“The Tonkinese Labour Traffic to the Colonial New Hebrides: The Role of French
Inter-Colonial Webs”
Indian Ocean World Centre, McGill University, Speaker Series Talk,
Winter Term, 2016.
Naomi Alisa Calnitsky
M.A. (University of Otago), B.A. Hons. (University of Manitoba)
Abstract
The modern nation, Vanuatu, formerly called the AngloFrench Condominium of the
New Hebrides, is a small Pacific Island nation that forms a Yshaped archipelago. It sits
to the West of Fiji and to the Northeast of New Caledonia and is made up of more than
80 islands. William Miles referred to this colonial Condominium as a “cosovereign
experiment.” Between 1921 and 1940, some 21,922 Indochinese indentured workers,
most from the densely population Tonkin region, arrived in the colonial New Hebrides,
now modernday Vanuatu, the Melanesian island chain that came under the joint rule of
British and French colonists as part of a Condominium established over the islands in
1906 that set in motion a new colonial structure that would last until Vanuatu’s full
achievement of independence in 1980. Under the terms of the 1906 Condominium, a joint
administration would govern the islands. Prior to the arrival of official political
colonialism over the New Hebrides, a number of agreement were reached between
British and French interests, including the establishment of a Joint Naval Commission in
1888 and an agreement, prior to this in 1878 respecting the independence of the islands.
Themes of interest in this talk include: the historical context of French IndoChina, the
colonial context of the New Hebrides, the context of New Hebridean plantation labour,
1
and indigenous resistance to French colonial culture in the early twentieth Century, as
well the nature and experiences of indentured Tonkinese labour on French plantations.
Introduction
The modern nation of Vanuatu, formerly called the Anglo-French Condominium
of the New Hebrides, is a small Pacific Island group that forms a Y-shaped archipelago. It
sits to the West of Fiji and to the Northeast of New Caledonia and is made up of more
than 80 islands. William Miles referred to this colonial Condominium as a “co-sovereign
experiment.” Between 1921 and 1940, some 21,922 Indochinese indentured workers,
most from the densely population Tonkin region, arrived in the colonial New Hebrides,
now modern-day Vanuatu, the Melanesian island chain that came under the joint rule of
British and French colonists as part of a Condominium established over the islands in
1906 that set in motion a new colonial structure that would last until Vanuatu’s
achievement of full independence in 1980. Under the terms of the 1906 Condominium,
a joint administration would govern the islands.
Prior to the arrival of official political colonialism over the New Hebrides, a
number of agreements were reached between British and French interests, including the
establishment of a Joint Naval Commission in 1888 and an agreement, prior to this in
1878 respecting the independence of the islands. The islands were named by Captain
Cook in 1774, but six years prior to Cook, in 1768, the French explorer Louis Antoine de
Bougainville called the islands Les Grande Cyclades. And long before Bougainville, the
Spaniard Pedro Ferndandez de Quiros led an expedition that defined the islands as “Terra
Australis de Espiritu Santo.” Today, the name Espiritu Santo persists in Vanuatu to
2
denote its largest island that is home to a population of about 40,000. In fact, in 1980 a
repressed insurrection declared this island independent from the rest of the New
Hebrides. Vanuatu was also not immune to other forms of colonialism that included the
expansion of a Presbyterian presence from New Zealand, Australia, Canada and Scotland,
and earlier arrival of the London Missionary Society Reverand John Williams who was
famously eaten on the Island of Erromango, dubbed the Martyr Isle. Unfortunately for
Williams, his arrival was preceded two weeks earlier by an Australian sandalwood
trader’s murder of two young sons of a “local chief,” entrenching a deeper suspicion of
white intruders that would lead to the Williams’ ambush and end. The first formal
European settlement in the New Hebrides islands would not occur until the year 1865,
and the missionary presence in the New Hebrides was in most places, preceded by
sandalwood traders. (Douglas, 354). Dorothy Shineberg, the eminent historian of
Melanesia, contested the “myth” that traders neglected the Melanesian islands because
they were cannibalistic and introduced ideas relating to islander agency, taking an early
approach that ran against the grain of simplistic narratives that divided the European from
the Melanesian categorically [in terms of historical agency.] (Ibid)
The missionary Percy Chatterton, who ran a London Missionary Society school in
Papua New Guinea between 1924 and 1929, wrote the following of the people of
Melanesia:
The Melanesian way was egalitarian because it had to be, not because of some
inward urge to egalitarianism deeply planted in the Melanesian soul.” (Bennett,
Wealth of the Solomons, 1).
3
Shineberg’s later work, that culminated in the publication of the book The People
Trade, focused on the French presence in the Western Pacific, specifically on their
practices of transporting labour from the New Hebrides group to their convict colony at
New Caledonia in the final decades of the nineteenth century and the first three decades
of the twentieth century.
Significantly, the French colonial practice of removing New Hebridean labour to
the New Caledonia colony preceded the practice of removing Tonkinese workers to
labour in the New Hebrides. It is also important to note how, as Eric Jennings informs us,
the French presence in Indochina had origins in the earlier nineteenth century, in efforts
to protect the missionary population resident there as well as Vietnamese Catholics.1
Themes of interest in this talk include: the historical context of French Indo-
China, the colonial context of the New Hebrides, the context of New Hebridean
plantation labour, and indigenous resistance to French colonial culture in the early
twentieth Century, as well the nature and experiences of indentured Tonkinese labour on
French plantations.
French Indochina
Indochina’s colonial export products included rubber, rice as well as opium and
located strategically for imperial trade. By the 1870s France had completed its conquest
of the Cochin China territory of Annam and over the course of the 1880s, 1890s and
1900s successively assimilated the area that is modern-day Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos
into its empire. French Indochina was home to a variety of ethnic groups, and made
1
Eric Jennings, (Interview) “Imperial Heights: Dalat and The Making and Undoing of French IndoChina,”
New Books in Southeast Asian Studies, New Books Network.
4
efforts to assimilate Vietnamese subjects into French colonial culture with little success.
In the 1930s the Japanese increasingly sought out colonial agreement with the
French to protect Japanese interests in the region and in 1940 Japan invaded and occupied
Tonkin in an effort to blockade China’s important of fuel and arms along the Yunnan-
Vietnam Railway that cut through China’s southern border and had been developed by
the French colonial administration in the years 1904-1910 to increase the capacity for
European exports to infiltrate China and for Indochinese products to access Chinese
markets. The French Vichy government was pressured by Japan to close this railway
route and ultimately when the French refused, an ensuing Japanese occupation of
Indochina would result, beginning in 1940 and continuing for the during of the War.
Indeed, part of Japan’s wartime ideology of building a Greater East Asia Co-
Prosperity Sphere involved the contention that Western imperial powers should be
expelled from the region and rich resources and commodities would ostensibly come
under the imperial direction of Tokyo. The period of Japanese occupation led to an
experience of double imperialism in Indochina, with Japan framing itself as a liberator,
that would gradually cleanse the Western imperial presence from Asia. In Indochina,
Japan did not adopt a policy of violence that had been demonstrated in China. During the
occupation, the French colonial government was left in place, undermining Japan’s “Asia
for the Asians” policy, opting for a policy of French and Japanese co-existence, while in
1941 the French governor general Jean Decoux offer Japan the “most favoured nation”
status allowing most Indochinese exports to be directed to to Tokyo at low prices.
The System of Inter-Colonial Indenture
5
What I would like to focus on in my talk today is a lesser known story to history,
or a backstory, that of the indentured labour traffic involving the movement of colonized
Vietnamese bodies along and within the networks developed by French inter-colonial,
imperial webs. Tonkinese Indentured contracts in the New Hebrides lasted five years,
and included women at a ratio of 1 to six. The French trading firm Ballande was
responsible for the recruiting and transporting ends of the IndoChinese labour traffic to
the New Hebrides. Tonkinese earned about 160 francs per month, while New Hebridean
islanders received between thirty and forty francs per month. From 1925 onwards, most
French plantations on the islands were in the habit of using Tonkinese workers. By 1929,
the Tonkinese population in the New Hebrides included 1000 children and 1200 women
of a total of over 5000 Tonkinese. Among the indentured Tonkinese the mortality rates
were quite high.
In the New Hebrides, labour needs on French and British holdings were generally
met by local and imported labour from Indochina and parts of Polynesia. The plantation
sector in the New Hebrides long experienced labour shortages due to poor conditions and
low wages since the nineteenth century. Cash cropping in the New Hebrides commenced
in the 1860s. Expatriate planters relied almost exclusively on local labour until 1922,
when the enterprising French led by M. Albert Sarraut turned to Indo-China for
labour.colonialism and labour in the New Hebrides islands. Recruitment from Tonkin
produced mobile work forces that moved from one plantation to the next and earned four
to five times as much as local natives earned. Children and women made up a
considerable proportion of those imported and French planters were soon indebted due to
high costs of transportation to and from Indochina. Capitalist modernization in the New
6
Hebrides produced three kinds of regions: those oriented for export on alienated lands,
labour supply regions, and marginalized areas still un-integrated. In most cases, natives of
the New Hebrides were not easily induced into plantation work in their own “backyards.”
The Tonkinese made up about one-tenth of the total population of the New
Hebrides by 1929. At this time, there were approximately 6000 workers sourced from
present-day Vietnam, of whom 3700 were male, 1200 female and 1000 children. The
New Hebrides islanders had long been familiar with experiences of their won indenture,
especially beginning in last decades of the 19th century. Native islanders, who had wanted
to take part in their own kin-based economies and societies were often reluctant to serve
as plantation workers for the French but in some cases served shorter contracts in the
plantation zones. The French found a more secure labour force from among their
overcrowded and impoverished colony at Tonkin, which formed part of their Indochinese
colony that also included the regions of Annam and Cochin-China and which was
colonized formally in 1887. As their colonial relationship with the region deepened,
France not only developed a habit of transporting people from its IndoChina colony to its
plantation colony of the New Hebrides, it also developed new networks of trade between
its colonies, with rice from Indochina becoming a supplier for the French colony at
Senegal. (Pearson et al. 240). As a result of this relationship, rice sourced from Indochina
would become an important element of the modern Senegalese diet. Senegal also
experienced a small migration of Vietnamese after the collapse of French Indochina, who
came along with French colonists who had evacuated the region (K.C.R.W. Good Food
Interview with Pierre Thiam, Sept. 18, 2015).
7
The institution of indenture was controversial in its similarly to earlier systems of
slavery that involved the transport of human labour from a source region to a destination
region; Margaret Rodman notes that indenture Tonkinese in the colonial New Hebrides
experienced both hunger and deprivation and “rarely got the full entitlements they
expected, and the shortages of food and pay were their constant concerns.” (Rodman,
111) They were often highly dependent on the “good will” of plantation owners, and had
“little recourse to justice” when the terms of their contract were not fulfilled. Rodman
also notes that in the Southern part of the Island of Efate, where the colonial government
was located, Tonkinese workers often experienced improved treatment compared with
those in the more outlying islands.
One French plantation owner in the New Hebrides, by the name of Jean-Pierre,
acquired 560 hectares of land in South Efate and planted coffee, cocoa and coconuts, with
the help only two workers from the Banks Islands, a small island group in Northern
Vanuatu, but didn’t begin contracting Tonkinese workers until 1937. At this time, his
forty Tonkinese labourers formed part of a larger working force of about 1,800 Tonkinese
laboring in the New Hebrides islands that year, and this number, as Rodman points out,
was significantly lower than the figure of 6000 that prevailed in 1929. (Rodman, 111).
While my talk today is concerned primarily with indentured agricultural labour, it
is important to note that Tonkinese also performed critical roles as domestic servants in
French colonial households in the islands, allowing for what Rodman calls the
“expansion of bourgeois sensibilities” in these shifting colonial spaces. In fact,
indigenous islanders were also mobilized to serve as domestic workers in French colonial
households of the New Hebrides. While indenture labour was often viewed as morally
8
problematic in the discourses of the time because it indicated a continuation of earlier
practices rooted in the slave trade, it was also defined by specified structures attempting
to bond the system together, included specified periods of contract, payment systems, and
systems of transport.
In 1914, Edward Jacomb, in his biting commentary on the Anglo-French
Condomium system in the New Hebrides wrote the following:
Labour of some kind is as necessary in tropical countries as it is in any other, and
it is not every kind of labourer who is suitable for agricultural work in the tropics.
Obviously the persons who are the most likely to be fitted for such work in any
given country are the natives of that country. There may be special reasons why
they cannot be employed, or better labourers may be obtainable. In Australia, for
instance, the aborigines have proved quite incapable by nature of becoming steady
workmen; and in Fiji, capable as the Fijian may be, he is f a r too lazy. The
Australians are attempting to over come their labour difficulty by refusing to
employ any but white labour : Fiji has imported coolie labour, and has thereby
created a new and difficult problem to cope with in the future. I n the New
Hebrides, however, it seems clear that—given fair treatment— the local labour
supply would be ample to meet the requirements of the Group, in the present and
immediate future at all events. (Jacomb, 147)
William Miles’ study of the decolonization of Vanuatu notes that Vanuatu is the
only case in “colonial history in which Great Britain and France have ruled jointly.”
(Miles, xv). He refers to the system as “Condocolonialism” which “superimposes
9
competitive identities along nonindigenous lines.” (Miles, 38) Miles also notes that while
French-native unions spawned a metis group that they felt responsible for educating and
recognizing, while British-indigenous unions on the islands were often treated as
“outcasts” and referred to as half-castes. (Miles, 40) French plantations were also more
numerous compared with the Australian and British planter presence, and the French
were more prone to drinking as well as “philandering” with the Melanesian groups. (Ibid)
Indeed, the permeability of cultural borders, as in any European overseas colony,
was never fully controlled. As Ann Laura Stoler relates in Along the Archival Grain:
Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense:
Fearful colonial visions and their attendant policies were engraved in
consequential excess on paper and chiseled “in stone.” Their material force
appeared in elaborate “coolie ordinances” repeat- edly rewritten to fix the degrees
of unfreedom that would keep Sumatra’s plantation workers coerced and
confined. Often it manifested in thou- sands of pages of intricate plans to establish
fitting places to park colonial embarrassments—like mixed blood orphans.
Material force was engraved in phantasmic scenarios of potential revolt that
called for militias readied with arms. (Stoler, 2)
While Stoler’s work is concerned the Dutch colonial archive, the overlapping
commonalities of domestic and indentured working spheres, as they would intersect with
the colonial archive in other parallel (or divergent) colonial contexts throughout
Southeast Asia and the South Pacific, are often striking as European, indigenous and
10
migrant Asian and Pacific Island groups were mobilized in domestic spaces and upon the
terrain of inter-colonial commerce.
Shineberg and the People Trade: The French Labour Traffic in the Pacific World
As the scholarship of Dorothy Shineberg has shown, the French involvement in
trafficking labour from the New Hebrides islands to their colony at New Caledonia was
extensive, and between the years 1865 and 1930 involved some fourteen thousand
laborers who were drawn mostly from present-day Vanuatu but also from the Gilbert
Islands (now Kiribati) and Solomon Islands. Just as the Tonkinese labor traffic
orchestrated by French planters involved women and children, the traffic to New
Caledonia also had a small female component, and the fatality rates among indentured
workers were high. This French labor traffic was also a component of the larger world of
the Oceanian labor trade that encompassed destinations such as Fiji, Western Samoa, and
Australia.
Humanitarian discourses from the period understood the trade as an evil and often labeled
it a perpetuation of slavery. Historians have studied the trade to Queensland extensively,
while scholarship on the French traffic is less extensive.
Shineberg notes that the French trade to New Caledonia peaked between the years
1874 and 1894. In the case New Caledonia, the labor trade was primarily a nineteenth
century phenomenon although it did extend into the twentieth century; the numbers
reveal that a full 12,000 arrived in the nineteenth century and the French referred to this
group as neo-hebridais. On April 4, 1883, Governor Pallu de la Barriere recorded the all-
pervasive presence of this laboring group, saying, “The New Hebridean is everywhere
11
and few houses are without them.” (Shineberg, 1995, 3). The group functioned as a
colonial backbone for mining and plantation work until the arrival of Asian engagés
would later arrive to the colony. As Shineberg alluded to only in a footnote, in the French
colony of New Caledonia, small numbers of Asians would also make a presence between
the years 1864 and 1885, as well as in the 1890s and 1900s, larger importations of
Vietnamese and Indonesians to New Caledonia also occurred in the 1920s.
The French also put children to work in New Caledonia in their nickel mines and
as house servants; as Shineberg describes, a loophole in the indenture law meant that
children were transported and sometime worked ten years or more whereas adult
transportees to the colony were indentured for only a period of between three and five
years. (5) The French also relied heavily on practices of kidnapping in order to procure
Melanesian island labour, as late as 1911. (6) The French also used trading tactics to lure
men to their New Caledonia colony, offering Snider rifles to men in positions of authority
in exchange for recruits.
Increasingly after 1864, as the convict population on New Caledonia grew, the
need for labour to meet construction needs for public works, and to guard and transport
convicts between Ile Nou and the mainland, and increasingly after 1873 their labor was
diverted towards mining of gold, copper and nickel. An influx of Communards deported
from France in 1872 further caused a need for more New Hebridean labour to support a
growing urban population in Noumea, the colony’s capital. As Shinberg notes,
Over the whole period, cooks, nursemaids, and houseworkers were always wanted
by public servants as well as private settlers…By the 1920s however, nearly all
12
New Hebrideans, whether indenture or “free residents,” worked in Noumea, either
in domestic serviced in private homes, bars and restaurants, or as dock and store
laborers.
So as we can see, there were numerous parallels between the nineteenth century and early
twentieth century context of French New Caledonia and twentieth century New Hebrides,
in terms of a persistent French colonial dependence on imported labour to serve domestic
needs, and the reliance upon geographical dislocation of these workers to provide labour
fixes in colonial settings. The divergent contexts of these two colonies, however, sprang
mainly from the fact of New Caledonia’s specific positioning as a convict site, and what
bridged the two was the removal of native New Hebridean islanders to serve in New
Caledonia and the removal of Tonkinese labour to serve in the New Hebrides. The
French referred to New Hebrideans as “canaques” and often used “minor’ forms of
corporal punishments, including whipping, blows, “kicks and pushes” to discipline their
indentured Melanesian workers in plantation contexts.
Margaret Rodman’s work has explored other angles of domesticity in the New
Hebrides, specifically from the point of view of private and colonial British domestic
space in the context of housing and relative separation from Melanesian islander
communities resident there. Her study, Houses far from Home, is preoccupied with the
domestic experiences of British Colonial servants stationed in the islands.
She argues that “simply tearing down the house of colonialism is another kind of
imperialism, a conquest that makes it harder to find among the rubble the meanings that
were colonialism’s posts, beams, shingles, and trim, much less its occupants.” (Rodman,
2-3)
13
During the Anglo-French Condominium in the New Hebrides, each colonial
group had its own set of domestic servants that diverged from one another, as Rodman
describes, the “French judge’s Indochinese servants would have to share a toilet with the
New Hebridean servants of the British Judge. The cultural schisms of the Condominium
were extended to the servants.” (46) Regulations enacted by the Condominium further
served to “demarcate” Port Vila, the capital of the colony, as a white space; when in 1907
French and British resident commissioners took joint actions to “restrict the movement of
natives in the town between 9 PM and 5 am.” (34) In 1910, the British Resident
Commissioner, Merton King,
felt that the court officials to be sent out to the New Hebrides should be warned of
what King termed the ‘terrors that await them here. That they cannot purchase
anything, or scarcely anything, that a civilized being wants, and that servants are
unprocurable… A degraded type of Mongolian from Annan and Tonkin [i.e.
Vietnam] can be procured as servants in Noumea, but they are mostly worthless as
I know to my cost.’
And so in this instance we can discern some potential cross-over between the two
colonial cultures in terms of the Tonkinese labour traffic, or understood otherwise, the
eventual Indochinese presence in the colony, and the British reluctance to take part, and
their preference for Melanesians as domestics. Rodman observed that,
except for the presence of the maligned Melanesian and Indochinese servants, the
Condominium created white space as part of the juristic experiment…Not only
did the Condominium hold out the promise that land disputes with islanders
14
would be resolved in favor of whites, but the ‘natives’ themselves would recede
from view. (34)
Rodman also observed how, in Vanuatu, the British and French pursued “land alienation
policies in which respect for traditional culture played little part.” (Rodman, 1992, 648)
It was at least until 1963 that the French would draw upon a “large pool of Tonkinese
labor for gardening and other maintenance work.” (Rodman, 2001, 95)
In Houses far from Home, Rodman also gave insight into how the shifting and
intermittent presence of colonial officers shaped relationships of domestic service
involving natives and Tonkinese. Henri d’Arboussier was the French Resident
Commissioner in the New Hebrides between 1922 and 1929, and his presence in the
islands would overlap with that of British Resident Commissioner Merton King, whose
term ran from 1907 to 1924. King’s “fellow occupant” and assistant commissioner
Edward Jacomb wrote of the residence as “badly and insufficiently furnished…and if we
do not get an Annamite [Vietnamese] by tomorrow, we shall have to cook our own food.”
(55) While the British resident commissioner Alexander Wilkie (1962-66) once remarked
to his wife: “I would not be resident commissioner in the New Hebrides and not have a
New Hebridean cook,” the French, according to Rodman, relied on Vietnamese cooks and
French planters also sometimes “imported” their own wives “for occasions to help cook.”
(67)
Tonkinese Resistence and Punishment
While corporal punishment of Tonkinese was rare it did occur in some occasions
when the grounds for punishment were born out of cases of overt insurgency. One case
15
in 1931 saw the execution of six Tonkinese by guillotine in Port Vila for having killed
their French master and another worker. (93)
As described earlier, there were some isolated cases in which Tonkinese served
British colonials in the islands as service practices proved permeable between the two
colonial spheres that jointly ruled in the islands. In 1949, for instance, Len Barrow, the
acting British district agent on Tanna had a Tonkinese named Hoa, who had formerly
been at work on a French district agent’s house on Malakula island, sent to Tanna to carry
out repairs for a colonial house, and he also received a Tonkinese carpenter after making
a request for this help. (Rodman, 2001, 157-8)
Cultural divisiveness also took place in Indochina directly as a result of French
policies, as Christopher Goscha has noted:
By colonising eastern mainland Southeast Asia, the French placed a number of
pre-existing kingdoms and their subjects within a larger colonial entity named the
‘Indochinese Union’ from 1887. No longer did local sovereigns direct their own
foreign and internal matters, the French did. Pre-colonial kingdoms became
subordinate sub-units or countries (pays was the colonial shorthand) of the
Indochinese colonial state. The ethnic Vietnamese kingdom of Dai Nam
(Vietnam) was dismantled into three colonial parts. ‘Annam’ in today’s central
Vietnam and ‘Tonkin’ in the north became legally constituted protectorates, while
‘Cochinchina’ was transformed into colony in the South... The colonial division of
Vietnam into three parts was based less on racial criteria than on the drawn- out
16
nature of French colonial expansion between the second Empire and the Third
Republic, the result of complex politico-legal and economic considerations, as
well as the need to divide in order to rule. Significantly, the French also created
colonial nationalities (nationalite) for each of the new territorial sub-units (pays).
(Goscha, 1192)
As Goscha notes, the “colonial encounter cut in many ways.” (1209)
The colonial encounter generated new identities among colonized subjects but
also, underwent shifts, in the case of French Indochina, in the composition of the
colonizing population as well. As Marie-Paul Ha has argued, French Indochina
underwent a shift around the turn of the century from previously being a “no woman’s
land” and into a “woman’s haven.”(Ha, 2014) Ha argues that a new approach to promote
the imperial cause involved the “elevation” of bourgeois domesticity to as essential or
indispensable to “true colonization.” (8)
Marie-Paule Ha’s scholarship also discusses the shifting contexts of French
empire, in which, nineteenth century contexts were often shaped by a different colonial
composition in which the outcasts and misfits of France could find an outlet in the
colonies; the colonies could take on the burden of those who failed to fit the conventions
of the motherland; the overwhelmingly presence of the pariah-as-colonist made it
difficult to restore the “quality” of French emigrants, but a shift toward a reclamation of
French colonial spaces as ones requiring robust colonists who possessed qualities and
skills and the Union Coloniale Francaise (UCF) would promote the selection of such
“quality settlers”. Among the benefits of including women as colonists was the charge of
17
putting an end to the “highly undesirable practice of concubinage between Frenchmen
and native women,” and also an unloading of the large “stock” of metropolitan single
females. (21) The UCF organized five hundred talks between 1897 and 1906 in efforts to
promote the emigration of bons colons or good colonists to the colonies.
Micheline Lessard’s recent work has explored how, as early as 1873, French
missionaries in Tonkin were reporting about a practice of kidnapping in which women
and children were sold in China; the French trade in annamite women was indeed
prevalent on Chinese markets. While the French colonial administration and military
made efforts to stop the trade, its pervasiveness, as well as the participation of
Vietnamese “players” in trafficking network, made it a problem that was difficult to
stamp out. (Lessard, 12)
Finally, I would like to note that, while the French were in the business of
transporting Tonkinese to the New Hebrides in the 1920s, New Zealand was in the
business of undoing the labour traffic in Western Samoa that had commenced under the
wing of a German imperial trading presence on the islands of Upolu and Savaii. The
German period is often remembered as a time of peace and progress in Western Samoa
since Samoans were never forced to work on German plantations. Since Samoan people
were less than willing to serve as a disciplined labour force on German plantations,
German planters ultimately resorted to the policy of transporting contract “coolie”
labourers from China. By 1921, all German nationals had been deported, except those
with Samoan wives, and New Zealand forbid the Chinese from intermixing with
Samoans and would ultimately repatriate the indentured Chinese brought to the islands by
German planters.
18
Colonialism in the South Pacific provided the impetus for most regional migration
in the contemporary colonial period, as the late nineteenth century European “scramble”
for colonies, which saw the carving up of Africa into distinct European territorial
colonies would also include Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Europeans profited from
private ownership of Pacific land and made use of wage labour on alienated lands. This
alienation was especially marked in French territories of the Pacific, in the New Hebrides
and in New Caledonia. Land alienation was more actively resisted in the New Hebrides
beginning in the 1930s, after foreigners’ property rights were legalized, and the
redistribution of colonial lands would take place after Vanuatu achieved in independence.
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