Travailleurs, recruteurs et planteurs dans l'Archipel Bismarck de 1885 à 1914

Abstract

Workers, recruiters and planters in the Bismarck Archipelago from 1885 to 1914. For some years Pacific history specialists have been carrying out a critical re-examination of facts relating to work in European plantations at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. The very notions of black-birding, indentured labour and labour trade have been questioned in an outbreak of systematic doubt which combines ethical, humanitarian and economic arguments. Paying particular attention to the different problems surrounding this subject, the author analyses in his turn documents from archives and accounts of survivors. In the area of the Bismarck Archipelago alone he shows that neither at the time of their recruitment nor during their period of work had Melanesian workers entered into freely negotiated contracts and that it is impossible to imagine a convergence of their interests with those of their employers. The economic conditions under which the plantations were operated prove that it could hardly be otherwise, and that present arguments for or against the immoral nature of the system studied are irrelevant. Finally, he points out that ethnographic literature is almost silent on this subject, as if repercussions on Melanesian populations had been unimportant.