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Dr Holger Droessler is an historian of 19th- and 20th-century U.S. history, with a special focus on imperialism, capitalism, and the Pacific Ocean. He holds a PhD in history of American Civilization from Harvard University. Currently, he is pursuing research for his book, "War Workers," which tells the global story of non-citizen civilians working for the U.S. military from the Civil War to Iraq.

For issue #102 of The Internationalist, we excerpt from Dr Droessler's debut work, Coconut Colonialism: Workers and Globalisation of Samoa. In the following extract, he argues that surveillance and discipline on Samoan plantations were severe; Chinese workers had limited freedom of movement, and contract breaches often led to punishment, reflecting the exploitative nature of labor management under colonial rule.

While producing copra for export was the primary goal of Samoan plantations, their impact on the people working on them went far beyond. Since workdays were long and only Sundays were off, workers spent most of their waking hours at work on plantations, with little distraction for their bodies and souls. Migrant workers from Melanesia and China also lived on the plantations where they worked. Samoans, by contrast, retained the comfort and familiarity of their homes and followed a more flexible work schedule.

Workers were confined physically within the limits of the plantation, both day and night. They were not allowed to move around or leave the plantation at will. During field work, workers were under constant surveillance by overseers, their fellow workers (who sometimes reported other workers), and plantation owners themselves. In the eyes of the largest employer of plantation laborers, Chinese workers adapted to this coercive work environment well. In a business report from 1907, the DHPG managers in Samoa reported their “general satisfaction” with the newly arrived workers from China, “after overseers have now gotten sufficiently used to their treatment.” Remarkably, the DHPG managers maintained that plantation overseers, rather than the workers themselves, had to go through a process of “seasoning” to get adjusted to their new workplace and its harsh discipline. The concern with overseers foregrounded the challenges in the “proper” management of the Chinese labor force, rather than the serious challenges faced by those being managed. Chinese workers, the statement revealed, had to be “educated” into accepting the new constraints on their bodies, sometimes even by violence. In their attempt to displace this seasoning process from worker to overseer, the DHPG managers highlighted the conflict-ridden nature of solving the “labor problem” in Samoa.

Surveillance and work discipline were harsh, particularly on the bigger plantations. In his first report to Berlin after the arrival of the Chinese in April 1903, Governor Solf was already complaining of “unfortunate misdemeanors in the treatment and provisioning of the Chinese” on the part of planters. Chinese workers were also severely limited in their physical mobility outside the plantation. Chinese laborers had to carry a badge with an identification number and a legitimation card everywhere they went. They were not allowed to leave the plantation without the explicit consent of the plantation owner. If they wanted to go to Apia, they needed a special pass from the plantation boss. The legal contract, which most Chinese workers had agreed to in Shantou without knowing its full details, revealed its true face on the plantations in Samoa. Colonial law reduced human beings with more than physical needs into mere hands satisfying the burgeoning demands of a cash crop economy. Squeezing as much labor power out of workers while maintaining order was the principal aim of labor contracts. Hence, workers who refused to work were severely punished for breaching the contract. After lobbying from European and American merchants in German Samoa, Chinese workers who wanted to stay on the islands beyond their contracts were prohibited from purchasing land or engaging in trade. Some still decided to stay.

Most of the larger plantations in Samoa were located far away from bigger settlements. In many ways, these plantations formed islands within islands, where workers experienced the isolation of plantation life both physically and socially. In the rare instances when workers were allowed to leave the plantation, they felt the sheer geographical distance that separated them from the outside world. The three main plantations of the DHPG on Upolu were Vailele (four miles east of Apia), Vaitele (four miles west of Apia), and Mulifanua (25 miles west of Apia). Given the lack of well-maintained paths or roads, Mulifanua and Vaitele were located at considerable distances from the commercial capital Apia. To reach the plantation in Mulifanua, for example, it took three to four hours by horse and, depending on weather conditions, up to six hours by boat. The physical isolation of the plantations also heightened the sense of social isolation among workers. Beyond the plantation boss, his family, and his overseers, workers were on their own. As one Melanesian worker remembered, plantation life was exceedingly boring. For most, a normal day consisted of little else than working, eating, talking, and sleeping.

Colonial officials were acutely aware of the dangers of social isolation on plantations. When the first three hundred Chinese contract laborers arrived in April 1903, Governor Solf and recruiting agent Friedrich Wandres advised planters outside Apia to take at least three laborers to prevent their running away to join their fellow countrymen. Since some of the smaller plantation owners could afford only a few of the expensive new Chinese laborers, the governor’s advice was not always heeded. Although German colonial officials had organized the recruitment of additional workers from China, they had little influence over exactly which plantation owner took how many laborers. Some of the “surplus” laborers were contracted to the colonial government itself, mainly for domestic work, office work, and construction. As a consequence, a few Chinese workers ended up alone or virtually alone on smaller plantations. They combatted their social isolation by holding on to institutions and practices from back home: forming mutual benefit societies, smoking opium, and gambling.

Melanesian workers, who had been settling in Samoa for decades, initially shared a sense of social isolation with Chinese workers. Over the years, however, labor recruits from the same islands developed lasting bonds during their time in Samoa. Similar language and customs helped newly arrived workers, known as nubois, to rebuild social ties severed by migration and hardship. Labor migration of able-bodied men had direct consequences for the Melanesian agricultural economy, as women and children were forced to increase their own labor contribution. Not all of the Melanesian men who came to Samoa were alone, however. According to Tiʻa Likou, the worker from New Britain, “quite a few Melanesian women” were working on Samoan plantations in 1910. Exact numbers were not collected, but roughly one in four Melanesian recruits was female. As wives of the Melanesian labor recruits, they joined their husbands in cutting and especially in preparing copra. They soon earned a reputation for their skills and speed—and their lower wages. To prevent conflict, plantation owners erected separate tinroofed barracks with concrete floors and timber walls for couples and simpler barracks for the overwhelming majority of single men.

At the same time, the fact that most workers from Melanesia had signed three-year contracts posed considerable challenges to the formation of more permanent community life. Most Melanesians returned to their home islands after their contracts ended, but some decided to stay in Samoa. After World War I, around 120 olbois and a smaller number of so-called Teine uli (Black girls) remained in Mulifanua and later Vaitele. As they intermarried with Samoans, they put down the roots of Samoa’s mixed-race Melanesian Polynesian community. The overwhelming majority of Melanesians, however, returned home after one or two contracts and offered useful advice for the next generation of labor recruits.

Some of the Melanesian workers who went home had managed to amass a considerable fortune (mostly in the form of Western goods, such as clothes, jewelry, knives, and watches), which they leveraged to climb the social ladder of their home societies. Their years as plantation workers in Samoa, especially their acquisition of Samoan plantation pidgin, conferred both useful skills and social prestige on the Melanesians who returned to their homes in New Ireland and elsewhere. Many returning workers used their experiences in Samoa to rejoin the agricultural economies of their native islands. As early as the mid-1880s, the German consul in Apia had defended the recruitment of workers for Samoa by suggesting that returning workers become the originators of plantation agriculture in their home islands.

For some migrant workers, isolation from their fellow islanders was the price to be paid for lighter work. Workers employed by plantation owners or colonial officials generally had less demanding physical work but, at the same time, were often excluded from the social life of their peers on plantations. Tapusini Peni Maluana from Nissan Island, for instance, came to Samoa around 1909 and was hired as a domestic worker in the home of the German manager of the DHPG plantation in Vailele. Recalling his early days in the new workplace, Maluana noted that he missed the company of fellow Melanesians and local Samoans, which field workers, especially on large plantations, enjoyed. Other Melanesians who came to Samoa and worked as servants on plantations had different experiences. Tui Sakila, for example, described his job as a messenger boy on a large plantation as “very tiring.” As a messenger boy, he had to run from plantation house to the fields and back several times a day to deliver messages for his boss. Like Tapusini, Tui appreciated any opportunity to chat with friends and fellow workers on his way. But because speedy delivery of certain messages (for example, concerning changes in the work schedule) mattered a great deal on copra plantations, Tui and other messengers had little time to waste. Their world, too, was driven by the employer’s clock.

As these cases of Chinese and Melanesian workers illustrate, the experience of social isolation depended on the size and location of the plantation as well as the type of work. To a certain degree, white settlers, plantation owners, and officials shared a sense of social isolation with the workers they employed. Both Euro-American and non-Samoan laborers were minorities in Samoa and had traveled a long way from their families and homes in Europe, the United States, and the Pacific. But this is where the similarities ended. White Europeans and Americans in Samoa had, by and large, come to the South Pacific voluntarily, while the contract laborers arrived under much more coercive circumstances. As workers, most Chinese and Melanesians shared a more pronounced sense of alienation, not only as a consequence of being uprooted from their home societies but also due to the difficult new work environments they found themselves in. For them, Upolu, Savaiʻi, and Tutuila were indeed islands of labor.

In this respect, Chinese and Melanesian workers also had different experiences than most Samoans, who were generally not geographically displaced and continued to maintain their long-standing community ties in the face of colonization. Since Samoans were not forced to work on foreign-owned plantations, they also remained relatively shielded from the worst excesses of work discipline directed at contract workers from elsewhere. Throughout the colonial period, Samoans continued to rely on their sustainable farming practices, which guaranteed the continuity of the larger contours of Samoan community life. By resisting the wholesale commodification of their labor power, Samoans managed to escape the most violent forms of discipline and punishment exacted on plantation workers from Melanesia and China.

When efforts to manage the labor force through spatial and temporal discipline failed, plantation owners resorted to more aggressive methods. Workers who broke one of the many formal and informal regulations that governed life on the plantation could face serious consequences. Depending on the severity of the transgression, the spectrum of punishment stretched from monetary fines and imprisonment to flogging and the death penalty. Physical violence against workers on Samoan plantations was not uncommon, though it was less common than in other German colonies or in the Pacific colonies of other colonial powers. As in other German colonies at the time, corporal punishment in Samoa helped colonial authorities to routinize their precarious claim to power. Yet in German Samoa, it was rarely the colonial authorities that resorted to corporal punishment but rather plantation owners and their overseers themselves. As the largest employer in German Samoa, the DHPG even ran its own jail in Vaitele, where workers were interned and, in some cases, punished with forced labor.

Excerpted from Coconut Colonialism: Workers and the Globalization of Samoa by Holger Droessler, published by Harvard University Press. Used with permission. All rights reserved.

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