This special issue of Labour History aims to interrogate the relationship between the history of indentured labour in the Pacific Ocean and the concept of oceanic mobility. From the 1960s onwards, major contributions in Pacific history and anthropology have focused on the influence that the labour trade and later forms of unfree labour have had on (post)colonial economies and island communities. Whereas early works stressed the willingness of Islanders and others to be recruited for colonial indenture, recent perspectives have attempted to complicate the interplay between agency and labour mobility. Scholarly work on slavery, incarceration, indenture and other forms of forced labour have since focused on the “immobility” of labour highlighting different networks of transportation which crossed boundaries and regulations to exploit labourers to work for (post)colonial authorities and private actors.
Special issue editors Nicholas Hoare (ANU) and Tobias Wagemann (ENS) encourage submissions with a historical perspective on labour regimes in the Pacific Ocean and related oceanic worlds. Articles may focus on labourers’ mobility and constraints, gendered mobilities and domestic labour, actors of coercion, and moments of rebellion, resistance or accommodation to coercive regimes of indentured servitude. Our goal is to both capture diverse perspectives on the theme and work towards providing an updated snapshot of the field of Pacific labour history close to four decades after Clive Moore, Jacqueline Leckie and Doug Munro’s agenda-setting edited volume, Labour in the South Pacific (1990), first conceived at conferences in 1985–86.
Abstracts of 300 words in length (excluding references) should be submitted to Nicholas Hoare (Nicholas.Hoare@anu.edu.au) and Tobias Wagemann (tobias.wagemann@psl.eu) by 14 November 2025. Articles of 6,000–8,000 words in length (excluding references) should be submitted by 27 March 2026 with publication of the special issue planned for 2027. Please note that Labour History articles are published online Ahead of Print with permission. Click here for a PDF of this Call for Papers.