Islands of Labor: Community, Conflict, and Resistance in Colonial Samoa, 1889-1919

Abstract

My dissertation follows the lives and struggles of the workers of Samoa from the last decade of the nineteenth century until the end of the Great War. Drawing on a wide range of sources—from travel reports and court depositions to photographs and maps—my dissertation reconstructs the experiences of Samoans as well as migrants from Melanesia, Micronesia, and China. This diverse group of peoples living in Samoa harnessed their own energy and that of their natural environment to create a colonial world often beyond their own control. At the same time, they succeeded in re-creating their own lifeworlds in ways that often defied the limits of this colonial world. I argue that community, conflict, and resistance among workers in colonial Samoa can best be understood by delving deeply into the particular dynamics of particular workscapes. Five workscapes—the subsistence economy, the plantation, the ethnographic show, the building of infrastructure, and the colonial service—became crucibles of lived sociality and, over time, political solidarity for the people living and laboring in colonial Samoa. As much as German, American, and New Zealand colonial officials tried to keep workers apart from one another, they succeeded in overcoming racial and colonial boundaries and formed new kinds of community.