Blackbirding
Definition, Meaning & Examples
Part of speech noun
Quick meaning: Blackbirding is a noun meaning (UK, Australia, New Zealand) The practice of kidnapping Pacific Islanders, or kanakas, for sale as cheap labour.
Meaning
(UK, Australia, New Zealand) The practice of kidnapping Pacific Islanders, or kanakas, for sale as cheap labour.
More Meanings
- present participle and gerund of blackbird
Example Sentences
Burns Philp was to incur public odium in the most notorious case in Queensland concerning blackbirding.
Douglas Oliver, in Black Islanders, tells the story of a blackbirding party which, in 1871, captured a group of eighty-five unsuspecting Bougainvilleans who had taken their twenty-man canoes to the blackbirding ship out of curiosity or a desire to trade.
Blackbirding was the euphemism given to the slave-trading that occurred in the Pacific from the mid-1800s through to the early-1900s. According to one study, blackbirding, [as] “the practice of luring Melanesians and Polynesians to toil for next to nothing was called”, involved upwards of 60,000 people between 1863 and 1904 (Horne, 2007, p. 2).
Related Words
Related dictionary entries include ouzel, merle, merl, ousel, blackbirder, birdcatching.
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Sources & Attribution
FreeDictionaryAPI.com / Wiktionary · Original source · CC BY-SA 4.0
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