Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022. 288 pp. (Maps, B&W photos.) US$40.00, cloth. ISBN 9780674263338.
Coconut Colonialism is an important contribution to our understanding of the German colonial period in Western Samoa (now Samoa) and, to a lesser extent, the colonial period in American Samoa. Covering the last decade of the nineteenth century through World War I, the book is not a conventional history of colonialism. It is not about German and American colonial rule in the islands; rather it is about “Samoa’s role in both German and American colonial projects” (19). The author, Holger Droessler, is less interested in the imposition of colonial rule than in the kinds of ties that developed between different groups of Samoans and their colonial counterparts. His emphasis is on Samoan resistance and appropriation rather than on Samoan accommodation and compliance. Samoans were not passive respondents to a monolithic colonial enterprise. Instead, they were active participants and shapers of varied colonial encounters.
According to Droessler, Samoans had their own way of relating to the wider world that he labels “Oceanian globality.” “Confronted with coconut colonialism, Samoans and other islanders counterposed their own definition against the limiting form of globality that colonial officials and capitalists sought to force on them. In doing so, they filled the foreign and abstract notion of global space with their own culturally specific and relational meaning” (9). The relations that Droessler is concerned with revolve around the political economy of “work” that Samoan “workers” performed in colonial “workscapes.” Thus, coconut production on plantations for the global market required certain kinds of labour that differed from the local production of coconuts for village subsistence. There is an entire chapter on the nature of work regimes initiated on large German coconut plantations, and the plantation labour force that included Samoans, Chinese, Melanesians, and other Pacific Islanders. Defiant workers, strikes, inter-ethnic conflicts and inter-ethnic solidarity, as well as the maintenance of Samoan culture, are among the subjects covered.
Shifting away from coconut plantations and their workers, there is a chapter on the “performative labour” of travelling Samoan troupes recruited to entertain European and Americans audiences at fairs and zoos far from the islands. Droessler finds that, “[t]hese cultural workers collapsed distinctions not only between center and periphery but also between colonizer and colonized” (19). There are additional chapters on Samoan “builders” of local infrastructure, as well as Samoan cultural mediators such as nurses, police, clerks, and translators, who occupied significant interfaces between European administrators, planters, and Samoans. As workers in government positions learned more about colonial administrations from the roles they performed, they became more politically sophisticated in their strategies of resistance and appropriation. There were also business leaders such as O. F. Nelson, a part-Samoan, who were crucial in formulating the twentieth-century agenda of Samoan self-determination. The book concludes with a discussion of the Mau, the post-World War I anti-colonial movement that had its roots in earlier forms of Samoan resistance and was shaped by international developments including the formation of the League of Nations and Samoans’ shared experiences with other Pacific Islanders abroad. Thus, anti-colonial nationalism in both Western and American Samoa during the 1920s had international as well as local origins.
Droessler is well informed about Samoan culture. He has engaged in an enormous amount of research, including archival research, in multiple languages. The book is well written and meticulously detailed with footnotes running to 45 pages. Droessler believes that the history of Samoan responses to colonialism should be at “the very center” of the study of colonialism rather than at its margins (11). As he states, “In sum, historians of German and American history have a lot to learn by turning their eyes toward the South Pacific” (19). Moreover, Droessler argues that by “highlighting the central role played by working people,” his work is part of a wave of scholarship breaking “the silence” about workers in colonial settings (19). Nevertheless, the question remains as to how and why Western Samoa and American Samoa took such different political and economic trajectories and the extent to which this was the result of particular colonial policies and administrations.
The book might benefit from a review of the literature on German colonialism and earlier work on colonialism in the Samoan islands rather than consigning this discussion to footnotes. More coverage of colonialism in American Samoa could enhance Droessler’s arguments. There could be more discussion of inter-ethnic unions and marriages. In addition, there is very little attention to the relations between missionaries and the Samoan clergy, especially given the importance of Christianity in the colonial era. Finally, the use of the term “globality” might receive further clarification.
These suggestions in no way detract from the importance of Coconut Colonialism. This is a significant and provocative book that is essential reading for anyone interested in colonialism in the South Pacific.
Paul Shankman
University of Colorado, Boulder