Talk:Robert Towns

Coolie

This quote is an unusual one to select from a lifetime of letters, and I wonder if it is representative of his correspondance. The reference in the Australian Dictionary of Biography seems a much more rounded and comprehensive description of Towns's life. ROxBo (talk) 14:13, 17 September 2008 (UTC)

Townsvale

It needs some info on his Townsvale (not Townsville!) plantation in the Gleneagle/Veresdale area in Queensland. Kerry (talk) 13:37, 21 December 2013 (UTC)

Indentured labour, kidnapping, and slavery: what's fact and what's POV?

I think the article is going too far with calling Robert Towns a slave trader in the lede. There is no question that he imported South Sea Islanders to work on his plantations, as did others. And there is no question that South Sea Islanders were poorly paid and not well-treated and many died. But many did come voluntarily on contracts, although there may well have been misrepresentations as to what was promised in those contracts, and, yes, there were definitely allegations that some of the men were kidnapped to meet quotas.

But they were not slaves, because they were paid, they were not owned (could not be bought or sold), and they were returned to the Islands at the end of their contracts (although some chose to stay).

Nor do we have any source here that has any evidence that Robert Towns personally kidnapped anyone (unlikely as I doubt he went out on the ships) or that he requested/authorised kidnapping by his ship captains or others involved in recruiting workers (the more likely way it occurred if it did)?

The two citations [7] and [8] in the article are reliable in the sense that they are accurately reporting something, but they are reporting the allegations of descendants of those South Sea Islanders based on oral histories, and while they do make allegations of kidnapping of family members, they don't mention Towns as being involved. I don't think there is anything here that proves he was kidnapping (which is why the article previously only talked of allegations of "blackbirding" because we do have sources for the allegations). I think it is fine as per WP:NPOV to say that various authors and South Sea Islander families make these allegations of kidnapping and that the indentured labour contracts "were akin to slavery", but not to draw the conclusion he was a slave trader.

FWIW, I think some of his workers probably were kidnapped but I doubt that he was so stupid as to directly order this to occur. Queensland in the 1800s wasn't the wild west without governance or laws or moral qualms; the importation of workers was regulated and there were people in Queensland concerned about the welfare of the South Sea Islander workers and lobbied for better and fairer arrangements, oversight of their conditions, etc. Probably plantation owners like Towns offered to pay a bonus for a full ship load of contracted workers and then turn a blind eye to exactly how this was achieved. I note that the modern corporate world operates on similar principles of "plausible deniability" still. Kerry (talk) 07:14, 8 March 2018 (UTC)

I agree that "slave trader" is overstepping quite a bit. We should of course go by the sources, but unless Towns is mentioned specifically in them more general comments about the practice should go in the relevant articles rather than here. Frickeg (talk) 08:22, 8 March 2018 (UTC)