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Media type:
E-Article
Title:
The Teacher and His Copra: Debts, Taxes, and Resistance in Colonial Samoa
Contributor:
Linnekin, Jocelyn
imprint:
Duke University Press, 1994
Published in:Ethnohistory
Language:
English
ISSN:
0014-1801;
1527-5477
Origination:
Footnote:
Description:
<p>In colonialism's early phases foreign hegemony must be seen as problematic and in process rather than as given. This essay examines European attempts to institute exploitation in Samoa when Western domination was imperfectly established. The episode of the mission teacher and his copra debt illustrates the complex and contested entanglements between indigenous people and mutually competitive agents of capitalism. Historically, indebtedness has been one of capitalism's snares in peripheral locations, but Samoans used debts to exercise a reciprocal leverage. Their actions exemplify the unsystematic, local resistance employed by colonized peoples against foreign enterprises.</p>