Coolies Research Articles

Centenary Paper: Living Hell: The Chinese Coolie Trade in Nineteenth-Century Cuba

Between 1847 and 1874, approximately 150,000 Chinese were brought to Cuba under termed contracts to fulfil a labour shortage on sugar cane plantations. Known as ‘coolies’, they suffered harsh conditions and were treated severely. Coolies were generally viewed as dutiful and submissive and their voices have largely been confined to the margins of literature and history. However, the nineteenth-century testimonies and illustrations of Chinese coolies denounce the savagery and cruelty of the Spanish overseers, while simultaneously revealing that coolies were not passive victims. The coolies demonstrated agency, courage and strategic resistance in the act of migrating, in their words, and rebellions. Coolie labour played a major role in reshaping Cuba’s sugar economy and its existing systems of production. In addition, the amplified presence of the Chinese in Cuba challenged existing paradigms of race and nation. Cuban society was no longer Black and white. The growing Chinese population forced a reconsideration of this traditional binary vision of society and, in the formation of a new Chinese–Cuban identity, complicated notions of what constituted cubanidad.

Racial Rage, Racial Guilt: The Uses of Anger in Asian America

ABSTRACT Asian Americans are conventionally described as “middle-man minorities,” outside of dominant racial paradigms of White and Black, adjunct to White privilege and exempt from the brunt of systemic violence directed against Black people. Historical accounts of the in-betweenness of Asian Americans trace their origins to how Asian coolie labor has served to triangulate White capital and African slavery over the course of European modernity. If this is the material history of in-betweenness, what is the psychic corollary of the middle-man thesis? Through an analysis of the Netflix dark comedy series Beef, as well as case histories of Asian American patients and students, we argue that the psychic effects of occupying a racially intermediate position implicate an unexplored terrain of racial rage and racial guilt that Asian Americans are insistently socialized to hold on behalf of others.

Indenture Beyond the ‘Coolie’ Trade: Reinitiating Chinese Indentured Migration to Cuba after the Chinese Commission Report (1874–1920)

ABSTRACT The historiography of Chinese indenture in Cuba is very clear when it comes to its periodization, establishing the start date of the trade in 1847 and the end in 1874. This periodization is based upon the arrival of the first and the last ships carrying Chinese indentured labourers. Thus, studies on the so-called ‘coolie trade’ focus on the period between these dates. What happened after the arrival of the last ship has attracted less attention. The end of the trade, after all, did not coincide with the end of indenture in Cuba, either in legal terms or in practice. By the 1880s there were still Chinese indentured labourers in Cuba who had not finished their contracts. Furthermore, after 1874 there were attempts to restore the trade in Chinese migrants: firstly, in 1877; and later, in 1919. Chinese indenture in Cuba is an excellent case study by which to problematize the meaning of ‘abolition’ and inquire on the nature of ‘indenture’. Using multilingual source material, this article suggests a continuous view of indenture in Cuba beyond the 1874 hallmark, and pinpoints the debt generated at the moment of recruitment to pay for the emigrating costs as the single most important defining mechanism of indenture.

The Brown Adventure Romance: Chander Pahar and the Management of Racial Capital

Abstract: Can the archetypal imperial adventurer—the hero of empire's interlinked fictions of discovery and conquest—be brown? This question finds expression in a genre of Bengali literature yet to receive significant scholarly attention. Rather than viewing these novels as a case of Bengal "writing back" to the British genre of the imperial romance, I read them as enquiries into the turbulent shifts of race, migration, and fractured self-fashioning in the age of decolonization. Through a closer look at Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay's Chander Pahar or The Mountain of the Moon (1937), the essay demonstrates how traces of indentureship and coolie labor as abject and elided forms of brown/ness fracture both the category of the brown expeditioner and its effect on the stereotypes of the dark continent.

Freeing Chinese Men on the María Luz: Gender and the Latin American Coolie Trade

AbstractThis essay analyzes a Japanese court’s criminal conviction of a Peruvian shipmaster for abusing Chinese contract workers and the subsequent release of all Chinese passengers except a lone girl. Using the case as a lens onto gender dynamics within the coolie trade to Latin America, I argue that overlapping patriarchal practices made Chinese contract labor overwhelming male and prioritized men in debates over freedom. The María Luz trials upheld women’s domestic sexual bondage while condemning men’s enslavement.

La migración china en República Dominicana: 1862–1961

La migración china en República Dominicana: 1862–1961

Perverse Aliens: On Chinese Indentured Labour, Sodomy, and Canadian Nation-Building

Although the socio-political histories of the Opium Wars (1839–1842 and 1856–1860), Canadian Pacific Railway, and 1885 Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration have been studied, they have not often been interconnected. This article examines these socio-political histories at the intersection of sexual and race subject-making, alongside Canadian nation-building. I investigate Chinese coolie labour, the opium trade, and sexuality by analyzing historical records from both the British and Canadian Houses of Commons. The indexing of sodomy in the 1885 Royal Commission of Chinese Immigration: Report and Evidence illustrates the simultaneous racialization and sexualization of Chinese bachelor communities. I argue that the deeming of practices and desires as perverse was used to justify the alienation and exclusion of full citizen-subjects. In this examination of these histories of racialization, abstraction of labour, and the perverse alienation of bodies in settler colonial territory, I offer the term “perverse aliens” to nuance early Chinese migration.

Coolie labour and colonial capitalism in Asia

AbstractIn the course of my academic research labour bondage after the abolition of slavery has been a recurrent theme in my writings on the colonial past and the postcolonial present. In the context of the globalizing economy, the role of capitalism as a dominant mode of production has been of pivotal importance in the perpetuation of confined labour relations. This argument does not concur with the conventional wisdom that the transition to capitalism was the start of an emancipatory trend for labour. Expressed in the liberation from extra‐economic coercion, the trope of a double freedom contends that the working poor although dispossessed from means of production were at least free now to sell their labour power. The gradual reversal taking place is addressed in what became known as the social question, which led to an improvement in the terms of employment and social security. This article is concerned with aspects of sourcing coolies wide and far and confined labour relations in Asia from colonialism until today. It traces the radically different trajectories of labour and welfare in the Global North and South and argues that cooliehood is directly linked to capitalism and its globalization.

Politics of Life and Labor: French Colonialism in China and Chinese Coolie Labor During the Construction of the Yunnan–Indochina Railway, 1898–1910

AbstractThe Yunnan–Indochina railway, built by France across the China–Vietnam border between 1898–1910, never realized the expansionist dreams of French colonialists in Indochina and therefore has been studied as a failure of French imperialism. Taking a labor perspective, this article examines the labor conflicts along the Yunnan railway against the backdrop of the emergence of a global labor market where different colonial powers competed for cheap Chinese labor after the emancipation of black slaves. At the time of the railway's construction, access to cheap labor was so central to colonial competition that the metropolitan, colonial, and business agents of the French empire found themselves in a dire conflict over labor shortages in Yunnan. To the extent that France failed to restrain the railway company agents from abusing the labor force, other European colonial powers used worker misery to dispute French claims to conducting a “civilizing mission.” At the same time, both Qing imperial officials and Chinese nationalists advanced their arguments for national sovereignty in the name of protecting their national subjects, i.e., the railway workers. As a result, French recruiters had to reconsider the terms of Chinese coolie employment, increase wages, improve worker contracts, and invest in welfare systems. In sum, worker resistance during the construction of the Yunnan railway not only delayed the railway's completion and diminished French colonial prestige in the region but also empowered the workers, giving them leverage to increase the value of their labor in a market extending beyond Chinese national borders.

Chinese contract labor, the corporeal rift, and ecological imperialism in Peru’s nineteenth-century guano boom

ABSTRACT Building on the theory of ecological imperialism in the context of the Peruvian guano boom, this analysis explores the metabolic rift in the human relation to external nature and the corresponding corporeal rift in the destruction of human bodily existence. Guano capitalists robbed Peru of the manure deposited by seabirds, while British imperialism introduced a system of racialized expropriation (the ‘coolie trade'), referred to by Karl Marx as ‘worse than slavery.’ Previous failures to understand this historical tragedy were due to the legal forms adopted, which categorized as semi-free labor what was in fact the social murder of the workers.

‘Parity with all nations’: The ‘coolie’ trade and the quest for recognition by China and Japan

AbstractThis article explores the quest for sovereign equality by China and Japan as it unfolded in a specific historical moment, the third quarter of the nineteenth century. It does so by focusing on the debate around the ‘coolie trade’, i.e., the traffic of Chinese indentured labourers, which offered an opportunity for non-Western countries such as China and Japan to position themselves with respect to Western conceptions of ‘modernity’ or ‘civilization’ and thereby advance their quest for ‘parity with all nations’. Through a study of the Maria Luz case, decided in the early 1870s by Czar Alexander II and drafted by de Martens, the article sheds light on the different approaches of Japan and China with respect to international law at this critical historical juncture. Specifically, it shows that, although the coolie trade mostly affected China, it was Japan who first managed to reap a parity dividend by firmly condemning the practice, whereas China’s action was steered by the circumstances. Eventually, however, China’s growing interest in Chinese populations abroad paved the way for the establishment of its first permanent diplomatic representations overseas. For both countries, the events encapsulated by the Maria Luz case unveil an important, yet overlooked, moment in their quest for parity with all nations and, more generally, in their engagement with international law.

The Coolie Trade, 1838–1916: The Migration of Indentured Labor from India and China

The Coolie Trade, 1838–1916: The Migration of Indentured Labor from India and China

Profitable partnerships: The Chinese business elite and Dutch lawyers in the making of Semarang

This article examines the collaboration between the law firm of C.W. Baron van Heeckeren from Semarang and the Oei Tiong Ham Concern (OTHC). From the 1880s this Dutch law firm became the centre of a close-knit group of Dutch lawyer-entrepreneurs who through interlocking business directorships developed important sectors of the Javanese economy and the city of Semarang. In doing so Van Heeckeren and his associates teamed up with the Chinese business elite of the port-city. In particular they worked with the foremost Overseas Chinese capitalist, Major Oei Tiong Ham, developing profitable partnerships. The Dutch lawyers acted not only as his legal advisors, but developed his sugar empire as directors-shareholders, held major stakes in his shipping business and coolie trade, and profited from his opium trade. They moreover helped Oei Tiong Ham to acquire real estate and enterprises formerly belonging to powerful Chinese opium farmers and collaborated with him in developing infrastructural and housing projects. This article provides new and revealing details about how the business world of colonial Java worked during the early phase of Dutch economic imperialism and how the Chinese business elite seized the opportunities provided by the Dutch colonial state to advance their business interests.

The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery: The Chinese Worker and the Minstrel Form by Caroline H. Yang

Reviewed by: The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery: The Chinese Worker and the Minstrel Form by Caroline H. Yang Klara Loc-Ling Boger (bio) The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery: The Chinese Worker and the Minstrel Form, by Caroline H. Yang. Stanford University Press, 2020. Ix + 280 pp. $28.00 paper. ISBN 9781503612051. Explicitly evoking Saidiya Hartman's articulation of "the afterlives of slavery," Caroline H. Yang's The Peculiar Afterlife of Slavery: The Chinese Worker and the Minstrel Form compellingly argues that one such afterlife, the minstrel form, informed representations of Chinese "coolie" labor in late nineteenth and early twentieth century American literature. Yang emphasizes minstrelsy's origins in American chattel slavery and its antiblack logics that resulted in jovial depictions of enslaved Black people as "naturally" subservient to whites. Minstrelsy's specifically proslavery antiblackness affirmed whiteness as the only legitimate claim to personhood and citizenship even after Emancipation, and as the nation expanded westward, this sense of white national identity had to contend with other subordinated racialized labors. Coolie labor, at once seen as a replacement for slave labor and as a challenge to the standard of "free" American labor, perpetuated white anxieties about who can claim "legitimate" labor and citizenship. Using Robin Bernstein's definition of repertoire as a set of practices and gestures that inform everyday life, Yang asserts that blackface minstrelsy was one such repertoire that formed a "state of vision, of feeling, and of consciousness" in nineteenth century America (37). Yang's turn to the minstrel form's manifestation in literature after Emancipation is significant as she demonstrates the ways pervasive and quotidian antiblackness set the terms of representation for the Chinese "coolie" laborer. Literary minstrelsy during Reconstruction was a venue for the forging of a national cultural identity that upheld white supremacist definitions of personhood and political enfranchisement, "recalibrating" antiblack racism through the coolie figure (19). "Coolie" minstrelsy continued proslavery logics through representations of nonwhite figures as subhuman as it attended to anxieties about racialized labor that was nonwhite yet also not enslaved. In "Part I: 'Earliest Pioneers' of White Literature of the West During Reconstruction," Yang explores work by white writers, namely Bret Harte, Mark Twain, and Ambrose Bierce, who, in spite of their "progressive" politics, still perpetuated racist depictions of Chinese laborers by deploying popular minstrel tropes and gestures. Thus, these writers intertwined the antiblack logics of slavery with US imperialism. These writers began their literary careers in California and were central in crafting or "pioneering" the space of the West as an American national space. For example, Yang argues that Harte's best-selling 1870 poem "Plain Language from Truthful James," later renamed "Heathen Chinee," refigures Topsy from Uncle Tom's Cabin, a character that employs minstrel gestures, into the language and gestures of the Chinese laborer Ah Sin. Twain's early [End Page 510] representations of the Chinese, such as in the play Ah Sin (1877) co-written with Harte, demonstrates his appreciation for minstrel shows; in many of his early writings that feature Chinese people, Twain directly borrows from minstrelsy and employs a mixture of the stock characters the "interlocutor," a straight man character, and "end men," two joke-telling characters nicknamed Tambo and Bones. Bierce's representation of the Chinese in his early short story "The Haunted Valley" (1871) at first glance seems to be most critical of minstrelsy, yet ultimately fails to point to the form's origins in slavery. The westward extension of a minstrelsy cognizant of Chinese labor was a crucial mechanism that made the "external" space of the frontier internal to the nation. Yang's readings of these texts importantly underscore slavery, colonization, and imperialism's intertwined relationship. In "Part II: 'Pioneers' of Asian American and African American Literatures at the Turn of the Twentieth Century," Yang examines how "Eurasian" writer Sui Sin Far and African American writer Charles Chesnutt offer critiques of minstrelsy. Whereas the aforementioned white writers were "pioneers" of the colonial space of the West during Reconstruction, Far and Chesnutt wrote after Reconstruction and can be seen as "pioneers" of their respective minority American literary traditions. Still, Yang argues, Far fails in her critique to acknowledge minstrelsy's roots in slavery, such...

States and human immobilization: bridging the conceptual separation of slavery, immigration controls, and mass incarceration

ABSTRACT Immigration controls and incarceration both comprise state efforts to limit people’s freedom of movement. Usually analyzed separately, both are part of the legacy of slavery. In this paper, I examine the British Empire’s first implementation of immigration controls against ‘coolie labour’ from its colony of British India following the abolition of slavery in 1835. I also examine the implementation of methods of control and discipline enacted against formerly enslaved people in the United States following its abolition of slavery in 1865. Just ten years after abolition, the U.S. also passed its first immigration controls, the 1875 Page Act. I argue that both immigration controls and mass incarceration were state methods aimed at weakening people’s position in the capitalist labour market and, more generally, to weaken people’s ability to realize social justice. Together, immigration and carceral controls created racialized and gendered categories of people denied access to the mythical institutions of liberal democracy: liberty, fellowship, and equality. Both also strengthened nationalism(s) through the production of a U.S. ‘nation’ secured against ‘criminals’ and ‘foreigners.’ By making connections between immigration controls and mass incarceration, I argue, we can more clearly recognize that the success of prison abolition and No Borders movements are, together, integral parts of the unfinished project to realize liberty.

A Philippine ‘coolie trade’: Trade and exploitation of Chinese labour in Spanish colonial Philippines, 1850–98

Chinese immigration to the Philippines has traditionally been studied in relation to commercial activities. But between 1850 and 1898, there was an unparalleled influx of Chinese labourers, which raised the number of Chinese residents to 100,000. This influx was fuelled by the abundant profits obtained by Chinese brokers and foremen, Spanish institutions and authorities in Manila, consuls in China, and Spanish and British ship captains, all of whom extracted excessive fees and taxes from the labourers. The trade in and the exploitation of Chinese labourers in the Philippines have yet to be thoroughly researched. This article shows that the import and abuse of Chinese labourers in and to the Philippines continued throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, and that, despite some anti-Chinese Spanish colonial rhetoric, a wide range of actors and institutions, both in China and in the Philippines, took advantage of this unprecedented inflow of immigrants.

Exploiting Chinese Labour Emigration in Treaty Ports: The Role of Spanish Consulates in the “Coolie Trade”

AbstractAuthors writing about the history of the “coolie trade” in Cuba have generally focused on the multinational effort to halt the trafficking of Chinese workers. Little has been written about either the role of consuls as middlemen or of Spanish participation in the traffic in treaty ports. Yet, several sources indicate that many officials at Spanish consulates in coastal China were intensely involved in the shipment of Chinese emigrants to Cuba and other coolie trade destinations, and were also at the centre of international scandals. These consular officers frequently used their authority to obtain a monopoly over the trade. In this article, I argue that the coolie trade was the main objective of Spain's consular deployment in China, and that the involvement of these consular officials was crucial in developing an abusive migratory system and sustaining the mistreatment of Chinese immigrant workers throughout the second half of the nineteenth century.

Conjure Women and Coolie Women

Conjure Women and Coolie Women

19세기 중반 중국의 쿨리무역(苦力貿易)

19세기 중반 중국의 쿨리무역(苦力貿易)

New Geographies of China and Latin America Relations: Introduction to the Special Issue

New Geographies of China and Latin America Relations:Introduction to the Special Issue Julie Michelle Klinger and Tom Narins The geographic relations between China and Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) have deepened and diversified in the twenty-first century, coinciding with the ebb and flow of the "pink tide" in Latin America, massive Chinese economic growth, and a recalcitrant United States. Accordingly, grounded, transnational, and ethnographically driven research on this relationship has emerged in recent years, with contributions coming from across the social sciences (Lau-sent-Herrera, 2013; Kong & Gallagher, 2016; Oliveira, 2016; Klinger, 2017). This special issue of the Journal of Latin American Geography presents a collection of articles that broaden and deepen the scope of geographic literature on China and Latin America in light of contemporary change in both regions. We note that Latin America is a cultural and geographic construct that includes territories, people, and politics throughout the Americas, and as such the entire hemisphere is a valid site of inquiry for China–Latin America relations. Latin America is not simply a neutral site that is impacted by China, nor China by Latin America; rather, the articles in this issue question the forms of agency exercised by multiple actors constituting China-LAC/LAC-China relations in diverse locations and sectors. We further note that there is no single monolithic "China" acting across global space; rather, there are specific actors with distinct sets of interests, even within the same sector and site. In the present global political juncture where social and environmental justice, international cooperation, government transparency, corporate accountability norms, and human rights are under siege, it is especially important for scholars to advance understandings of the dynamic and multiscalar processes that shape the future of Latin America in broader regional and global perspectives, including in relation to China. Toward that end, the articles in this issue explore specific dimensions of the geographies of China-LAC relations, delving into themes as diverse as migration and ethnic politics, local and transnational food justice movements, infrastructure construction, the seafood trade, defense partnerships, and outer [End Page 6] space cooperation. These investigations use an array of methodological approaches to advance grounded empirical work on actually occurring spatial practices. In this introduction to the special issue, we briefly review some major trends in the literature on research of the geography of LAC-China, discuss contemporary developments, and put forth some questions for further inquiry. approaches to the geography of china-lac relations While the literature on LAC-China relations has grown prodigiously over the past fifteen years, work that focuses on the spatial aspects of this relationship has grown more slowly. This is in part due to the methodological commitments of grounded empirical research, which often involve extensive ethnographic fieldwork, sometimes in multiple languages and countries. In the twentieth century, the most robust research on the spatiality of LAC-China relations occurred in the areas of historical and diaspora studies (Chang-Rodriguez, 1958; Farley, 1968; Conrad, 1975). A strong tradition of historical, ethnographic, oral history, and multilingual archival research has since emerged, tracing the movement of Chinese people to and from the Americas over the past three centuries (Hsu, 2000; Quiros, 2016; Seijas, 2016), revealing transnational relations that decenter overwhelmingly Euro-American and white definitions of settlement and belonging in the western hemisphere (Siu, 2007; McKeown, 2010; López, 2013; Young, 2014). This is part of a larger project to recenter Latin America in world history (Benton, 2004; Besse, 2004; Vaughan & Weinstein, 2004; Sebastiani, 2012). Deploying post-colonial and critical race theory, many of these histories examine how the multiple pathways through which people from China came to the Americas were crucial to the formation of race, national identity, and labor relations in the Americas (Jung, 2006; Roediger & Esch, 2012; DeLugan, 2016; González, 2017). Histories of the introduction of coolie labor to the cane fields, gold mines, and railroads of the Americas lend considerable empirical and theoretical richness to the important Anglophone histories of "the Chinese" in "America" (that is, the United States) (Lee, 2003; Jung, 2008; Meagher, 2008; Zhou, 2009). The persistent official categorization of people of Chinese descent as "other" in much of Latin America erases both the...