Politics > CSR in Fiji

CSR in Fiji

When CSR came to Fiji in 1880, the new British colony’s economy and politics were in grave disorder.  European planters had struggled to establish plantations, relying on workers kidnapped (blackbirded) from the New Hebridean islands (Vanuatu): but Indian indentured labourers began to arrive in 1879: eventually 61,000 girmitiyas.  Cotton had failed as a staple and sugar languished for lack of capital and expertise. Armed with both, CSR swiftly became the dominant player. By 1900 it had three mills processing cane from 20,000 acres.  It employed three quarters (4,500) of Fiji’s indentured labourers and bought the cane from the planters who employed the other quarter.  CSR refined all Fiji’s raw sugar.

Only in Fiji did CSR employ farm labour directly, and working conditions were severe:

driven to the cane fields at dawn, labourers worked at least a nine-hour day in an effort to complete tasks which in law were supposed to take six hours…. Close to 10% of adult immigrants died within five years of arrival…

In brief, profits were made by “placing an underpaid Indian at the receiving end of an Australian overseer’s whip or swagger stick”. 

Competing in a global market, the General Manager must control costs.

Writing to a Fiji Mill Manager, Knox was emphatic that any business undertaking must be run on business and not philanthropic principles … it must stand on its own feet, i.e. on its profit earning capacity … the epidemic of flabby sentimentalism now raging promotes malicious and untruthful criticism but I have never yet been able to convince myself that it would be good for us to … reduce the rate of dividend declared. (Bruce Knapman, Fiji’s Economic History)

The production system changed in 1919, when the Government of India brought the indentured system to an end.  E.W. Knox - by now a major actor in the global sugar market and a pillar of the British Empire - advised Churchill (as Colonial Secretary) on measures to cope with this interruption of the labour supply. In brief, Indian families became tenant farmers, still bound to a production system controlled by CSR. The company was able to control the production, milling and refining of Fijian sugar throughout the colonial era, winding up its operations only in 1973, two years before Fiji became independent.    

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Further Reading

Sources

  • Bruce Knapman, Fiji’s Economic History 1874-1939: studies in capitalist development. Canberra, NCDS, ANU, 1987

  • For a more critical overview, Wadan Narsey, in Contemporary Pacific, Spring, 1990