This article presents a historical analysis of the pivotal role played by Chinese migrant labor in the development of cocoa cultivation within the colonial plantation economies of Samoa and Vanuatu during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Drawing upon a range of primary and secondary sources, this study examines the motivations behind the introduction of Chinese indentured workers, the conditions under which they labored, and their significant, yet often overlooked, contributions to the expansion of the global cocoa commodity chain. The research contextualizes these specific Pacific instances within the broader historical phenomena of commodity frontiers, the evolution of coerced labor systems post-slavery, and the global movement of Asian migrant workers. By delineating the recruitment practices, daily lives, and socio-economic impacts of Chinese laborers in these distinct colonial settings, this article aims to provide a nuanced understanding of the complex interplay between imperial ambitions, global market demands, and the human cost of tropical agricultural expansion in the Pacific.

Chinese migrant labor, cocoa cultivation, plantation economies

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Ulbe Bosma, The World of Sugar (Cambridge, 2023), 47; Beckert et al., “Commodity Frontiers,” 436; Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York, 1985); Tracey Banivanua Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue: The Australian-Pacific Indentured Labor Trade (Honolulu, 2006).

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W.E. Burghardt Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (New York, 1935), 15.

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Lisa Yun, The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves in Cuba (Philadelphia, 2009), Mae Ngai, The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics (New York, 2021); Adam McKeown, “How the Box Became Black: Brokers and the Creation of the Free Migrant,” Pacific Affairs 85, no. 1 (2012): 30. See also the special edition by Diane Kirkby and Sophie Loy-Wilson eds, “Labour History and the ‘Coolie Question’,” Labour History, no. 113 (Nov 2017); Julia T. Martínez, “‘Unwanted Scraps’ or ‘An Alert, Resolute, Resentful People’? Chinese Railroad Workers in French Congo,” eds. Mae M. Ngai and Sophie Loy-Wilson, International Labor and Working-Class History, 91 (2017): 79–98.

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Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830-1920 (London, 1974), 42; Andrea Major, “‘Hill Coolies’: Indian Indentured Labour and the Colonial Imagination, 1836-38,” South Asian Studies, 33, no. 1 (2017): 27–8; Madhavi Kale, Fragments of Empire: Capital, Slavery, and Indian Indentured Labor in the British Caribbean (Philadelphia, 1998), 147.

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Droessler, Coconut Colonialism, 18.

Kate Stevens, Gender, Violence and Criminal Justice in the Colonial Pacific, 1880-1920 (London, 2023), 125.

John Hinchley Hart, Cacao, Treatise on the Cultivation and Curing of “Cacao” (Theobroma Cacao) (Trinidad, 1892), 47.

Emma Robertson, Chocolate, Women and Empire: A Social and Cultural History (Manchester, 2009), 5; Catherine Hall, “‘Turning a Blind Eye’: Memories of Empire,” in Memory, ed. Patricia Fara and Karalyn Patterson (Cambridge, 1998), 35; On ongoing slavery see Catherine Higgs, Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa (Athens OH, 2012), 203.

Clarence-Smith, Cocoa and Chocolate, 27; Corey Ross, “The Plantation Paradigm: Colonial Agronomy, African Farmers, and the Global Cocoa Boom, 1870s-1940s,” Journal of Global History, 9, no. 1 (2014): 53.

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Austin, “Capitalists and Chiefs,” 66.

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