Coolies Research Articles

Editor's Note

Editor's Note Mari Yoshihara, Editor This issue begins with Kandice Chuh's presidential address delivered at the ASA annual meeting in Chicago in November 2017. In the face of a wide range of attacks on academic freedom nationally and globally, Chuh asks us to deliberate responses to the current scene, not by defending academic freedom but first by tracing the longue durée of the principle originating in professionalization of the academy with its underpinning liberal ideology and US nationalism. She further reminds us of the conceptions of the autonomous rights-bearing citizen that shape the understanding of academic freedom, which has then been deployed against the interrogation of racism and settler colonialism in the name of civility. She calls on us, as an association, to unlearn the inherited ways of knowing and being and to practice the year's conference theme, "a pedagogy of dissent": "an organized approach to un/learning grounded in the world and founded in generosity and compassion, understood to be essential to social transformation." In response, Soo Ah Kwon reflects on the ways in which our own professional labor in universities is often implicated in the logic of liberal academic freedom and its neoliberal products—for instance, in our advocacy for institutional diversity that is devoid of political and structural inquiry into inequality and injustice. She reminds us of the need for a relentless critique of our profession, its governing logic, and our relationship to universities as our workplace. Jodi Melamed uses Chuh's address to situate US higher education in the context of the proliferation of rights-based forms of racial and colonial capitalist violence in the name of the common good. Discussing how the ASA itself has been a very site of such contestations, she asks us to contemplate the kinds and forms of "thick relationality" that would form pedagogies of collective action in our own association. Four essays address various modes of temporalities and spatialities in the way the world is captured by artists, writers, and critics. Frances Tran's elegant essay, "Time Traveling with Care: On Female Coolies and Archival Speculations," approaches the history of the coolie trade and the figure of the female coolie using the science fiction trope of time travel, proposing an affective and aesthetic practice with the archive that does not aim to reproduce mastery or establish subjects as knowable entities. In "Appraisal Narratives: Reading Race on the Midcentury Block," Adrienne Brown problematizes another set of archives—narratives of residential segregation in literary fiction, forms, manuals, maps, and urban reportage—to illustrate how idioms of perception, value, and taste undergirding home ownership and neighborhood value in the United [End Page vii] States have been organized by race. Brandon Webb's "Laughter Louder Than Bombs? Apocalyptic Graphic Satire in Cold War Cartooning, 1946–1959" examines the left-liberal divide in the works of the nation's leading syndicated cartoonists, Herbert Block and Jules Feiffer, to argue that satirizing the contradictions of the nuclear era meant questioning the basic assumptions of the Cold War rivalry and breaking from the consensus framework. Simon Willmetts's "Digital Dystopia: Surveillance, Autonomy, and Social Justice in Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story" analyzes the question of autonomy in Shteyngart's novel to argue for personhood presented in the dystopian genre that is socially embedded and politically engaged, and a necessary but insufficient precondition for the resistance and refusal of digital mass surveillance. The issue carries four book reviews on topics that are all the more relevant in our times. Joseph Stuart reviews five books on racial formation and the civil rights movement. Rebecca Hill discusses works on the history of political culture and the shaping of public opinion and discourse. The three books reviewed by Benjamin Medeiros take up the political and cultural battles over free speech on college campuses. Christopher Perreira discusses three books that deal with the cultures and logics of the carceral state and settler colonialism. In the Event Review, Doug Ishii discusses the exhibit on the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II at Alphawood Gallery in Chicago. The social impact game Survivance—which takes its name from Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor's term that...

Edlie L. Wong. Racial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship.

In Racial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship, Edlie L. Wong seeks to bring both the Chinese and the West into the narrative of Reconstruction, an era long dominated by examples of racial tensions, discrimination, and violence directed toward African Americans in the South. Although Wong is not the first scholar to argue for a more expansive portrayal of this era, underutilized sources and interdisciplinary methodology make Racial Reconstruction an important addition to the existing literature. Chinese coolie labor in Cuba and Chinese settlement and subsequent calls for Chinese exclusion from white West Coast residents and politicians are not merely additions to the unfolding of Reconstruction, but crucial components of a national story of coming to terms with free labor and shifting notions of race and citizenship. Wong’s focus on the “dialectical configuration of black inclusion/Chinese exclusion” (seeking to bring newly freed African Americans into the fold of political, social, and cultural life in the U.S. while simultaneously excluding Chinese from the same institutions) convincingly “link[s] together immigration and citizenship struggles in the long shadow of slavery, abolition, and Reconstruction” (3, 4), challenging historians to think broadly in terms of sources and subjects when writing on and teaching about Reconstruction.

The Crowns of Stuzo Clothing

The Crowns of Stuzo Clothing

Alien Nation: Chinese Migration in the Americas from the Coolie Era through World War II

Elliott Young’s Alien Nation looks at two simultaneous processes fundamental to the history of Chinese immigration to the Americas. National governments throughout the Americas considered the Chinese as inassimilable and undesirable outsiders. At the same time, Chinese migrants established networks and cooperated across borders to evade migration controls and gain entry into the Americas.Relying on archival and published primary sources from seven countries in North America and Europe, Young’s work builds on and complements national-level histories of Chinese immigrants in Canada, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, and the United States. The book’s hemispheric and global scope allows Young to track common patterns in Chinese migration to the Americas. While geographically and chronologically expansive, Young’s work does not lose sight of the stories of individual migrants. Throughout the book, Young privileges the agency of migrants who may be viewed as victims, whether as coerced coolies who led mutinies in protest of their mistreatment, or as undocumented migrants who used fraudulent family connections and papers to enter the United States. The attention to serial migration is particularly welcome.Young’s book is divided into three parts. Part 1, “Coolies and Contracts, 1847–1874,” focuses on the era before Chinese exclusion and, concurring with the work of Moon-Ho Jung, blurs the distinction between coolie and free-labor migration regimes, including the credit-ticket system that facilitated Chinese migration to the United States and Canada. Some Chinese undoubtedly were coerced or tricked into participating in the coolie trade, but Young argues that many Chinese signed contracts of their own free will and rebelled against ill treatment. At the same time, “free” laborers, such as the Chinese who began to migrate to Mexico during the late nineteenth century, could endure abuses similar to the horrors of the coolie trade. The word coolie, which refers to “low-status workers, usually from China and India” (xv), was sometimes used to describe both free and unfree forms of labor and was deployed to marginalize Chinese migration as undesirable.Part 2, “Clandestine Crossings and the Production of Illegal Aliens, 1882–1900,” is a transnational history of the early years of Chinese Exclusion. After the enactment of the Chinese Exclusion Act, the US government worried about Chinese immigration via Mexico and Canada. It pressured both to similarly bar the Chinese, while a growing immigration bureaucracy helped shift the image of the Chinese from “the coolie of the mid-nineteenth century” to “the illegal alien of the late nineteenth century” (130). Chinese managed to evade immigration inspectors and create smuggling networks during the Exclusion era that brought Chinese from Mexico, Canada, and the Caribbean in large numbers, but “at great expense and danger” (153).Part 3, “Competing Revolutionary Nationalisms, 1900–1940,” looks at political developments in China and the Americas that had an outsized influence on Chinese migrants. Young argues that revolutionary fervor along with the weakness of the Mexican state created the conditions for anti-Chinese violence and the Mexican expulsion of Chinese during the 1930s. Chapter 7 examines Chinese political and mutual aid networks and explores differences among Chinese associations as a way to highlight the point that Chinese migrants thought and acted differently from one another. While outside observers used examples of violence between Chinese organizations to characterize the Chinese as criminal, these networks were crucial for Chinese arrival and adaptation to the Americas.Young’s book raises tantalizing questions for further research. Were Chinese networks divided along hometown, class, and gender lines? Moreover, how did anti-Chinese ideology spread across the Americas? While these questions might fall outside the scope of Young’s work, they will be useful for future scholars to understand Chinese immigration on a global scale.This well-written and accessible book is a shining example of the promise of transnational history to advance contemporary scholarship. It should find its place on reading lists on Latin American and Asian American history as well as borderlands studies.

Hokkien Merchants and the Kian Teik Tong: Economic and Political Influence in Nineteenth- Century Penang and Its Region

This article explores nineteenth-century Penang’s Hokkkien merchants and their secret society or hui —the Kian Teik Tong (Jiande Tang)—which had a variety of roles and an extensive network. It contextualizes the merchants’ secret society as a transnational socioeconomic and political organization rather than as an overseas Chinese criminal group in the wider Penang area. By recovering Kian Teik Tong and its network, it can be shown how these merchants secured and mobilized labour, capital, and allies in a way that cut across linguistic, ethnic, class and state boundaries in order to establish control of coolies and the lucrative opium, tin, and rice businesses, in order to exert political influence in the colonial and indigenous milieus of the nineteenth-century Penang region. They established a social contract through their Kian Teik Tong relief activities and initiation rituals, and thus were able to recruit thousands of members who were mainly labourers. With such a substantial social force, the merchants launched organized violence against their rivals to attain dominance in opium revenue farming and tin mining businesses in Penang, Krabi, and Perak. The widespread and strategic location of the Kian Teik Tong in Burma also enabled the same merchants to monopolize the Penang-Burma rice trade. The versatility of the Kian Teik Tong’s functions allowed them to operate as an alternative political order vis-a-vis the colonial and indigenous powers. This arrangement allowed the Hokkien merchants to gain significant political clout in confronting the Siamese and Dutch authorities.

Mark Twain in China by Selina Lai-Henderson

Reviewed by: Mark Twain in China by Selina Lai-Henderson Hongmei Sun Selina Lai-Henderson. Mark Twain in China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015. 164 pp. $45.00 (cloth). The title of this book might be misleading, but not necessarily in an unwelcome way. If you expect this book to be about the reception of the work of Mark Twain (1835–1910) by the general public in China, you are getting more than that. In fact, a larger section of the book (the first three chapters) is about Twain’s changing political opinion about China and American imperialism. After a thorough review of how Twain’s view of China and Chinese immigrants was transformed, the final two chapters focus on the reception of Mark Twain’s work in China, including Taiwan and Hong Kong. Thus, Selina Lai-Henderson provides a broad overview of Mark Twain as an American writer on the international stage, following recent publications such as Tsuyoshi Ishihara’s Mark Twain in Japan: The Cultural Reception of an American Icon (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), Susan K. Harris’s God’s Arbiters: Americans and the Philippines, 1898–1902 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), and Hsuan L. Hsu’s Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain’s Asia and Comparative Racialization (New York: New York University Press, 2015). The three chapters delineating Twain’s transformed view of the Chinese and the United States as an empire draw on historical records, other historical studies of Twain, and short analyses of Twain’s political commentaries. Lai-Henderson describes the change in Twain’s views by noting that, despite growing up in a “pre–Civil War, slave-holding town imbued with conservatism and white supremacist ideas, Twain had come a long way by the time he denounced American imperial missions abroad” (12). Chapter one is devoted to Twain’s adventures in the American West in the 1860s and his change of opinion toward the Chinese in America at this stage of his life. When he worked as a journalist in New York, shortly after he had left his home in Hannibal, Missouri, he described the Chinese as “human vermin.” His adventures in the American West, especially his experience in San Francisco during the time of a huge influx of Chinese labor, allowed him to grow into someone who showed sympathy to the Chinese, as indicated in writings such as his “Chinese Slaves” (1864), “China at the Fair” (1864), and “Our Active Police” (1865). Returning to the eastern United States, Twain continued to write against racism and social injustice to the Chinese in America. Lai-Henderson includes a discussion of the play Ah Sin (1877) in this chapter and reinterprets the image of Ah Sin, whom many other Twain scholars see as problematic and stereotypical, as a character who actually subverts racist stereotypes. Chapter two recounts Twain’s two voyages to the Sandwich Islands (Hawaiian Islands) in 1866 and 1895 and compares his attitudes on each trip toward Chinese coolie labor. Twain’s first visits occurred when the coolie trade was rapidly growing, and Twain’s description of it indicates that he was “more concerned about coolie trade being beneficial to American business and the extension of America’s empire across the Pacific” than about the Chinese, although sympathy can be detected (37). Twain’s practical attitude toward justifying the coolie trade goes along with his support of Chinese rights. His friendship with Anson Burlingame (1820–1870) was a positive influence on his support for Chinese rights in America. Twain penned “The Treaty with China: Its Provisions Explained” (1868) in support of the Burlingame Treaty, wherein he defended the rights of Chinese [End Page E-9] immigrant workers to vote and to acquire citizenship in the United States. By the time of Twain’s second trip to the Sandwich Islands, he had become increasingly disillusioned with European and American colonialism, and “it was now the Anglo-Saxon crowd that he came to denigrate as the real ‘human vermin’ for their claims to moral superiority” (44). Lai-Henderson points out that Twain’s travelogue Following the Equator (1897) proves that, although he had not addressed the “Chinese question” since Ah Sin...

What Is the “Coolie Question”?

What Is the “Coolie Question”?

The Coolie Labour Crisis in Colonial Queensland

The question of “coolie labour” was of great importance in colonial Australia. Like the debates and conflicts over Chinese immigration and Pacific Islander labour, the outcome helped shape dominant national strategies around labour, immigration and nationalism, summed up in the idea of a White Australia. Unlike the issue of Chinese immigration, the issue of importing indentured Indian “coolie” labour drove major capitalist interests into a prolonged and bitter conflict with each other. Sugar planters in Queensland demanded the government facilitate the large-scale recruitment of indentured labourers from British India, and liberal obstruction of this led the planters and their allies to campaign for separation from Queensland. This article describes this conflict, the divisions and rival perspectives within the ruling class that shaped it and the reasons that almost the entire southern establishment, Conservative as well as Liberal, galvanised against the planters. It outlines the role played by British anti-slavery thought, and the belief that such a plantation colony in the north would develop a radically different social and political structure, one that was a threat to the free-labour economy.

Asian Indentured Labor in the Age of African American Emancipation

AbstractThis article examines transnational connections between African American emancipation in the United States and Chinese and Indian indenture within the British Empire. In an era of social upheaval and capitalist crisis, planters and colonial officials envisioned coolies as a source of uninterrupted plantation labor. This vision was often bound to the conditions of African American emancipation. In British Honduras, colonial officials sought to bring emancipated African Americans to the colony as labor for sugar plantations. When this project failed, interest turned toward indentured Chinese labor managed by white planters from the U.S. South. In India’s North-Western Provinces, the outbreak of famine came to be seen as a “kindred distress” to the crisis in Lancashire’s textile industry. Unemployed English factory workers were seen as suffering from famine due to the scarcity of slave-produced cotton, just as colonial subjects suffered from scarcity of food. While some weavers in the North-Western Provinces were taken into the coolie trade, the emigration of unemployed Lancashire weavers was looked to as a possible alternative to indenture. Drawing upon archives in Australia, Belize, Britain, India, and the United States, this article explores connections between seemingly disparate histories. By focusing upon their interrelation, this article locates the formation of crisis not in raw materials, but rather within a transnational struggle over racialized labor exploitation, or what W.E.B. Du Bois called the “dark and vast sea of human labor.”

Trouble on the Rand: The Chinese Question in South Africa and the Apogee of White Settlerism

The importation of more than 60,000 Chinese laborers to work in the Witwatersrand gold mines in South Africa between 1904 and 1910 remains an obscure episode in the history of Asian indentured labor in European colonies. Yet the experience of the coolies on the Rand reverberated throughout the Anglo-American world and had lasting consequences for global politics of race and labor. At one level, the Chinese laborers themselves resisted their conditions of work to such a degree that the program became untenable and was canceled after a few years. Not only did the South African project fail: Its failure signaled more broadly that at the turn of the twentieth century it had become increasingly difficult to impose upon Chinese workers the coercive and violent exploitation that had marked the global coolie trade in the era of slave emancipation. At another level, the Chinese labor program on the Rand provoked a political crisis in the Transvaal and in metropolitan Britain over the “Chinese Question”—that is, whether Chinese, indentured or free, should be altogether excluded from the settler colonies. Following the passage of laws limiting or excluding Chinese immigration to the United States (1882), Canada (1885), New Zealand (1881), and Australia (1901), Transvaal Colony and then the Union of South Africa, formed in 1910, likewise barred all Chinese from immigration—making Chinese and Asian exclusion, along with white rule, native dispossession, and racial segregation the defining features of the Anglo-American settlerism.

Chinese abolitionism: the Chinese Educational Mission in Connecticut, Cuba, and Peru

AbstractThis article explores a little known facet of transnational opposition to forced labour through the earliest case of ‘Chinese abolitionism’. It analyses the transnational formation of the first Sino-American actor network in the United States and its deployment in the 1874 investigations of coolie conditions in the forced labour regimes of Cuba and Peru. At the core of this actor network was the Chinese Educational Mission and its milieu of sociability, which served as a crucible of transnational cooperation between the first Chinese America experts and their US supporters. The flows of information, cosmopolitan ideas, and personnel across this network led to an unprecedented reinterpretation of the global coolie trade as a key concern in Qing foreign relations and a serious international problem that paralleled the problem of slavery. Two Qing interventions harnessed the actor network’s social capital, framing coolie abuse as an international atrocity, accelerating the abolition of the coolie trade, and signalling the need for a Chinese Foreign Service in Western countries for the protection of Chinese overseas.

Reimagining Coolie Trajectories: The Triumphant Return as Political Statement in Late Qing “Coolie Fiction”

AbstractThe trade in indentured Chinese labor (the “coolie trade”) to the Americas was an exploitative labor‐recruitment regime that resulted in the transportation of over 300,000 Chinese men to various work sites in the mid‐to‐late 19th century. As Chinese impacted either directly or indirectly by the trade attempted to process and comprehend the multiple violences they were witnessing and experiencing, there emerged what I have previously called “conceptual vocabularies” related to the trade – new terminologies, worldviews, and sense of geopolitical/racial position – as evidenced in contemporary media and official reportage. The following discussion will identify how the traumatic translocation of coolie laborers, having already given rise to these vocabularies, could go on in later years to inspire a small burst of “coolie fiction.” With origins in Shanghai's Anti‐American Boycott of 1905, two such pieces of fiction —Bitter Society (1905) and Golden World (1907) (Ku shehui/Huangjin shijie 1985)— make use not just of the powerful latent vocabularies of the historic coolie trade but use the vari‐directional travels of the coolie protagonists as spatial metaphors for the characters' awakening activist subjectivity. The outward journey under the oppressive management of foreign recruiters symbolized China's loss of autonomy and humiliating descent into semicoloniality; while the triumphant depiction of erstwhile laborers returning from abroad to lead activist efforts as depicted in each novel can be read as a plea to readers to stand together and reclaim whatever power they could – whether from Euro‐American colonizers or from the “corrupt” Manchu ruling apparatus – in order to effect China's own “return” from its perilous state of semicoloniality. In making use of the coolie trade vocabularies and the coolie trajectories specifically, the novels simultaneously nod to a shared sense of past victimization and to the potential that such powerful public memory has to inspire social or political change.

Disrupting the National Frame: A Postcolonial, Diasporic (Re)Reading of SKY Lee's Disappearing Moon Café and Denise Chong's The Concubine's Children

SINCE ITS EMERGENCE IN THE 1980s AND 1890s, Canadian Studies has gained recognition as a field of inquiry that could mount a wide-ranging and radical critique of mainstream Canadian history, society, and culture. Originally inspired by rights-based movements of 1960s and 1970s, Canadian Studies grew out of community level activism against race and class oppression (Lai 1). Its principal modality has been to construct a collective self, or Canadian identity, through which to challenge representation of Asians as perpetual outsiders or aliens and to rewrite existing Canadian history to acknowledge such racist policies as Chinese Exclusion Act, Japanese Canadian Internment, and Komagata Maru Incident (Chao 18). In this way, field has historically unfolded within a nationalist framework, locating nation-state as primary interlocutor of Asian/alien body in Canada and taking up a kind of (Lai 5). Nonetheless, as field increasingly becomes drawn into academy, critics have noted some possible limitations of this framework. One such limitation is that focus on domestic identity politics, and promotion of citizenship and national belonging as political goals, runs risk of reinforcing a reductive pluralism which cannot shake up systemic historical conditions and ... ideologies of normativity that have produced racialized subjects and minoritized cultures (Kamboureli 64). In exploring ways to expand on Canadian national frame, Lily Cho has posited that Canadian Studies could be situated more clearly within a postcolonial, paradigm. Such a paradigm, she contends, could generate insights into how construction of Asian-ness in Canada is deeply connected to Asian-ness elsewhere (188). Indeed, Cho points out that there is a need to think about formation of Canadian through imperialism and and to see Canadian history within a wider, global context of capital and labour migration (188). Focusing specifically on Chinese Canadian communities, Cho illustrates how a diasporic can highlight links between Chinese migration and British imperialism (186). That is, a perspective can consider how early Chinese immigrants to Canada came from South China, where Opium Wars had disrupted local economy [and] provid[ed] much of push for emigration (Stanley 56). Furthermore, it can stress how many of these immigrants were indentured workers, imported via coolie trade which burgeoned in British Hong Kong after Atlantic slave trade went into decline (Peter Li 20). Importantly, then, a postcolonial, paradigm can productively complicate history of Canadians by acknowledging that this history is not only shaped in Canadian context; rather, it is part of a larger history of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism. If Cho's arguments gesture to benefits of a global, historical, and comparative framework, Larissa Lai's book, Slanting I, Imagining We, emphasizes perils of relying too heavily on a fixed notion of Canadian identity. Lai argues that tactic of strategic essentialism has become seriously problematic due to pressures of state incorporation currently informing Canadian Studies (6). Underlying these pressures is an investment in liberal multiculturalism that reinforces static notions of racial and national difference and works to recirculate logic of colonialism in newly embodied forms (23). This logic becomes all more insidious in a post-9/11 Canada, where narratives of citizenship, nationalism, and security have become intertwined in ways that reproduce Orientalist images of Others as unassimilable and anti-democratic foreigners. As Lai points out, 2010 Maclean's article entitled Too Asian suggests that the trope of 'yellow peril' has been reinvigorated in national imaginary (Lai 17). …

“A exceção e a regra”: fragmentos de uma reflexão jurídico-literária

Análise do texto teatral “A Exceção e a Regra”, escrita em 1929/1930 pelo dramaturgo alemão Bertolt Brecht. A peça trata do julgamento de um comerciante rico, que durante uma viagem de negócios pelo deserto, matou o homem que lhe servia de carregador e guia. O texto escolhido permite abordar a semelhança entre encenação e julgamento, caracterizada pela oralidade e publicidade; constatar a atualidade do tema e a coincidência entre ficção e realidade; e realizar a crítica da inversão lógica do uso da regra e da exceção, que faz da exceção, a regra.

The Chinese Commission to Cuba (1874): Reexamining International Relations in the Nineteenth Century from a Transcultural Perspective

This paper describes the Chinese Commission to Cuba in 1874, investigating the international coolie trade between China and Cuba, the report of which would eventually bring down the human trade. In using the case of the Commission to Cuba to better our understanding of Sino–foreign relations in the nineteenth century, the paper concludes that it is critical not to allow an essentially cross-border phenomenon be falsely observed through the lens of the nation-state. Moreover, the paper argues for the need to pay more attention to the ways in which Western and non-Western actors interacted in the nineteenth century, particularly in the context of Sino–foreign relations, in which the racial and national labels of the twentieth century might not always explain the motivations governing the actions of people in the previous century.

Does Quality of Life Improve in Women Following Hysterectomy

Objectives: To measure the change in quality of life of women before and after hysterectomy. Methods: This prospective observational cohort study consisted of a convenience sample of 100 women scheduled for elective hysterectomy. Women between the age group of 30-60 years, those living with partner, premenopausal/postmenopausal age, who undergo abdominal/vaginal hysterectomy with or without salphingo oophorectomy for nonmalignant reason, were included. Women were recruited preoperatively and followed for four months after surgery. World Health Organization-Quality of life (WHO-QOL) Questionnaire was completed preoperatively and at four months postoperatively. Analysis included univariate statistics, paired t test and Chi-square tests. Results: The mean age of women in the study cohort was 43.71 years; majorities had primary education (49.5%) ,performed coolie work(71.6%), had 2 children(40%) ,duration of complaints were less than 3 months.(29.5%). 42.1%of them were diagnosed with Fibroid uterus and 58.9% have undergone Total abdominal Hysterectomy with Bilateral Salphingo Oophorectomy. 89.5% did not attain natural menopause before surgery.Overall,there was marked improvement in quality of life mainly in Physical health and psychological status at 4 months after surgery as compared to preoperative period. Paired t test showed significant difference ( p˂0.001) in quality of life scores among samples between preoperative period and at four months after surgery. There was significant association between social relationship in preoperative period with selected demographic variables (Age, preoperative diagnosis and type of surgery undergone) . However, it was highly significant with age (p˂0.001) as compared to preoperative diagnosis (p˂0.05) and type of surgery undergone (p˂0.01). Conclusion: Quality of life improved considerably from the preoperative period to four months postoperative in women who underwent hysterectomy.

The Treaty with China: Its Provisions Explained

The Treaty with China: Its Provisions Explained

J. S. Mill on Coolie Labour and Voluntary Slavery

This article discusses John Stuart Mill's voluntary slavery argument in On Liberty. The author shows that standard interpretations of the argument rely on the assumption that part of Mill's objection to voluntary slavery is the permanent nature of the decision. However, in correspondence, Mill also objects to voluntary ‘coolie’ labour contracts, which he regards as a form of slavery. This produces difficulties for standard interpretations of the voluntary slavery argument. Finally, the author provides a revised interpretation of Mill's argument to solve this problem.

The Diplomacy of Nationalism: The Six Companies and China’s Policy toward Exclusion by Yucheng Qin (review)

Reviewed by: The Diplomacy of Nationalism: The Six Companies and China’s Policy toward Exclusion by Yucheng Qin Daniel Meissner (bio) Yucheng Qin. The Diplomacy of Nationalism: The Six Companies and China’s Policy toward Exclusion. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009. x, 224 pp. Hardcover $51.00, isbn 978-0-8248-3274-2. The Six Companies, according to Yucheng Qin, played a far more influential role in protecting Chinese immigrant rights in the United States and in shaping late Qing diplomacy and nationalism than scholars have previously realized. This study attempts to rectify that oversight by examining the Six Companies from the perspective of a traditional huiguan (native place association), a transnational labor facilitator (not broker), a quasi-official governmental institution, a pioneering nationalist organization, and a model for Qing diplomatic missions. As if this were not an ambitious enough project, Qin also takes to task Joseph Levenson’s assertion of late Qing evolution from culturalism to nationalism, arguing that nongovernmental agents such as huiguan were instrumental in transitioning native place identity to nationalism. Qin begins by defending the Six Companies against a prevalent mid-nineteenth-century (and still generally accepted) accusation that the organization served as a conduit for importing indentured coolie labor. In chapter 1, he presents a brief historical view of international trading networks linking Guangdong with far-flung Cantonese merchant communities. He argues that Chinese immigration to the United States was an extension of these historical “commercial activities” (p. 17). Although he is setting the foundation for an anti-coolie argument, he admits (and thus clouds the issue) that the cost of transit to San Francisco was at least four times the annual income for Chinese laborers, and, therefore, “some Chinese came to the United States through a contract labor system” (p. 21). The following paragraph is even more inclusive, claiming that “the majority of Chinese immigrants came to California during the nineteenth century by means of the credit-ticket system” (p. 21). Under this system, immigrants would repay the cost of transit, presumably with interest, after finding some means of support in the United States. Again, to Americans at the time (and, indeed, to many scholars today), it is difficult to distinguish a contract labor or credit-ticket system from indentured labor. Regardless, someone or some institution was needed with the means to advance substantial sums of money for the thousands of Chinese immigrants who sojourned to the United States. Qin continues to build his argument in chapter 2 by briefly reviewing the push and pull factors that prompted the great mid-nineteenth-century wave of Chinese immigration, and the creation of native place associations. Chinese merchants who established business enterprises in San Francisco to provide goods and services to sojourning laborers also established native place huiguan. These mutual aid societies offered a variety of services for those who emigrated from the same hometown or district, including housing and labor assistance, dispute settlement, and the [End Page 477] repatriation of remains. In chapter 3, Qin describes how racial tensions and discriminatory legislation directed against Chinese as an ethnically distinct group prompted the largest six huiguan to consolidate as the Zhonghua Gongshuo (Chinese public association), generally known as the Six Companies. Qin argues that the Six Companies represented a highly significant change from the traditional native place huiguan to a comprehensive national organization. He further argues that the Six Companies would play a critical role not only in the protection of Chinese immigrant rights in the United States, but also in the development and use of nation-state diplomacy and the transference of this skill to the Qing government. In chapter 4, Qin returns to the issue raised in chapter 1 concerning the widely accepted view that the Six Companies acted as a labor broker for Chinese immigrants. He provides a historical context for anti-Chinese activism in the 1860s and 1870s based on unchecked Chinese immigration and declining economic conditions in California. The American view of coolieism and the perceived role of the Six Companies in brokering indentured labor was succinctly captured by the San Francisco Chronicle: the Six Companies has “‘almost despotic authority over the Chinese immigrants, compelling a long term of...

The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves in Cuba (review)

Reviewed by: The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves in Cuba Philip A. Howard The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves in Cuba. By Lisa Yun . Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008. 336 pp. $56.50 (cloth); $26.95 (paper and e-book). Employing the testimony of 2,841 Chinese workers initially recruited by British and American companies and later by Cuban traffickers of African slaves and indentured workers to labor in Cuba alongside African slaves, Lisa Yun provides a worthy examination of the lives of Asian immigrant laborers during the last half of the nineteenth century. Positing these workers within the context of the global economy and at a time when the economic growth and prosperity of the North Atlantic world were dependent on the exploitation and oppression of African slaves and East Indian and Chinese indentured workers, Yun demonstrates that employing coolie labor was critical to the shift away from slavery and toward the adoption of free wage labor in Cuba. Although these Chinese workers were theoretically free wage earners, the testimony that some Chinese coolie laborers gave in front of members of a commission sent by the Chinese government to determine their role, status, and treatment in Cuba illuminated the disturbing fact that the majority of them were held and treated in the same fashion as African slaves, argues Yun. As a result, Yun is able to "reexamine the liberal philosophies and assumptions regarding contracts and freedom," as well as the "very structures of a free society, a contractual society based upon the concepts of self-ownership." After exploring the historiography on transitional laborers in the Americas in general, and Cuba specifically, Yun points out that much [End Page 615] of the literature written on the Chinese experience in Cuba underlined the fact that the production of certain commodities, such as sugar, as well as the laws that governed indentured servitude and known as the Chinese Codes transformed the majority of coolies into slaves. For example, the codes required Chinese indentured workers to obtain the permission of their masters to marry. The codes also declared that the status of any child born of a coolie originated from that of the mother. Finally after 1860, the codes denied freedom to any Chinese worker who completed his contract. The latter regulation, better known as "recontracting," tied the coolie to one owner or owners beyond the period of his initial contract. Recontracting made the coolie trade profitable to British, American, and later Cuban commercial interests. As a result, between 1847 and 1877 some 142,000 Chinese arrived in Cuba. Interestingly, another 100,000 Chinese coolies landed in Peru during this time. Yun argues that the Cuban plantocracy sought coolie laborers for many reasons. Two of the most important causes were that they sought to reduce the intensity of the African slave trade to ensure that Cuban society would not resemble, at least demographically, Saint Domingue and experience that country's same violent fate after 1791. The fact that the cost of one coolie tended to be one-third to one-half less than that of an African slave drove demand among Cuban planters. The relatively lower cost of a Chinese indentured worker explains why after British and American companies started the coolie trade, the island's wealthiest African slaveholding families from Havana and Matanzas, particularly the Zulueta family, subsequently replaced them. By the 1860s, the most prominent Cuban slave owners became not only the principal investors in the Asian trade but also the largest holders of coolie workers. To substantiate her thesis that Chinese coolies were held and treated similarly to the African slaves, Yun traced their experiences from the moment they were recruited in China and transported to Cuba. Their "middle passage" resembled that of the African slaves, according to Yun. Once they arrived, the contracts that they signed to work for an individual for a period of eight years were deceptive in nature. Although owners were obligated to pay their workers four pesos monthly, they immediately deducted from their workers' salaries the cost for their clothes and food as well as medical care and "lost-time." As a result, by the time that the contracts...