Coconut Colonialism: Workers and the Globalization of Samoa

Abstract

There are many ways to write a global history: one is to survey multiple locations across time spans and geographies with interconnections and themes. Another is to dive deeply into a particular place, unfolding the daily lives, experiences, and hopes of local communities and individuals, tying them into global networks of travel, trade, diplomacy, entertainment, political alliance, and commercial interest. Droessler pursues the latter in Coconut Colonialism, a thoughtful, gracefully written, and deeply committed history of Samoa.The title is a bit of a feint—while the development of a copra economy in German Samoa is the heart of the narrative, this is far more than a chronicle of coconut plantation labor or agricultural politics. This is agricultural history in the broadest sense. Droessler ranges from the lore and culture of the coconut in Samoan society to the world built by planters and grove workers, through the multiple globe-spanning travels of ethnographic performers, infrastructure builders, and civil-servant mediators between the Samoan communities and German administration.These dramatis personae populate a remarkable and deeply nuanced set of scenarios, from the Samoan translator and administrator Charles Thomas Taylor to Chinese immigrants like Ko Tuk Shung in labor disputes and Melanesian workers like Tui Sakila. We follow plantation friendships between Ielu and Malua, agitators like Taio Tolo—who regards his fellows as like the Illustrados in the Philippines—and world-spanning nurses like Grace Pepe. In all, Droessler does not merely recount ethnological reconstructions of groups but traces Taylor's personal ambitions to travel, the San Francisco sojourns of Pepe, and the questions of rank and respect that troubled Tolo. We see these people's experiences (and those of dozens of other figures) in detail within and outside the German administration.The stories are generously yet concisely told. Droessler avoids excessive academic apparatus and instead focuses on the characters, their hopes, challenges, and quirks. Samoan men and women accepted harsh plantation work, but on their own terms, establishing their own cooperatives and trading networks. In this, Coconut Colonialism draws on an array of historiographical traditions: the island, field, and plantation social narratives of scholars like Ronald Takaki or Gary Okihiro; the voyaging mobility of Islanders underscored by David Chappell, or the performative self-fashionings examined by Adria Imada. Droessler grounds these in personal stories and puts individual lives into his “globalization.”Droessler searches out the personalities and characters behind the work that connected the building of coaling stations and establishment of radio towers as colonial service, yet also sees the linkages to communications for Islanders with a wider world of information. Those serving directly in the colonial administration occupied a “precarious position,” invaluable to the Germans while also advancing their own ambitions within status and compensation ranks and, at times, agitating for greater self-determination while also drawing on their own chiefly, noble statuses as matai. We see gender materially rooted in Samoan male-female roles such as the ‘aumāga and aualuma working groups, through malaga communities and the matai society, and deployed in hygiene and public health programs assigned to women. These investigations allow Droessler, for example, to recount the life of Grace Pepe as trainee and then nurse and also examine the decimating 1918 flu pandemic that scourged Samoa.Throughout the work, Droessler remains close to his sources. Though making some significant points about capitalism, workscapes, Oceanian globality, and the colonial roots of globalization, his analysis is rather built directly into his impressive elucidation of experiences and the manifold meanings of agricultural work and village society. These encompass an international range of immigrants, from Samoan coconut huskers to performers enacting Islander culture on stages in Europe like Tuvale—a high-ranking matai who saw the songs and dances he presented to audiences as diplomatic gestures in exchange for European hospitality—and figures like Tupua Tamasese Lealofi I, who navigated white-collar administrative functionaries vying for attention and status within colonial structures.Droessler unpacks racism as a fact of everyday life in multiple dimensions and not just between German rulers and Samoan workers, but also as inflected by the experience of Chinese laborers, Melanesian workers, and the prejudices around their cohabitation with local women in plantation and farm settings. He also illuminates the lived self-definition of the famed “half-castes” who often populated higher social ranks, including Ta‘isi O. F. Nelson, who would later lead the Mau movement for Samoan political self-determination. This comes at the point about which this book ends, with the colonial system under stress from global political transformations. And this is Droessler's well-made point: to understand global change, see the local actors, and the real lives that populate these histories.