Scholars today increasingly see the world of colonial empires in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as constituting movements within and between empires. There has been a shift in focus toward tracking transnational and transimperial flows and networks of peoples, commodities, and ideas. Scholars such as Sebastian Conrad, Roland Wenzlhuemer, Tony Ballantyne, Antoinette Burton, among many others, have followed global forces shaping local realities, and vice versa, through multidirectional connections arising from diverse and intricate policies and actions, revealing multiple voices, engaging numerous locales, and crossing great distances. In doing so, they have uncovered interconnected, interactive, and globally entangled colonial spaces. But seldom has Samoa been the center of these investigations. Holger Droessler's Coconut Colonialism: Workers and the Globalization of Samoa places the country at the confluence of a global colonialism making demands on the Indigenous Pacific but challenged and contested by those local energies it sought to control.
Coconut Colonialism makes a valuable contribution to scholarship on German and US colonialism and on histories of colonial globalization in the Pacific world. It does so by focusing on Samoa in transition and Samoans on the move. It offers a nuanced discussion on the forging of connections and the globalizing forces that shaped Samoa from the end of the nineteenth century to the end of World War I. The book's five chapters discuss work in Samoa and Samoans as workers in varied professions operating, networking, and engaging in the world of empires around them. They show the aspirations and limitations of work and workers. Here colonialism both enables and limits mobility. Samoans create their own paths and opportunities within colonialism, despite colonialism, and because of colonialism. Droessler has come up with a sharp, focused, and innovative study. And the book's title also makes much sense: the term “coconut colonialism” captures the framework within which these globalizations and movements took place, referring to informal and formal control of Euro-Americans over tropical islands to extract their resources (p. 5).
This study is organized topologically, with each of the five chapters discussing different workscapes linked with specific places and themes. The first chapter centers the coconut by discussing Samoan farming practices, the pressures for commodification, and plantation labor. The next chapter looks at planters and the transformations brought by the cash crop copra, including its impacts on Samoan producers and Chinese and Melanesian migrant workers. Chapter 3 follows Samoans who performed in ethnographic shows in the United States and Europe. It looks at how these workers carved pathways in the international world of colonial shows, how they made opportunities and connections across national, racial, and gender divides in situations ripe for exploitation. This chapter is especially poignant in showcasing how Indigenous workers operated in a transimperial world, how they made sense of it all, and how their movements were tied to the changing local conditions at home. The next chapter moves to the labor shaping colonial infrastructure—the experiences of builders of roads, telegraphs, and naval stations in Samoa. Finally, chapter 5 looks at “colonial service jobs,” the work of soldiers, interpreters, and nurses, whom the author casts as “mediators” between different colonial realms (p. 159).
Themes of global forces confronting local experiences resonate throughout the work, unearthing varied Indigenous responses, opportunities, and initiatives in the face of colonialism. Coconut Colonialism is about the interplay of extraction and interference in local lives and the impacts and repertoire of local resistance to colonialism, as well as of Indigenous power and the (unintended) opportunities that colonialism created for the colonized. Highlighting the movements of Samoan labor reveals many other kinds of (related) movements. Focusing on these would have broadened the analytical scope of the book, but perhaps they are better left for another study to dwell on. We get very little on the transimperial movements of white colonizers or settlers; nor does the author track the transimperial movements of capital or products and commodities. This book is also not about the movements of the coconut itself in the world of empires. Still, the book makes it evident that Samoan labor movements were just one strand of mobility among many in the world of coconut colonialism.
Coconut Colonialism draws attention to the global dimensions of German and US national histories. But foremost, it adds to the scholarship on the Indigenous Pacific. It reveals imperial borders as highly porous, even to unprivileged, colonized subjects. It also reveals that the histories of Samoan workers offer exciting avenues for grasping what was an era of intense transimperial interconnectedness. This book should be of interest to a broad range of readers working on colonial and Pacific histories.
