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EXPLAINING MIGRATION:
the tradition in eastern and southern Africa
Colin Murray
University of Liverpool
Following a Durkheimian paradigm of the relation between society and the individual, a distinction between analysis of structural factors at the macro-level and analysis of individual
decisionns at the micro-level has often been applied to the study of labour migration.The allerged disfunction between these levels is misplaced, for two reasons. Firstly, the phenomenon of migration is defined by
the crossing of boundaries such as those of rural community, African soiety, etc. within the conceptual entity described as the labour market. This poses the question of how the appropiate macro-level is to be
identified.
Secondly, structural factors diffrentially impinge on individuals within small communities. Analysis of individual decisions cannot therefore proceed independently of analysis of
structures at the micro level. The study of migration is properly the study, at various levels of abstraction, of processes of integration and diffrentiation. Investigation of particular historical transformations
offers the best way of accomodating the diversity of individual circumstances within a structural analysis.
WORKERS; RECRUITERS AND PLANTERS
in the Bismarck Archipelago, 1885-1914
Michel Panoff
Center National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris
Prēcis. For some time 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 the beginning of the 20th centuries. The very notions of ‘blackbirding’, ‘indentured labour’ and ‘the 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 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 the period of their work had Melanesian workers entered into freely negotiated contracts and that it is impossible to imagine a convergence of their interests witose 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 irrelavant. Finally he points out that the ethnographic literature is almost silent on this subject, as if repercussions on Melanesian populations had been unimportant.
THE LONG APPRENTICESHIP:
Labour in the political economy of New Guinea,1915-1941
Colin Newbury
Linacre College, Oxford
WHILE the conditions of recruitment and employment in New Guinea are much better understood as part of current and past research into the labour history of
Pacific groups , the contribution of the administration of the Australian Mandate still remains to be evaluated. It is argued in this paper that Australia colonial officials and
their departments were more than arbiters and regulators in an economic system of production for export. The administration itself as a basics service industry generated
a large market for labour and financed the infrastruture of rural and urban linkages that transformed New Guinea into a partially-unified political economy before the 1940s.
The accelaration of this transformation in the post-war period enhanced the role of government. Greater market opportunities existed for private investment and for the
development of independent commercial agriculture based on the sale of cash crops from the 1940s.
THE LONG APPRENTICESHIP: labour in the political economy of New Guinea, 1915-1941
Colin Newbury
Linacre College, Oxford
WHILE the conditions of recruitment and employment in New Guinea are much better understood as part of current and past research into the labour history of
Pacific groups , the contribution of the administration of the Australian Mandate still remains to be evaluated. It is argued in this paper that Australian colonial officials and
their departments were more than arbiters and regulators in an economic system of production for export. The administration itself as a basic service industry generated a
large market for labour and financed the infrastructer of rural and urban linkages that transformed New Guinea into a partially-unified political economy before the 1940s.
NOEL FATNOWNA AND HIS BOOK:
the making of framents of a Lost Heritage
Clive Moore
University of Queensland
FRAGMENTS OF A LOST HERITAGE was launched at the Pacific History Association Conference in Brisbane in 1989. None present will forget Noel
Fatnowna’s eloquent oration. He held his academic audience spellbound, playing them theatrically in the Australian version of classic Melanisian Bigman style, totally in
control. Fragments is the most reliable and readable account of the several written by descendants of Queensland Kansas, and adds considerably to the already extensive
literature on the Queensland labour trade.(see Moore 1992: 79-86; Munro 1995a).
Yet Noel was no academic and his book is not a normal product of academic scholarship. It is a spoken text, dictated not written, and it is full of larrikin irreverence
and a determination to suceed in Australian society.
LABOUR RESISTANCE AND A CHALLENGE COLONIAL ORDER:
the Asian workforce in New Caledonia and the New Hebrides at the
time of the Second World War
Stephen Henningham
Australian National University
In several of the Pacific island groups until the late 1940s, the colonial project relied on the labour power of indentured workers. Many of these workers came from
various locations in Asia. The presence and impact in Fiji and Hawaii of workers from Asia has been well documented, but only brief attention has been given to their story in New Caledonia and in the New Hebrides.
This article reviews aspects of the history of the Asian segment of the workforce in these colonies during and immediately after the Second World War.
Review article
PLANTATION WORKERS
David A. Chappell
University of Hawaii at Manoa
PLANTATION WORKERS breaks new ground. Anti-colonial resistance and plantation labour have been popular themes in modern Pacific Islands history, but they
have rarely been combined to examine the ways that workers coped with plantation regimes. In a sense this is ironic, since, as one of the contributors points out, "[1]abor
migration was central to Pacific colonalism" (p. 69) One reason for such an oversight is the problem of defining "resistance".Ten years ago, Peter Hempenstall and Noel
Rutherford examined typologies proposed by African historians and suggested that "protest" was more a encompassing word to describe the efforts by Pacific Islanders
to effect positive change in colonial systems (1984:29).
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