In myriad ways, Holger Droessler’s Coconut Colonialism adds important information and insight to the complex history of colonialism in Samoa from the 1880s to World War I, a period during which Germany controlled Western Samoa, now the independent nation of Samoa, and the United States controlled Eastern Samoa, which remains a U.S. territory today. Samoa is an especially rich place for studying the logic of colonialism and its contingent permutations since Britain, Germany, the United States, and New Zealand all claimed dominion at various times. By 1900, Britain had bowed out, leaving Germany and the United States to split Samoa between them. They created an international border that cut through the Samoan archipelago. Germany developed Western Samoa as a planter colony for tropical products, mainly copra (dried coconut meat from which oil was extracted) but also cacao, cotton, and rubber. Meanwhile, the United States began a massive overhaul of Pago Pago on the island of Tutuila, turning it into the naval base and coaling station originally conceived of in 1872. New Zealand’s assumption of sovereign authority over Western Samoa during World War I and under a League of Nations mandate during the 1920s added another imperial nation to the mix.
Borrowing Thomas Andrews’s idea of distinct workscapes, Droessler organizes his material into five chapters, each focused on a particular type of labor context found in colonial Samoa: (1) the autonomy and resistance of the small Samoan landholder; (2) the influx of imported, indentured laborers to plant and process coconuts into copra (these were the arduous, menial, and low-paid jobs that Samoans refused to do); (3) the performance of Samoan culture, or some version of it, at expositions, theaters, and zoos in the United States and Germany; (4) the construction of the buildings, roads, wharves, and communication grids that constituted the infrastructure of empire; and (5) the more skilled and respected administrative work of empire as represented by interpreters, clerks, police, and nurses.
Even readers new to Samoan history will find much that is familiar here. Droessler asserts that the book’s main objective is to show how “Samoa’s diverse working people at the turn of the twentieth century were the innovators of a specifically Oceanian form of globality” (201). Yet there are many parallels between colonialism as it played out in Samoa and in other parts of the world beyond Oceania, from the Lakota performers who traveled to Europe with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show to the Panama Canal Zone to Ho Chi Minh’s education and politicization in France. Droessler makes occasional comparisons to colonialism elsewhere, especially to other German colonies in southern Africa, China, Saipan, and New Guinea, but does not fully develop a comparative angle or theoretical framework, favoring instead a more fine-tuned case study of Samoa and Samoans. And this is indeed where the book makes its most valuable contributions. Even if the “globality” Droessler casts as uniquely Oceanian was fundamental to colonialism more generally, this detailed treatment of the Samoan experience adds much to the historiography on Samoa, German and U.S. imperialism, and Indigenous adaptation, resistance, and activism in response to colonial subjugation.
One of the book’s signal features is its simultaneous attention to German and U.S. colonialism. As Droessler observes in his introduction, most scholars, probably because they identify as historians of either Germany or of U.S. foreign relations, have narrated only one empire’s history. Droessler demonstrates how the imperialists in Samoa all shared attitudes that Droessler labels “salvage colonialism,” in keeping with other scholars of German colonialism (35, 216). Whether German or American, they designed policies, created limited opportunities, and imposed restrictions using a paternalistic, protectionist ideology. The exercise of colonial power was not identical across empires, however, for a host of reasons. The United States was not as invested in Samoa’s copra economy, for instance, since the naval base was its priority, and while Chinese laborers were among those recruited to work on German Samoa’s plantations, the United States applied the Chinese Exclusion Act to bar Chinese workers from American Samoa.
Another worthy achievement of Coconut Colonialism is its forefronting of Samoan adaptation and resistance to colonial institutions. As one might expect, most of Droessler’s sources were produced by the imperial powers and reside in the national archives of the United States, Germany, and New Zealand. Despite the power imbalances riddling the source base for such a project, Droessler managed to ground Samoan responses to colonialism in Samoan cultural traditions. He did this largely by contextualizing Samoan motivations and understandings in Samoan words and concepts. A glossary translating Samoan words into English or a better index that readers could use to remind themselves of a word’s meaning would have been helpful, but the method employed does succeed at explaining Samoan adaptation and resistance to colonization as their own initiative and not something forced on them from outside. One of Droessler’s key arguments is that colonialism spawned new opportunities for Samoans to pursue their own interests, and that their interests included a desire for knowledge about the rest of the world that could be gained through travel. Although Samoans who showed too much independence risked being fired from their jobs or sent into exile, they still pushed at the glass ceiling to maximize their autonomy, status, and influence.
For historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, this book’s situating of U.S. colonialism within a larger frame offers a fruitful vantage point and relief from the myopic tendency to study the U.S. acquisitions of 1898 as an isolated event disconnected from the European scramble for overseas colonies. In addition, since American Samoa is part of the United States, U.S. historians could benefit from knowing more of the islands’ history.
