The interplay between minority and freedom is the very bread and butter of the colonial project. Colonialism dictates that the power is in the hands of the coloniser majority, even if sometimes that majority is numerically inferior as is evident in the slave-based economies of sugar colonies. In settler colonialism, the focus is on flooding the colonised territory with settler bodies, seizing the land, reducing, exterminating, or at least numerically minoritising, the Indigenous population, ensuring that the power will stay with the settler majority. In both scenarios, the colonised undergo, what Aimé Césaire has termed ‘chosification’: they are reduced to things to be owned, used, exploited, and consumed. In this article, I explore the concepts of ‘minority’ and ‘freedom’ within the structures of colonialism in a trans-imperial Oceanic context. I trace the movements of colonised peoples across and between the Pacific and Indian Oceans, travelling the circuitous and intertwined French and British imperial networks of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To what extent did notions of freedom and minority status shift in mobility? How can we understand these terms within the transactional trade in human labour? How transformational were ocean crossings for migrants, labourers and Indigenous people moving between islands, colonies, empires, and the metropole? I discuss these questions in relation to my past and current research on blackbirding and other free and forced horizontal labour movements and migrations that criss-cross the Francophone and Anglophone Pacific, the Indian Ocean and France.