solidarity beyond the spatial, social, and racial boundaries maintained by colonial administrations. In doing so, Samoa's workers shaped their own version of Oceanian globality.

Keywords

ChinaSamoaCapitalismLaborColonialism
Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 20 , Issue 17 , October 2022 , e9
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2022

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References

Notes

1 Solf to District Judge, Apr. 10, 1904, ANZ Wellington, SAMOA-BMO Series 4, Box 73, T40/1904, Vol. 1, p. 3.

2 “Urteil gegen Richard Deeken,” June 16, 1904, BArch R 1001/2320, p. 139.

3 The first 81 Gilbertese Islanders were forcibly recruited in 1867. Doug Munro and Stewart Firth, “Samoan Plantations: The Gilbertese Laborers' Experience, 1867-1896,” in: Plantation Workers: Resistance and Accommodation, edited by Brij V. Lal, Doug Munro, and Edward D. Beechert (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai'i Press, 1993), 102-03.

4 Ibid., 103-05.

5 By the late 1870s, men received $2 per month, usually payable in tobacco, plus rations, while women and children made $1. Ibid., 123 n18.

6 Of the total 4,857 workers, 2,250 were from the Gilbert Islands (46%), 1,201 from the New Hebrides (25%), 693 from New Britain and New Ireland (14%), 618 from the Solomon Islands (13%), and 95 from the Caroline Islands (2%). Stübel to Bismarck, Jan. 27, 1886, BArch R 1001/2316.

7 During the years of German rule in Samoa, the DHPG paid out an average dividend of 21%. Stewart Firth, “German Recruitment and Employment of Labourers in the Western Pacific before the First World War” (PhD thesis, University of Oxford, 1973), 242.

8 For a succinct summary of the debates about importing Chinese workers to German Samoa, see Stewart Firth, “Governors versus Settlers: The Dispute over Chinese Labour in German Samoa,” New Zealand Journal of History 11, no. 2 (1977): 155-179.

9 Report by Wandres, May 20, 1903, BArch R 1001/2319.

10 Moors to Solf, Samoanische Zeitung, Apr. 4, 1903, BArch R 1001/2319.

11 Nancy Tom, The Chinese in Western Samoa, 1875-1985: The Dragon Came From Afar (Apia: Western Samoa Historical and Cultural Trust, 1986), 36.

12 Ibid., 21-37.

13 Philip A. Kuhn, Chinese Among Others: Emigration in Modern Times (Lanham, MA: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008); Ching-Hwang Yen, Coolies and Mandarins: China's Protection of Overseas Chinese during the Late Ch'ing Period, 1851-1911 (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1985).

14 Walton Look Lai, “Asian Contract and Free Migrations to the Americas,” in: Coerced and Free Migration: Global Perspectives, edited by David Eltis (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 229-58.

15 Overall, family remittances by Chinese workers in Samoa remained relatively low. In 1912, they amounted to 7% of total wages paid. Cf. Hermann Hiery, ed., Die Deutsche Südsee 1884-1914: Ein Handbuch (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2001), 672.

16 Solf to District Judge, Apr. 10, 1904, ANZ Wellington, SAMOA-BMO Series 4, Box 73, T40/1904, Vol. 1, p. 3-4.

17 Adam McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago, Hawaii, 1900-1936 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001), esp. chapter 2; see also, his Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2008).

18 Ben Featuna'i Liua'ana, “Dragons in Little Paradise: Chinese (Mis-) Fortunes in Samoa, 1900-1950,” The Journal of Pacific History 32, no. 1 (1997): 29-48; A.S. Noa Siaosi, “Catching the Dragon's Tail: The Impact of the Chinese in Samoa” (M.A. Thesis, University of Canterbury, NZ, 2010).

19 Evelyn Wareham, Race and Realpolitik: The Politics of Colonisation in German Samoa (Frankfurt/M.: Peter Lang, 2002), 111.

20 Andreas Steen, “Germany and the Chinese Coolie: Labor, Resistance, and the Struggle for Equality, 1884-1914,” in: German Colonialism Revisited: African, Asian, and Oceanic Experiences, edited by Nina Berman, Klaus Mühlhahn, and Patrice Nganang (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 152.

21 Firth, “German Recruitment,” 261.

22 German Consulate Fukien to RKA, May 3, 1907, BArch R 1001/2323.

23 Report by Lin Shu Fen, enclosed to Rex to Bülow, July 20, 1908, BArch R 1001/2323.

24 Firth, “German Recruitment,” 264.

25 AA to Chinese Legate Berlin, Sept. 13, 1911, BArch R 1001/2328.

26 Schultz to RKA, Feb. 10, 1913, BArch R 1001/2328.

27 Wareham, Race and Realpolitik, 119.

28 Lin to Mitchell, May 28, 1912, NARA-CP, RG 84, Vol. 77. As Lin did not fail to mention a year later, the United States officially recognized the new Chinese Republic on May 2, 1913.

29 Firth, “Governors versus Settlers,” 168.

30 Malama Meleisea, O Tama Uli: Melanesians in Western Samoa (Suva, Fiji: University of the South Pacific, 1980), 42.

31 Felix M. Keesing, Modern Samoa: Its Government and Changing Life (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1934), 301.

32 Liua'ana, “Dragons in Little Paradise,” 313-14.

33 Michael Field, Mau: Samoa's Struggle Against New Zealand Oppression (Wellington, NZ: Reed, 1984), 13.

34 Ibid., 11.

35 L. P. Leary, New Zealanders in Samoa (London, UK: W. Heinemann, 1918), 90

36 Hermann Hiery, The Neglected War: The German South Pacific and the Influence of World War I (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai'i Press, 1995), 167.

37 Field, Mau, 31.

38 Robert W. Franco, Samoan Perceptions of Work: Moving Up and Moving Around (New York: AMS Press, 1991), 152.

39 Tom, Chinese in Western Samoa, 36.

40 Keesing, Modern Samoa, 357.

41 Liua'ana, “Dragons in Little Paradise,” 44.

42 James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985).

43 Cit. in Tom, Chinese in Western Samoa, 107.