Robert Louis Stevenson’s Demystification of the Pacific Copra Trade

From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, German, Australian, British, and Americans were scattered throughout Kiribati (formerly the Gilbert archipelago) as resident copra traders. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Pacific Island travels (1888–94) coincided with the height of the global copra trade. This chapter traces Stevenson’s curiosity about the region’s copra trade through one set of unpublished manuscripts (“South Seas Drafts”, Beinecke MS 808) and in a series of photographs taken on the atoll of Butaritari. By a close reading of Stevenson’s discussion of the copra trade alongside some of the family’s previously unpublished photographs, the chapter foregrounds Stevenson’s conception of the trade as part of the sprawling and globalized trade networks of the nineteenth-century Pacific.