Blackbirders were men who kidnapped Pacific Islanders to work on sugar and cotton plantations in Queensland, Australia, and in Fiji. In Australia, blackbirding flourished from 1863 to 1904. Starting in the 1860’s, sugar growing in northern Queensland began to expand. At first, sugar farmers relied on convicts for cheap labor but considered them unable to work in tropical areas. Traders shipped laborers from the Solomon Islands, the New Hebrides, and New Guinea, and sold them cheaply to the farmers. Many of the traders took the laborers by force. These traders became known as blackbirders.
From 1872 to 1890, both the Queensland and the British governments passed acts aimed at controlling the recruitment, and conditions of employment, of the Pacific Island laborers. But the acts were difficult to enforce, and blackbirding continued. In 1904, the federal government prohibited the use of Pacific Island laborers and gave a bounty for sugar cut by white laborers. The British government stopped the use of Pacific Island laborers in Fiji in 1910. Fiji was a British colony at that time.
