During her lifetime, Emma Kolbe/Forsayth/Farrell (née Coe, 1850–1913), known as ‘Queen Emma of New Guinea’, was one of the most powerful private individuals and economically successful entrepreneurs in the Pacific – a woman of colour in a world dominated by men. Using the figure of ‘Queen Emma’ and her networks as a starting point, this international workshop seeks to examine practices of coerced labour and forced migration and pays special attention to gendered lives on plantations in Western Pacific (including Papua New Guina, Fiji, Samoa, Pohnpei, and Queensland) and the means to gain knowledge about these lives today. The material traces and histories of these in the Anglo-German Western Pacific and in PNG in particular at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth century will be a key focus.