blackbirding

noun

1. (Australia, New-Zealand, UK, uncountable)The practice of kidnapping Pacific Islanders, or kanakas, for sale as cheap labour.

   “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).”

verb

1. (form-of, gerund, participle, present)present participle and gerund of blackbird