Blackbirding

Blackbirding was the trade in indentured laborers from the Pacific Islands during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and although slavery had already been abolished throughout the British Empire, the practice frequently relied on coercion, deception and outright kidnapping to transport tens of thousands of indigenous Pacific Islanders into plantation labor, in conditions resembling the Atlantic slave trade. Those transported, known in Australia as Kanakas or South Sea Islanders, were taken from places including Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Easter Island and the Bismarck Archipelago, mainly to work sugar cane, cotton and coffee plantations in Queensland, Samoa, Fiji and Hawaii; the ships and operators that carried out this labor trafficking were themselves called blackbirders, and the practice ran from the 1840s into the 1930s in some places. Similar labor-trafficking practices also occurred outside the Pacific, including in the Western Australian pearling industry and in haciendas and guano mining operations in the Americas. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/