Between 1905 and 1922, the settler colonial Canadian sugar refiner, BC Sugar, operated a sugar plantation in the Fiji Islands. This paper examines the events surrounding its 1922 departure.
According to the company, BC Sugar left Fiji due to labour shortages. An examination of the historical record indicates, however, that such shortages were largely of BC Sugar’s own making. Before 1920, when Fiji canceled all indenture contracts, the company had employed South Asian indentured migrants. In 1916, however, India halted indentured emigration. Simultaneously, Fiji decriminalized the desertion of indenture contracts. No longer bound by law to inhumane indentured labour, migrant workers began leaving Fiji’s plantations.
To bring workers back to its fields, in 1917 BC Sugar began offering daily work for wages that were in line with local living costs. Soon, the company was receiving more applicants than it could hire. Yet in 1918, BC Sugar dropped wages to inadequate levels. Predictably, the size of its workforce again shrank.
Underscoring the reliance of Canadian sugar upon indentured labour exploitation between 1905 and 1920, this paper examines how Canadian capitalism both benefited from and extended the international inequalities of British imperialism. As a British dominion company operating in a British colony, BC Sugar’s Fiji enterprise had no obligations to workers, growers, or Fiji itself. As a result, if it found costs to be higher than it preferred, it could simply leave. Such was not the case, however, for the people it left behind. With the mill gone, growers had nowhere to sell their cane. Labourers had nowhere to work, and merchants lost their customers. By the middle of the 1920s, the former plantation had largely become, in the words of one local correspondent, a “ghost town.”