Located at the crossroads of the Pacific, Samoa has always served as one of the vital cultural centers of Oceanian life, sustained through the practice of malaga. Though malaga was a custom primarily exercised to maintain social relationships through travel, it can also refer to processes of movement and mobility more broadly in fa'a Samoa (the Samoan way of life). However, malaga are not simply travel or movement. They are crucial to preserving vā: the “links, pathways, and networks that people reestablish as they move”. Forming the central tenet of the Samoan moral economy, vā allows Samoans to “nurture social harmony and ensure the integrity of the culture” through moving back and forth in between spaces (4).
In Coconut Colonialism, malaga are a (if not the) defining feature of the Samoan Islands’ unique global identity. Part of what Holger Droessler calls “Oceanian globality,” the workers of Samoa forged new connections with one another and the wider world in the spirit of malaga, despite the ever-tightening grip of Euro-American colonialism. The increasingly interconnected and hostile world which resulted from trans-imperial governance and globalization threatened Samoan traditions of mobility and cultural exchange. Nonetheless, Samoans found opportunities for cooperation, resistance, and agency within this limited colonial globality, offering the prospect of extending their long-established ideas of malaga within coconut colonialism at the turn of the twentieth century.
Telling a story situated at the nexus of labor, colonialism, and globalization, Coconut Colonialism presents a powerful and fresh perspective on history from below and from a region which receives comparatively little historiographical attention. Rather than being a narrative which explains the process of transforming coconuts and copra into colonial commodities for global markets, the coconut acts as a symbol for the incitement of colonization in Samoa and the wider Pacific, but also one which helped to shape the contours of resistance to global capitalism. Challenging more conventional narratives which offer sweeping accounts of powerful (White) actors who helped to shape global economic integration, the workers of Samoa under tripartite and later German, American, and New Zealand-mandated governance offer a “decidedly local and remarkably intimate” account of globalization (202).
Droessler argues that the workers of Samoa experienced colonialism and capitalism primarily through labor. Though Samoa forms the backdrop of the analysis, the book does not focus solely on ethnic Samoan workers. Instead, the book engages with a range of identities and agencies extant in Samoa, including Chinese migrant workers, various Polynesian and Melanesian groups from other Pacific Islands, and those of mixed-race heritage. These are the people – the local connections – that laid the foundation for Samoa's integration into global networks.
The book is divided into five parts, each engaged in a different “workscape” representing different categories of labor: coconuts, planters, performers, builders, and mediators. Workscapes emerged as central and interdependent arenas of colonial contestation, enabling different forms of interaction and giving rise to new forms of sociality. These diverse experiences helped to forge bonds of solidarity within and across workscapes, fueling the anti-colonial Mau movement and campaigns for self-determination presented before the League of Nations.
Chapter 1 discusses the importance of Samoan sustainable coconut farming practices on self-determination and autonomy. Since they were able to manage the introduction of export-oriented plantation agriculture on their own terms, independent food production allowed them to both creatively exploit new opportunities for trade and economic gain and undermine the monopolistic practices of Euro-American plantation owners through the creation of copra cooperatives. Chapter 2 focuses on the rather unequal community of workers in the harsh world of copra-making and their efforts to resist the demands of plantation agriculture. Though Euro-American authorities sought to segregate the colonial workforce along racial lines, Samoans successfully forged interracial solidarity with new plantation workers, shaping Oceanian globality.
Chapter 3 examines the experiences of those Samoans who performed in European and American exhibitions, fairs, and zoos, arguing that this kind of global malaga set Samoans apart from other ethnographic troupes of the time. Although the physical demands and labor discipline of the shows intimately connected them with other forms of labor at home in Samoa, they were able to redefine their tours as cultural and diplomatic malaga. Chapter 4 investigates the challenges and opportunities presented by the expanding infrastructure in Samoa. Samoan workers welcomed an additional space to earn cash and appreciated the connectivity that roads and ports presented, offering more regular and consistent ways of interacting with the wider world. Finally, chapter 5 explores the indigenous intermediaries (usually mixed-race) who navigated the precarious spaces between colonizer and colonized as police, translators, secretaries, and nurses.
While the thorough research and incisive analysis of Coconut Colonialism should be commended, there were instances where the book could have been stronger. . Droessler often mentions how workers were vulnerable to environmental and ecological concerns but fails to go into much depth about those concerns, or the impact of coconut colonialism on the bodies of its diverse workforce or the Samoan landscape. This would have been a rich opportunity to engage with promising and important work on labor in the history of science and the environment. Likewise, a brief glance at the secondary literature reveals only light engagement with recent work on German colonialism. Although Droessler's work makes a necessary contribution to the rather deficient literature on German Samoa, the study of German colonialism has recently become one of the most vibrant fields in imperial history. Why some landmark texts were excluded, let alone more specific studies which address similar issues of labor, race, and identity in German colonies, is unclear.
In Coconut Colonialism, Holger Droessler crafts a thoughtful narrative on how local people in small spaces reacted to large-scale processes like colonialism and globalization through labor. His original contribution and unique transnational and trans-imperial approach illustrate how future scholarship can overcome traditional methods to untangle complex global stories. Importantly, his focus on collaboration and resistance in response to Euro-American encroachment demonstrates the essential roles of agency and identity in these processes. For the workers of Samoa, malaga stands at the center of globalization, enabling them to construct a shared, cooperative vision of Oceanian globality.
