MOON-HO JUNG. Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2006. Pp. x, 275. $48.95

Abstract

In this important and well-researched work, Moon-Ho Jung argues that southern sugar planters looked to Asian “coolies” to solve their labor problems after the Civil War. Early reports from the Caribbean suggested that these Asians were docile and would not press for things like American citizenship. Many planters surmised that coolies could not be worse than slaves, those “impudent” and disloyal workers who went “on strike” soon after the Civil War began, and who would need new forms of discipline and competition after emancipation. Americans ridiculed British use of Asian laborers on their newly “emancipated” colonial possessions as replacing one form of slavery with another. But were these coolies in fact slaves, or were they free migrants working as “apprentices” in the British West Indies or Cuba? There were stories of Chinese men who came freely to work, men who married white women and lived and mixed with white people; but there were also stories of kidnapping, deception, and corporal punishment swirling around “Caribbean coolieism.” After 1860, Congressional representatives from the West would insist this was slavery. In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed “An Act to Prohibit the ‘Coolie Trade,’” and Jung insists that this was “the last of America's slave trade laws, unambiguously framed as such by Republican legislators” (p. 37).