Contested Oceans: Maritime Labor, Anti-Colonial Politics, and Asian/Pacific Diasporas in the 20th-Century Dutch Empire

Between the years 1873 and 1940, thousands of contract laborers from the Netherlands East Indies, China, and British India were transported on board Dutch ships to work on agricultural plantations and manufacturing facilities in Suriname.  This paper explores how Dutch businesses profiting from Asian contract labor--including shipping companies, plantation owners, and manufacturers in South America—conflated concerns about economic profits with colonial paranoia over ecological exchanges through their colonial discourses on public health, contamination, and disease among Asian migrants during the early twentieth century.  Dutch businesses and the colonial administration sought to control what they saw as dangerous trans-Pacific exchange networks by establishing public health initiatives as a way to protect a capitalist economy dependent on the very same Pacific World exchanges they so feared.

The cross-cultural and multi-ethnic connections made on board ships and within working environments in Suriname, spaces where workers had the ability to recognize and reinvent their identities as migrant laborers, were interactions highly policed by colonial entities and the seemingly benign sanitary motivations behind public health initiatives were intertwined with colonial suspicions over the threatening political ideas migrant laborers might be spreading along Pacific migration networks. Businesses--especially within a colonial context where they often served as ambassadors and helpmates for colonial regimes--were vital not only for the economic and logistic well being of the Dutch empire, but also for protecting it against political threats throughout the Pacific World.  This paper explores how corporate and individual actors were forced to negotiate the economic and ecological realities and fabrications around trans-Pacific labor migrations during a period of colonial control, globalization, and ecological integration in order to better understand how trans-Pacific labor migrations influenced the modern colonial period.