Blackbirding

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Blackbirding was the trade in indentured labourers from the Pacific in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It is often described as a form of slavery, despite the Slave Trade Act 1807 and the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 abolishing slavery throughout the British Empire, including Australia. The trade frequently relied on coercion, deception, and kidnapping to transport tens of thousands of indigenous people from islands in the Pacific Ocean to Australia, other European colonies, and independent countries of the Pacific and Central and South America, often to work on plantations in conditions similar to the Atlantic slave trade. These blackbirded people, known in Australia as Kanakas or South Sea Islanders, were taken from places such as Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Niue, Easter Island, the Gilbert Islands, Tuvalu and the islands of the Bismarck Archipelago, amongst others. The owners, captains, and crews of the ships involved in the acquisition of these labourers were termed blackbirders. Blackbirding ships began operations in the Pacific from the 1840s and continued, in some cases, into the 1930s. The demand for this kind of cheap labour principally came from sugar cane, cotton, and coffee plantations in New South Wales, Queensland, Samoa, New Caledonia, Fiji, Tahiti, and Hawaii. In Auckland, a small group of South Sea Islanders worked in flax mills. Examples of blackbirding outside the South Pacific include the early days of the pearling industry in Western Australia at Nickol Bay and Broome, where Aboriginal Australians were blackbirded from the surrounding areas. In Peru, Mexico, Guatemala, and elsewhere in the Americas, blackbirders sought workers for their haciendas and to mine the guano deposits on the Chincha Islands.