Coconut frontiers and ecological frictions in the Pacific World, c .1900–20: A multispecies history of capitalism

Abstract

The copra industry that developed in the Pacific region from the mid-nineteenth century was a global, thriving enterprise. Imperial powers and trade companies jointly set up palm tree plantations that shaped the livelihoods of island societies and recruited Chinese contract labourers. Such monocultural territorialisations also radically transformed the environments and lives of non-humans (plants, insects, fungi), creating ecological conditions that challenged the same economic endeavours at work. ‘Economic entomology’, a novel branch of the scientific study of insects related to profit-oriented land management, emerged globally in the early twentieth century to protect plantations more efficiently from insect pests and other plant diseases. By focusing on the unprecedented outbreak of rhinoceros beetle ( Oryctes rhinoceros ) in the Samoan islands during German colonial rule and its aftermath in the Pacific world, this article examines the history of coconut capitalism in this region as a more-than-human history and explores the potential of reading the global archive against the grain while applying a multispecies ethnographic lens. In so doing, it reconsiders both the colonial anxieties exposed by the beetle outbreak and the kind of multispecies spaces that this insect opened up for Samoan resistance. This paradigmatic case of the global co-constitution of plantation economies and transimperial pest control research sheds light on the intersections of capitalist expansion in the modern era and the correlated environmental transformations that forged a new epistemic and ecological regime in commodity frontiers during the early twentieth century.