The fact that the South Pacific slave trade arose just as the United States became embroiled in a conflict over slavery is no coincidence. Perhaps the biggest irony of the Civil War is that the December 6, 1865, ratification of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery (except for convicted criminals) in the U.S., did not put a nail in the coffin of the global slave trade. Instead, its locus was simply transplanted to a new region.
The South Pacific slave trade grew out of cotton, or rather a lack thereof. In the early 1860s, plantations in the American South produced 75 percent of the cotton used around the globe. The outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 ground textile manufacturing to a halt but did not diminish demand for its output. In Great Britain and Europe, the price of cotton exploded.
Global powers had already started discussing the diversification of the cotton industry, especially as the U.S. slipped further and further toward conflict. As early as the 1850s, the British government experimented with Fiji and Australia as cotton-friendly alternatives to the American South. The results were promising, but the crop was labor intensive. Its production was only profitable in the U.S. because those who worked on plantations were enslaved, and the enslaved did not earn salaries.
Only by replicating the conditions pioneered in the U.S. could a South Pacific cotton industry be as lucrative as the one it was replacing. Unsurprisingly, white European settlers and Confederate refugees who sought respite from the Civil War in the South Pacific played a pivotal role in the new plantations’ development.
“The obvious source of labor to turn to was local Fijian labor, but very few Fijians were available or willing to work for planters under the exploitative conditions that often prevailed on these plantations,” says Nicole. “In 1864 and 1865, the first ships carrying laborers from Vanuatu arrived in Fiji, [and] before long, an entire labor trade emerged to service Fiji’s new plantations.”
Beyond Fiji, the British colonies of Queensland and New South Wales in Australia offered similarly attractive ecosystems for re-establishing the cotton industry. Sugar cane, another labor-intensive good whose production was disrupted by the Civil War, soon followed.
The blackbird trade was disjointed. Independent operators controlled the ships and set their routes without coordinating with one another or local authorities. Most blackbirders were citizens of the U.S. and Britain who’d come to the region as traders or settlers and found a lucrative business in trafficking human beings.