Chinese immigration and contract labor in the late nineteenth century

Abstract

This paper considers why the Chinese migrants who came to California in the late 19th century were not indentured, and what their contractual status in the United States actually was. We argue that existing American laws prevented the effective use of a legal indenture system when Chinese laborers began to arrive in California in the 1850s, but that Chinese merchants in San Francisco developed extralegal means of operating a bound labor system. We explore the conduct of this system, with particular attention to the methods used by the merchants to enforce the repayment of the workers' debts for advances of passage fares.