How Samoan Workers under Colonial Regimes Enlarged their World

Abstract

The Samoan Islands have never really fallen off the world’s radar since it became the site of an ‘almost war’ between the Great Powers of the United States, Britain, and Germany in 1889. That war was averted by the intervention of a hurricane that sent to the bottom three U.S. and three German warships and cost many lives. A decade later, the Samoan Islands were carved up between Germany and the United States, with Britain withdrawing to tend to other imperial interests in the Pacific and Africa. In 1914, World War I saw Germany evicted from the western Samoan islands in favor of New Zealand and a League of Nations mandate, while the United States continued to enjoy the protective naval harbor in American Samoa to the east. Things went relatively quiet between the wars, though both parts of the Samoas were experiencing independence movements. And Margaret Mead was sowing the seeds of her most famous work of social science, Coming of Age in Samoa, researched in the American Samoa islands. Western Samoa burst back into prominence in 1962 as the Pacific’s first independent island nation, enjoying thereafter a reputation as one of the Pacific’s most stable and relatively prosperous states. Wrapped in the embrace of the U.S. Navy, American Samoa sailed serenely on.