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98 &+$37(5)285 2UJDQLVHG3ODQWDWLRQ3URWHVW Aside from dealing with the insurgency that brewed in the hills, Arthur Gordon faced another daunting task when he took control of the government in 1875. Like any governor, Gordon was expected to render his colony profitable to the British Empire and run it at minimal cost to the government and its metropolitan taxpayers.To make the economy viable, Gordon needed to raise revenue locally to fund his own administration. He also needed to attract offshore investment for capital growth and find a steady supply of cheap labour. But, aside from a £100,000 loan from the Colonial Office,1 the government was “terribly poor”.2 By 1875, a massive fall in cotton prices3 caused almost half of Fiji’s three thousand Europeans to repatriate to Australia and New Zealand and deprived the Gordon administration of their cash and entrepreneurial spirit.4 Yet if issues of investment and public revenue are important, it is with the question of labour that this chapter is concerned. After reviewing Gordon’s reasons for confining Fijian labourers to their villages to produce tax goods and for seeking Indian indentured labourers to make up for the shortfall in plantation labour, the discussion will examine the nature of organised resistance on Fiji’s plantations. ,QGHQWXUH It has often been assumed that Fijians were sheltered and marginalised from economic participation.5 The arguments presented in this book propose instead that Fijian taxes and cheap labour formed a vital part of the economic mainstream. Their communal confinement buttressed the power of their chiefs and thereby the cheap and orderly administration of the Fijian people. Organised Plantation Protest 99 Gordon was also keen to put a halt to the excesses of labour recruitment that had caused the extensive depopulation of numerous villages and districts in pre-Cession times.6 Among those who urged a change of policy were several missionaries. In a letter to Gordon, Rev. Langham wrote that the absence of able-bodied men from their districts led to dissatisfaction among those who were left behind because they were required to make up the shortfall in taxes. He was concerned that children were constantly taken out of school as cover for the shortage and that the lack of marriageable men was causing village populations to decline.7 Gordon hardly needed convincing. He wanted these men in their villages , working under the leadership of their chiefs in communal tax gardens. Legislation was duly passed requiring the permission of the village buli before villagers could be engaged as labourers. This new policy put a severe check on Fijians’ ability to leave and planters’ ability to recruit them. The shortage of labour was made more acute when Gordon decided to prohibit the sale of native land. As secure landowners, Fijians had little incentive to seek the meagre wages and ill treatment that prevailed on many European estates.8 While some continued to trickle out of their villages mostly to escape the drudgery of communal life,by the end of the 1870s Fijians had generally become unemployable as plantation labour. To supplement Fijian labour, Fiji had long benefited from Melanesian labourers.They came mainly from the Melanesian islands of Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands (see fig. 4.1), although it was those from Kiribati and Tokelau that gave them a generic “Polynesian” tag. Most came for three-year contracts mainly on cotton and coconut plantations. But this “Polynesian” traffic was tainted with “abuse and atrocities”,9 and Gordon was expected to curb such excesses to validate one of the key justifications for British annexation. Pressure on the governor also came from the Wesleyan Church, which criticised the lack of legal safeguards for the protection of labourers. In a letter to Gordon, Rev. Fison pointed out that plantation inspections were almost farcical. Whenever such visits occurred, “plantations put on their holiday garb”, and inspectors fraternised openly with planters. A labourer who had cause to complain against his employer was, as Fison put it, “not likely to expect impartial justice from the man whom he sees eating at his master’s table”.10 Fiji’s poor reputation was also exacerbated by the better wages that Melanesian workers were being offered in Queensland, New Caledonia, and Samoa.11 By mid-1877,the all-absorbing question that seemed “to supersede every other consideration”, as the Fiji Times put it, was “that of the labour supply”.12 The Fiji Times often claimed to speak for Europeans as “the producing class” [18.119...

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