Coolies Research Articles

Pacific Transactions: Nicolás Tanco Armero and the Chinese Coolie Trade to Cuba

On June 23 1855, Nicolás Tanco Armero (1830–1890) disembarked in Hong Kong after a voyage that took him through America, Europe, Africa and Asia. His departure point was Cuba, where he lived as an exile from his homeland, Colombia. His travelogue, Viaje de Nueva Granada a China y de China a Francia (1861), narrates his journey and three-year sojourn in China. Tanco Armero had been hired by the Cuban saccharocracy to work as a coolie trade agent in Amoy, a business which provided significant economic profit for the 25-year old entrepreneur. While he fervently critiques the institution of slavery in Cuba, he is a great admirer of the sugar plantations on which the Cuban economy thrived and which depended on the labour of the African slaves. This article is concerned with notions of racial and national identity negotiated by this white Creole male as they relate to the evident contradictions in his travelogue.

Archives of the Black Atlantic: Postcolonial Citation in The Pagoda

Contemporary African diasporic literature often displays “the allure of the archive” when writers encode archival documents into their narratives, revising the remnants found in an archive, and foregrounding the elements of archival research and data in their texts. Against the well-theorized connection between the archive and the nation-state, diaspora novels require a transnational reading practice that encompasses multiple national archives. This critical practice opens the archive and exposes the nation-state's exclusionary investments in it. Diaspora literature thus unmoors the archive from its stubborn attachment to national narratives. Bound by the forms of the governments who sponsor their enunciation, archival documents are frequently legal depositions, statements of arrest, indenture, capture, and execution. What can these documents tell us about the subjectivity of those laboring in fields or battened under hatches making a middle passage toward indentureship? This essay focuses on one aspect of novelistic citation of a transnational archive, using Jamaican author Patricia Powell's 1998 novel, The Pagoda, as an example. I suggest that the novel's foregrounding of archival documents (letters, maps, ships' logs, newspaper clippings, etc.), loosens Powell's characters from the social identities to which they were bound. I offer a reading between novel and archive, focusing on a letter being written by Powell's protagonist, Lowe, and the letter's interaction with a history sometimes called “the coolie trade.” The critical reading practice that I argue diasporic literature demands leads us from the literature back toward recognition of the archive itself as transnational.

The Coolie Trade, the Traffic in Chinese Labourers to Latin America 1847–1874 – By Arnold J. Meagher

The Coolie Trade, the Traffic in Chinese Labourers to Latin America 1847–1874 – By Arnold J. Meagher

The Coolie Trade: The Traffic in Chinese Laborers to Latin America 1847-1874

The Coolie Trade: The Traffic in Chinese Laborers to Latin America 1847-1874

The rise and fall of the coolie trade in mid-19^<th> century Amoy

The rise and fall of the coolie trade in mid-19^<th> century Amoy

‘Lazy’ Natives, Coolie Labour, and the Assam Tea Industry

AbstractThis paper considers the creation of a ‘coolie’ work-force for the Assam tea industry and the local dimensions of tea plantation enterprise. While the industry has flourished through its use of migrant labour and export markets for tea, it has retained important connections with the locality. The Assam tea industry was a predominantly colonial enterprise manned by white British planters. It allowed participation, albeit in subordinate and dependent roles, by local peasants and gentry, though mainly based on the labour of migrant ‘coolies’ recruited on indentured contracts. The prominence of ‘imported’ coolie workers has obscured the significance of various local groups as well as the tea industry's importance in the local ‘imagination’. Despite the gradual development of nationalist antagonism towards the white ‘Planters' Raj’, tea enterprise retained a hallowed place for the Assamese middle classes, as tea workers continued as a racialized labouring class.

Making History Work

Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World. Edited by Emma Christopher, Cassandra Pybus, Marcus Rediker. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. 274 pp., $60.00 cloth (ISBN: 978-0-520-25206-6), $24.95 paper (ISBN: 978-0-520-25207-3). Many Middle Passages addresses multiple audiences, at multiple levels, on a range of historical subjects. Contributors are established scholars from the United States, Australia, Britain and South Africa, and essays introduce readers to: African and Malagasy people taken to the Americas or across the Sahara; Arab slave caravans transiting East Africa en route to Zanzibar, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Reunion; Southeast Asian slave raiding networks; German military conscripts shipped to the Cape of Good Hope and Batavia; penal transport to Australia and Southeast Asia; Chinese and Irish contract laborers in the United States during the 1860s; the Chinese coolie trade to Cuba and Peru; the western Pacific “blackbirding” trade; and Chinese trafficking in women and children throughout Southeast Asia. The editors situate the book at the crossroads of several ongoing projects, including calls to “create a global past” (Manning 2003), and works that place coerced and free migrations in global perspectives (Eltis 2002). Essays cohered more specifically around “a cluster of ideas” laid out in The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Linebaugh and Rediker 2000). First, “that the rise of capitalism from the late sixteenth century onward forced millions of expropriated people to make middle passages from Europe and Africa to the Americas” (p.2). Second, that “the epitome of these middle passages, that of the Atlantic slave trade, might be used to explore other social and cultural transformations that resulted from …

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

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).

Opium and Social Control: Coolies on the Plantations of Peru and Cuba

AbstractThe place of opium in the history of the Chinese diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean has received scant attention. This article is a preliminary attempt to look into this history, based on fragmentary evidence available. From 1847 to l874, as many as 225,000 Chinese indentured or contract laborers (coolies), almost all men, were sent to Cuba, still a Spanish colony, and newly independent Peru. Both the human trade itself, as well as work and life on the plantations, closely resembled slavery; indeed, the coolies in Cuba worked alongside African slaves. Opium was part of the coolie trade from its inception, distributed in the holding pens in South China ports, on the long, arduous voyages across the Pacific or Atlantic, as well as on the plantations. Cuban and Peruvian planters permitted, even encouraged, the sale, barter and consumption of opium by their coolies, in effect creating a mechanism of social control by alternately distributing and withholding this very addictive substance to desperate men. But this cynical use of opium might also have backfired on them, as sustained and massive ingestion lowered productivity, caused premature death (often by suicide), and resulted in high absenteeism.

Opium and Social Control: Coolies on the Plantations of Peru and Cuba

The place of opium in the history of the Chinese diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean has received scant attention. This article is a preliminary attempt to look into this history, based on fragmentary evidence available. From 1847 to l874, as many as 225,000 Chinese indentured or contract laborers (coolies), almost all men, were sent to Cuba, still a Spanish colony, and newly independent Peru. Both the human trade itself, as well as work and life on the plantations, closely resembled slavery; indeed, the coolies in Cuba worked alongside African slaves. Opium was part of the coolie trade from its inception, distributed in the holding pens in South China ports, on the long, arduous voyages across the Pacific or Atlantic, as well as on the plantations. Cuban and Peruvian planters permitted, even encouraged, the sale, barter and consumption of opium by their coolies, in effect creating a mechanism of social control by alternately distributing and withholding this very addictive substance to desperate men. But this cynical use of opium might also have backfired on them, as sustained and massive ingestion lowered productivity, caused premature death (often by suicide), and resulted in high absenteeism.

Government Qadis and Child Marriage in Aden: Ethnography in the Aden Archives

Although the terms and (as in British Empire and Her Imperial Majesty) call up images of grandeur, in the colonies the business of empire was often quite humdrum and meant getting involved in the most detailed aspects of the lives of the common subjects, including those of the fast-growing urban underclasses. One of the places where the urban underclass of a rapidly expanding, densely populated, multicultural, imperial port city becomes visible is in the Aden Residency Records for the first half of the twentieth century. Prostitutes under close surveillance of local policemen; female organizers of zar ceremonies pushed out of business by religiously up-standing, middle class male opponents; bumboatsmen competing for licenses;1 ex-slaves fleeing back to their masters to escape the hardships of coolie labor; and hapless urban immigrants frantically petitioning against official deportation all come into view, however briefly, in the Aden Residency Records. This urban underclass, however, experienced British influence mostly through local intermediaries. In British Aden some of these intermediaries (such as Indian clerks and administrative assistants) belonged to the local bourgeoisie, while others (such as policemen, petition writers, and peons of various kinds) belonged, sometimes only barely, to the working class. Since, in Aden as elsewhere, law was one of the major instruments of colonial transformation, colonial courts are important sites to observe the nitty-gritty and the down and dirty of imperial and colonial transformation. Aden was occupied by the British in 1839 and became dramatically more important after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. As it developed into an international coaling station, it attracted labor migrants-both from its own rural hinterland and from across the seas -most of whom joined the swelling local working class and urban poor. At the same time, a colonial middle class emerged associated both with trade in all its aspects and with the colonial bureaucracy. Apart from a short hiatus in 1917, Aden was administered from British India until 1937, when it was transferred to the Colonial Office in London. South Yemen gained its political independence from Britain in 1967.2 The Aden Residency Records for the first half of the twentieth century include a number of files dealing with the two positions of government qadi of the colony, those of the two neighborhoods of Aden and Sheikh Othman. They do not include the actual court records or qadis' registers (sijills), although those were kept at the time, but consist of the administrative files kept-in English-on the qadis' affairs by Indian and British officials and include correspondence-in Arabic-addressed to the latter by the qadis.3 The records throw light on the work of the government qadis as they performed the marriages, legalized the divorces, and settled the disputes of their clients in accordance with the prescriptions of the Shafri madhhab (school of law, or orientation) and the texts associated with it. Especially when the qadis' decisions or actions came into dispute and attracted British administrative attention, the records contain great detail about the rulings and reasonings of the qadis. The content of these is not in itself new to scholarship about Islamic law. It is the ways in which they shaped and were shaped by the specific context of early twentieth-century British Aden that increases our understanding both of Aden's urban society and the history of Islamic law. Collier's 1975 insight that legal action does not occur in an isolated sphere but can only be understood in relation to the wider organization of socio-cultural life, while now a truism, remains valid, for in this case too the records only yield new knowledge if we place the information about the law in the context of the surrounding community.4 Sally Merry, a specialist in anthropology, spoke about her work in the colonial court records of Hawai'i as ethnography in the archives. …

Coolie Labour in Colonial Indonesia: A Study of Labour Relations in the Outer Islands, c. 1900–1940. Edited by Vincent J. H. Houben and J. Thomas Lindblad. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1999. xv, 268 pp. €39.00 (paper).

Coolie Labour in Colonial Indonesia: A Study of Labour Relations in the Outer Islands, c. 1900–1940. Edited by Vincent J. H. Houben and J. Thomas Lindblad. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1999. xv, 268 pp. €39.00 (paper).

Chalo Jahaji: On a Journey through Indenture in Fiji (review)

An odd combination of historical essays, autobiographical musings, and analytical demography, this volume purports to be a journey through the history of indentured labor in Fiji. (Indians were shipped to Fiji between 1879 and 1916 as coolie labor and worked in sugarcane plantations run by various concerns, the largest being the Australian-owned CSR company.) Barring six papers and two translations of Totaram Sanadhya's reflections on his time as a coolie in Fiji, the bulk of the book is the work of Brij Lal, the outstanding historian in this area of study. Lal has always been a historian of the empirical rather than the theoretical school; he is strong on archival research and data analysis and the best of his essays display this strength. Unlike the historians of the Subaltern Collective, however, he gives short shrift to the important and difficult issue of methodology. As Guha, Chakravarty, Prakash, Spivak, and others have demonstrated, a self-reflexive inquiry into the nature of history writing is essential to any postcolonial project attempting to reconfigure a discourse whose codes, rules, and procedures stem from Europe. When the subject under discussion is indentured labor (girmit), that most subaltern of all subjects, the question of methodology becomes even more urgent. For this reason, instead of Doug Monroe's rather pointless eulogy of Lal's oeuvre, an extended meditation on the act of historical mediation would have been, I think, a better way to start the book. Lal is an important historian and sooner rather than later he will need to grapple with this aspect of his work.

Immigration and American Unionism

Long opposed to illegal immigration and at best neutral regarding lawful immigration, organized labor rather abruptly altered its traditional stance on these issues during the Clinton years. Recognizing that open borders are inevitable in a global economy and faced with declining membership among their traditional population bases, American began to recognize in immigrants a potential source of new members who could reinvigorate a stagnant labor movement. Consequently, the 1993 AFL-CIO convention lauded immigrants for their role in strengthening unions, the 1995 convention rejected anti-immigration arguments as scapegoating, and by the turn of the century the AFL-CIO had endorsed amnesty for illegal immigrants and the repeal of sanctions against their employers. Cornell University Professor Vernon Briggs appears to have written Immigration and American Unionism as a response to this shift by the vanguard of the labor movement. It is essentially a well-written history of immigration interwoven with the history of American unions. The period from 1788 to 2000 is divided into six chronological episodes, each organized according to the same basic structure: the historical setting, the nature of the labor force and industrial employment, the type and level of immigration during the period, the relative status of unions, and the consequences of the era's events. The book provides some fascinating stories of immigration and clear explanations of immigration law; among the most interesting are the discussions of Chinese coolie labor in California, the bracero program by which Mexican farmworkers came to the United States, and the Texas Proviso-the provision in federal law by which employers could legally hire illegal immigrants (until its repeal in 1986). Similarly, all the familiar union histories are reviewed, including those of the Knights of Labor, the Industrial Workers of the World, the Homestead and Pullman strikes, and the formation of the AFL-CIO itself. Of course, these histories are well known, and it does not appear to be Briggs's intent to cast the individual events in a new light. Rather, it is the juxtaposition of the immigration and union trends that forms the book's central theme. Briggs contends that unions thrive (membership grows) when immigration is low or levels are contracting; falter (membership declines) during periods when immigration is high or levels are increasing (p. 3). Given the simplicity and overtly empirical nature of this hypothesis, the theory could have been developed more rigorously and concisely in a professional journal article, but the author presumably wished to target a broader and less academic audience than a technical paper would have attracted. Additionally, the book's two major drawbacks-its biased vantage point and its lack of statistical verification-might not have been tolerated in a more scholarly, peer-reviewed forum. Briggs openly discloses his opposition to liberal immigration rules and union pursuit of such policies, writing, For organized labor to sanction such an infusion on an ongoing basis can only be considered the act of a Judas. Organized labor might thereby become the friend of the self-serving immigrant advocacy groups, but it could no longer be considered a champion of American workers. The [amnesty] proposal is a betrayal of the legacy of the past in which always placed the interests of workers, whether native- or foreign-born, ahead of any subsidiary consideration. (p. 181) Indeed, he goes so far as to render an ethical judgment against the federal immigration policy in place since the 1960s: To satisfy the private interests of some citizens rather than serve the national interest, the principle of family reunification became the cornerstone of the new immigration system and remains so, even though it does not rest on a morally sound foundation (p. 108). Such pronouncements are doubly dangerous. First, though the criteria for a morally sound policy are not obvious, few would contend that reuniting families is immoral. …

"White Labor" vs. "Coolie Labor": The "Chinese Question" in Pennsylvania in the 1870s

"White Labor" vs. "Coolie Labor": The "Chinese Question" in Pennsylvania in the 1870s

Regino Pedroso and El ciruelo de Yuan Pei Fu: poemas chinos

In the Introduction to the anthology Encounters: People of Asian Descent in the Americas, Roshni Rustomji-Kerns remarks on the lack of discussion concerning the Asian diaspora outside the United States: Where the reality of our lives and their absence in academic explorations of Asian Americas collide, there is an open wound that needs to be acknowledged, discussed, and-one hopes-healed. The immigration of the Chinese to Latin America and their cultural production represent one of these absences. The arrival of close to 300,000 Chinese during the coolie trade (1847-1874) and the subsequent immigration that proceeded oftentimes remain a historical footnote. The terms mestizo and mulato are often regarded as representative of the miscegenation that occurred in post-encounter Spanish America, meaning that the only mixed blood is that of Africans, Europeans, and Indigenous groups. No hint of the Asiatic mixture is represented in these terms.

Chinese Coolies and African Slaves in Cuba, 1847-74

In 1874, a New York Herald correspondent in Cuba, James O'Kelly, observed that a Chinese coolie "contrary to the representations made about the traffic in Asiatics was treated in every respect the same way as his sable companions in misfortune." 2 O'Kelly was one of many observers of that period who recorded similar assessments; later, Cuban historians came to the same conclusion. While American scholars debate whether the Chinese coolies of Cuba should be called "slaves," the authoritative scholars of Chinese labor in Cuba, Juan Jiménez Pastrana and Juan Pérez de la Riva, substantiated the horrific conditions of Chinese coolies in Cuba and unreservedly stated that coolies were slaves in all but name. What were the conditions of Chinese coolie labor in Cuba and how is this related to our present understanding of labor's legacy in Asian American studies? Such questions become critical as we assess our present narratives of human experience, with the "coolie" having become a major figure in the study of Asian migration to the Americas. The coolie has figured into our diasporic history, literary narratives, ethnographic studies, and perhaps [End Page 99] most importantly, in communal memories and constructions of ancestral heritage.

Migration-Related Resources on the World Wide Web

Angel Island: Life in Detainment . Often called the Pacific Gateway or the Island of the West, Angel Island was a stopping point for the majority of Asians who immi grated to the United States. The International Channel maintains this site, focusing on immigrants' experiences while detained at Angel Island. Separate pages address living conditions, medical examinations, and interrogation, while another investigates the poetry some immigrants carved into the walls of the facility. Angel Island: Stories, Photography, and Poetry: . This web site, sponsored by the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation, offers a look into the history of the island and into the experiences of those who traveled through it. It addresses such issues as the Open Door Policy, the Coolie trade, Asian railroad workers, and the virulent racism many Asian immigrants faced. Arduini and Pizzo: An Italian-American Family History: . A family's decision to rediscover its roots becomes an educational opportunity for all. Created by Frank Arduini in 1994, this site records the histories of the Arduini and Pizzo families?two Italian immigrant clans joined in marriage in 1947. Arduini includes over thirty stories and eighty photographs on his pages, offering a very personal view of what it is like to build lives and legacies in a new country. Ellis Island Photography, 19004920: . Part of the Keystone-Mast Collection of the California Museum of Photography, this site contains numerous photos taken at Ellis Island during the great waves of immigration in the early twentieth century. The collection includes images of the structure and makeup of the Ellis Island facility, as well as photos of immigrants undergoing various examinations and questioning. This site provides an excellent resource for jump-starting discussions on the immigrant experience. Immigrant Ship Transcribers Guild: . Founded only a year ago, the Immigrant Ship Tran scribers Guild (ISTG) now has over five hundred volunteer members who translate, decipher, and transcribe the passenger lists of immi grant ships to the United States. Currently available online are the lists for nearly two thousand ships dating back as far as the mid 1600s. Teachers and students can easily navigate and search the site for names, dates, ports of departure, or ports of arrival. Learning About Immigration Through Oral History: . This lesson plan, part of the Library of Congress American Memory Collection, uses the oral histories of contemporary immigrants in east central Illinois to teach students the process of historiography and give them an understanding of our nation's ethnic diversity. The plan uses selections from the American Memory online collection as well as print and video resources. The lesson can be geared toward high school or middle school classes, spans several curricular areas, and can comprise either a short unit or a semester-long study. Learning, and Earning, Their Stripes: . The text of this site originally appeared in the Washington Post in 1996. It includes an article describing the controversial process of U.S. citizenship testing and a list of one hundred questions that the Immigration and Naturalization Service gives prospective citizens to prepare for their naturalization exam. Having students take the test provides an nice introduction to issues of citizenship and immigration.

Chinese coolie labour in Cuba in the nineteenth century: Free labour or neo‐slavery?

(1993). Chinese coolie labour in Cuba in the nineteenth century: Free labour or neo‐slavery? Slavery & Abolition: Vol. 14, The wage of Slavery: From Chattel Slavery to wage labour in Africa, the Caribbean and England, pp. 67-86.

Odredbenice modeliranja suvremenoga tarifnog sustava u telekomunikacijskom prometu

It is necessary to continually coordinate the tariff .system in telecommunication traffic with the engineering and technological developments in the field of telecommunications and the reached development stage of the telecommunications network of a coolly. The paper deals with the guidelines of essential meaning for the structuring of the tariff system being up to the level of Promet, vol. 5, 1993, br. 2, 63-67 the reached development stage of the telecommunications network. The last example of modernization of our tariff system has been discussed in a concise manner to bring it closer to the .systems of Western Europe in terms of making it more familiar to them.