Traffic: Slavery, Labour, Migration
Traffic in humans was always part of economic history and often part of maritime history. It has a long Pacific past. In both navy and merchant voyages, European mariners regularly captured adults and children from islands and coasts, but men and women characteristically held different value and had different experiences of captivity: as hostages on the one hand and, typically, as unwilling sexual labourers on the other.
Sexual commerce was not an incidental but a problematically quotidian aspect of maritime, imperial and local cultures. Women were often enough objects of exchange between men, with little or no freedom of their own. As such the Pacific traffic in women must be seen as part of a maritime history of forced labour.[247]While the forced movement of people for slave-based plantation economies defines Atlantic history, there is a less definitive but nonetheless significant history of coerced labour that unfolded in the Pacific. Historians have recently uncovered the extent to which an African diaspora extended from the Atlantic to the Pacific: any number of freed and escaped slaves from the Caribbean and North America ended up in Pacific ports, not infrequently re-entering a shadow network of forced labour via penal systems.[248] Other, more systematic if not official systems of slaving emerged in the Pacific world in nineteenth-century sequence to, and resulting from, the abolition of the slave trade in the Atlantic world. Many of the new South American republics banned slave labour in the early nineteenth century, for example, leaving a huge labour demand for the mid-nineteenth-century guano industry. China was one trans-Pacific source of contract labour. Easter Island was another, more coerced source. Around one thousand Rapanui and perhaps another thousand Micronesians were forced into mining labour in Peru.
Unscrupulous captains of this trade were occasionally brought before French and British courts,[249] and trial records, as well as Rapanui oral histories taken in the 1970s, confirm the coercion of the traders still remembered as ‘Peruvian slavers’. For Rapanui, this trade all but fatally compounded the pre-existing population decline from infectious diseases.[250]For most polities in the Pacific, the legitimate - that is, governmental - response to abolition of slavery was authorisation of indentured or contracted labour systems, linking the Pacific and Indian Ocean worlds. Indian indenture to the Caribbean and across the Indian Ocean from the 1830s extended to Fiji in the 1870s. And from the 1860s opportunistic captains began moving Melanesian men and some women to sugar plantations in Queensland, a trade that British and colonial governments soon began to regulate.[251] Over these decades and into the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of Japanese and Chinese were indentured to work in Hawai’i.[252]
Successive gold discoveries in California, the Australian colonies and then Otago in New Zealand created further demand for mobility, from which passenger lines derived great profit in the 1850s and 1860s, crossing from China and Hong Kong to San Francisco, via Hawai’i, and south-west to Sydney, Melbourne and Dunedin. In the last half of the nineteenth century, then, Pacific waters were constantly criss- crossed with vessels transporting contracted and free labourers, and migrants, to and fro. It became a busy ocean, increasingly so under steam. It also became a regulated ocean in this period, precisely because so much labour was indentured and observed in the shadow of the slave trade: captains and port-based agents were kept to minimum standards, at least on paper. All of this maritime movement of labourers also made Pacific coasts and ports key sites for a strident race-based nationalism. Coalescing around labour questions, the aspirational ‘whiteness’ of Pacific rim polities - Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US - was defined by anti-Chinese, anti-Indian and anti-Japanese politics.
A combination of proliferating maritime quarantine regulations and anti-Chinese labour/ immigration laws made the Pacific the ocean in which border control shifted from intermittent emergency measures to quotidian and eventually normalised practice.[253] And this all played out in maritime sites and as maritime matters: customs, quarantine, inspections, deportations, refusals and provisional entries were increasingly the routine business of Pacific ports.Overlaying this ‘global colour line’ by which so much of the Pacific was legally if not actually segregated, is a later twentieth-century diaspora. If Fiji is one site of an extended Indian diaspora, Australia, New Zealand and the United States are now home, or second home, to Fijian, Tongan, Samoan and Chamorro communities. Some of this out-migration has been voluntary, towards larger economies. Some has been unexpected and unwanted. There is a history of relocation and resettlement in the Pacific that is peculiarly oceanic, or more specifically, insular. Mining made some island homes literally unliveable: Ocean Island (Banaba), for example, where eighty years of phosphate mining (1900-79) stripped the island bare. Many Banabans relocated first to Fiji, and thence across the Pacific rim.[254] Other relocations are occurring now, or are imminent, as an effect of rising sea levels.[255]