Shineberg’s The People Trade is organised into three broad areas: recruiting of Pacific Islander labourers; profiles of the recruits; and workplace conditions. The book has many strengths. One is the painstaking assemblage of data from myriad sources. The reason that such a study has not been attempted earlier is that there are no systematic records available. Shineberg’s note of sources gives an indication of the ways in which she was able to collect and cross-check statistics. The book will have its critics because of the incomplete nature of the evidence, but the author has shown exceptional skill and perseverance in assembling the material. Shineberg’s computer analysis of 6,000 of the individual records provides a strong degree of accuracy in her findings. By comparison, it is a far larger sample than used in the quantitative work done on Australia’s convicts. However, she will draw some flak from cliometricians, who would prefer her to let the statistical analysis dominate the text. My own attempts to computerise similar Pacific labour data lead me to support Shineberg’s careful approach. She makes the final decisions, not the computer, which is as it should be. No other scholar is ever likely to do a better job on the New Caledonia Pacific Island labour statistics.

Shineberg delivers a warning to labour historians for creating too simplified a depiction of the kidnapping/voluntary recruitment dichotomy, suggesting that kidnapping and illegality continued right through the nineteenth century. There is also the issue, long canvassed, that the Queensland labour trade is not necessarily typical of that in other areas of the Pacific, but because its literature dominates, it is often taken as the bench-mark. Shineberg is quite correct in her assessment, but this also brings into question her own level of acquaintance with the Queensland literature. By my rough estimate, Queensland comparisons are made on 58 per cent of the pages in the book, which should indicate a comprehensive knowledge of the literature. But, actually Shineberg has a dated knowledge of the literature and is inclined to rely on the early monographs for her comparisons. Because the book has taken so long in the writing, Shineberg has failed to keep abreast of recent work on the labour trade. This also applies to Shineberg’s wider knowledge of the Pacific labour trade. Because her comparisons are overwhelmingly with Queensland, she loses her chance to make instructive comparisons.

Shineberg’s analysis of recruiting for New Caledonia is an interesting and valuable extension of our knowledge of labour migration in the Pacific. Historians of the Pacific labour trade, such as Peter Corris, Kay Saunders and Clive Moore, have long accepted that substantial kidnapping occurred in the first ten years or so that the labour trade operated in any newly trawled group of islands. There was a moving labour frontier, beginning in the Loyalty Islands and the New Hebrides in the 1860s, moving into the Solomon Islands in the 1870s, and the islands off eastern New Guinea in the first half of the 1880s. I would like to suggest that scholars, Shineberg included, too quickly have written off the first decade in which the moving labour recruiting frontier operated in any island group as totally given over to kidnapping and illegality. While the worst cases of brutality, fraud and kidnapping occur in the 1860s and early 1870s, by this time many island groups had already been exposed to significant outside contact. This is true for the 1860s in the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) and the Loyalty Islands, which had already been exposed to traders and missionaries over some decades, and true of Bismarck and Louisiade Archipelagoes because of prior exposure to whalers, other marine traders, settlers and missionaries. It was less so in the Solomon Islands because of lack of the same exposure, although even there whalers had made substantial contacts earlier in the century.

The People Trade is in many ways an old-fashioned book. It is based on documentary sources. It deals methodically and chronologically with the basics of indenture, motives in recruiting, working conditions, health and morality, and the recruits’ place in colonial society. Commendably, it gives appropriate weight to women and children, but in this area the book also shows another weakness. Despite being very aware of the gender dynamics in Melanesian society, Shineberg never manages to enter the lives of women, or the various taboos and restrictions placed on them.

The book takes no risks, sticking closely to the documentary evidence. It is thorough and comprehensive, but is somewhat lacking in imagination. The People Trade has been researched over many years by a careful and restrained scholar. It will sit well alongside Shineberg’s earlier book, They Came for Sandalwood: a study of the sandalwood trade in the south-west Pacific, 1830-1865, published in 1967. Although the first book belongs to a different era of Pacific scholarship, it is the direct precursor of The People Trade. The thirty-two years in between indicate the continuity and dedication that have gone into The People Trade.