Coolie trade

This paper looks at gastronomic identity in the age of global labor migrations. Focusing on the nineteenth-century inden- tured labor voyages from northern India to the sugar colonies in the Caribbean and Asia-Pacific regions, it highlights the sea voyage as both a social setting and a mirror back onto colonial society. The space of the indentured labor ship serves as an innovative site for understanding the political, cultural, and economic dimensions of historical labor movements, through which colonial politics andgustemic identities were negotiated. An analysis of the food provisions and other culinary items that British colonial officials provided to in- dentured workers during their journeys situates the “taste” of laborers in colonial feedings.

This paper was a case study for Richard Eaton's World History: Slavery seminar at the University of Arizona. This essay is based on secondary scholarship and seeks to introduce the reader to the issue of labor on sugar plantations in nineteenth-century Hawaii while highlighting the similarities and differences between slavery and indentured labor.

“Coolie” is a generic category for the “unskilled” manual labour. The offering of services for hire had various pre-colonial lineages. In the nineteenth century there was an attempt to recast the term in discursive constructions and material practices for “mobilized-immobilized” labour. Coolie labour was often proclaimed as a deliberate compromise straddling the regimes of the past (slave labour) and the future (free labour). It was portrayed as a stage in a promised transition. The tea plantations of Assam, like many other tropical plantations in South Asia, were inaugurated and formalized during this period. They were initially worked by the locals. In the late 1850s, the locals were replaced by labourers imported from outside the province who were unquestioningly designated “coolies” in the historical literature. Qualifying this framework of transition (local to coolie labour) and introduction (of coolie labour), this study makes a case for the “production” of coolie labour in the history of the colonial-capitalist plantations in Assam. The intention of the research is not to suggest an unfettered agency of colonial-capitalism in defining and “producing” coolies, with an emphasis on the attendant contingencies, negotiations, contestations and crises. The study intervenes in the narratives of an abrupt appearance of the archetypical coolie of the tea gardens (i.e., imported and indentured) and situates this archetype’s emergence, sustenance and shifts in the context of material and discursive processes.

Between 1847 and 1874, the international trade of Asian indentured laborers that is often referred to as the ‘Coolie Trade’ took the first large-scale arrivals of Chinese to colonial Cuba. During this period, there existed a system of racial hierarchy that divided the island’s population into three main groups: whites, free people of colour, and slaves. The 125,000 Chinese arriving in this period added another dimension to the cultural and linguistic heterogeneity of the island. This work pulls from archival information that chronicles this trans-Atlantic migration, including metalinguistic commentaries found in interviews done with these laborers. These records provide a micro-level view of the plantation system relevant for theoretical debates and related work within the field of Creole Studies. This work pays special attention to the relations between Chinese and African-born slaves and those Chinese who became bilingual in Spanish and served as intermediaries for their fellow countrymen.

This article examines debates over Chinese indentured labor in the Australasian colonies at the height of the gold rushes. It does so through the testimony of Chinese gold miners who protested the seizure of their gold by customs officials in Sydney Harbour. As a result of these protests, a " New South Wales Select Committee into the Seizure of Gold from Chinese Miners " was established in 1857 to investigate customs law and " coolie " rights. The findings of this committee uncovered Chinese and white settler memories over failed coolie transportation schemes, revealing the ways in which the legacies of coolie migration continued to shape understandings in the Australian colonies of law, labor rights, and fair taxation well after the cessation of such schemes in the 1840s. The archive of Chinese grievance against the colonial state, preserved in testimonies given to the select committee, reveal the long shadow of slavery in the British Empire, the complexities of multiracial communities, and the role of law and legal institutions in shaping both. In 1857, a scandal erupted in Sydney over New South Wales (NSW) customs offi-cials' seizure of gold from Chinese gold miners. These men were returning to China with gold earnings without paying a newly introduced duty tax. Much more than a dispute over unpaid taxes, the act was a violent expropriation of the Chinese miners' gold. This article focuses on arguments made by NSW authorities in defense of the seizure, including the accusation made by customs officials that Chinese miners were taking part in a conspiracy to reintroduce a " coolie " trade. A little known footnote in the history of the Australian gold rushes, this scandal has never been studied before. Here I use it to probe the legacy of the coolie trade in the Australian colonies and how it informed debates in NSW over free and unfree labor. Chinese miners protested the confiscation of their gold forcing the colonial government to conduct a formal investigation. A select committee into the seizure was established by the NSW legislative assembly as a result. 1 I show how their findings uncovered settler memories over failed Asian indentured labor schemes in Australia, revealing how the legacies of forced Asian migration continued to shape understandings in the Australian colonies over labor rights and fair taxation well after the cessation of such schemes in the early 1850s. In the process, two populations—Chinese indentured laborers and Chinese gold miners—became closely entwined symbols of a new social order that saw Chinese migrants deeply embroiled in a transitional moment in colonial systems of labor. The petitions of the Chinese and the hearings of the select committee also offer rare documentation of the claims of the Chinese.

Questo volume esplora le frontiere del contratto di lavoro tra Ottocento e Novecento, vale a dire quella “zona grigia” di indeterminatezza (in termini di status legale così come di status sociale) che caratterizzava i rapporti di lavoro prima e al di là del consolidamento del regime salariale d’ispirazione occidentale. Partendo da un ampio ventaglio di studi di caso (la condizione dei “servi a contratto” cinesi, l’impiego dei “lavoratori indigeni” negli imperi coloniali, il lavoro coatto durante la guerra, il lavoro femminile a domicilio, la condizione precaria dei lavoratori migranti ieri come oggi, i conflitti di lavoro che coinvolgono apprendisti, artigiani, operai industriali e agricoli, ecc.), le autrici e gli autori qui riuniti suggeriscono di indagare tre piste di ricerca principali allo scopo di cogliere la molteplicità e il significato delle forme di dipendenza nel lavoro: il disciplinamento del lavoro, il controllo della mobilità di lavoratori e lavoratrici, la produzione di diritti e, più in generale, di forme di appartenenza, anche in situazioni di costrizione o di assenza di libertà. Il contratto di lavoro è così ricollocato nel groviglio dei rapporti di lavoro, sottolineando la pluralità delle azioni, delle consuetudini, dei conflitti e delle negoziazioni che sottendono la sua messa in pratica in contesti ed epoche differenti.

Cet article traite des 27 engagés « chinois » qui furent transportés en Guyane française en 1820 pour y cultiver du thé. Cet essai fut la première tentative française pour remplacer la main-d'oeuvre servile des colonies quelques années après l'abolition de la traite des Noirs. L'expérience, qui dura un peu moins d'une quinzaine d'années, fut cependant autant un échec économique qu'une tragédie humaine. Les administrateurs et planteurs de Guyane, qui ne souhaitaient pas la venue de ces engagés et n'arrivèrent jamais à les considérer comme des travailleurs libres, les traitèrent aussi mal que leurs esclaves.

Between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, an influx of Europeans, Asians, and Arabic speakers indelibly changed the face of Latin America. While many studies of this period focus on why the immigrants came to the region, this volume addresses how the newcomers helped construct national identities in the Caribbean, Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil. The essays, from some of the most respected scholars of migration history, examine the responses--some welcoming, some xenophobic--to the newcomers. The contributors also look at the lasting effects that Jewish, German, Chinese, Italian, and Syrian immigrants had on the economic, sociocultural, and political institutions. They explore themes of assimilation, race formation, and transnationalism to enrich our understanding not only of migration to Latin America but also of the impact of immigration on the construction of national identity.

Overview of the Spanish presence in Asia during the last two centuries, divided between the last century of the colonial presence in the Philippines and the 20th century, when Spain disdained the region, partly out of the colonial experience.
España y Asia para estudiantes universitarios
El texto es la traducción de la visión general sobre la presencia española en Asia que publiqué en 2003 https://florentinorodao.com/colonizacion-filipina-y-relaciones-con-asia/ y pensado en que sea lectura para las clases de la universidad. Un esfuerzo por sistematizar la relación de España con Asia como parte de la relación exterior, no como parte de la presencia filipina o de relaciones bilaterales. Esto es, Asia como un área para el ejercicio de relación exterior española, para un libro de texto sobre su política exterior. Establezco los períodos a lo largo del siglo XIX (Continuidad hasta 1840, oportunidad colonial hasta 1964 y temor estratégico hasta 1898) y del siglo XX (Lazos privados hasta 1936; Militarismo y Orden Nuevo hasta 1945; La Otra Puerta Trasera hasta 1975) y acabo con un tercer período, Asia y la política exterior democrática, 1977-2003. Sin citas, leído, actualizado en la segunda edición y muy citado.

Archives, as both institutional and epistemological formations, are intimately associated with mastery, entangled in legacies of colonialism and efforts to document the past and manage bodies. This article takes up the science fictional trope of time travel to posit a mode of critical engagement that disorganizes the hegemonic timespace of the archive. It thinks alongside Charles Yu’s conception of time travel in How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (2010), which emphasizes the embodied nature of this process as one that takes both time and care. Mobilizing this understanding of time travel, the essay approaches the history of the coolie trade and the figure of the female coolie in ways that aim not to reproduce mastery or establish these subjects as knowable entities. Instead, by taking time to travel through multiple archives—literary, historical, theoretical—it builds on speculations and untidy reflections that come from positioning ourselves beside the female coolie and the histories of racialization attached to her. In doing so, it models time travel as a form of reparative criticism for American studies, an affective and aesthetic practice that illuminates other ways of encountering subjects that have been forgotten, silenced, or disavowed.

This is the pre-print version of this published article/ Esto es la versión pre-print de este artículo publicado:
Zeuske, “Coolies – Asiáticos and Chinos: Global Dimensions of Second Slavery”, in: Damir-Geilsdorf, Sabine; Lindner, Ulrike; Müller, Gesine; Tappe, Oliver; Zeuske (eds.), Bonded Labour: Global and Comparative Perspectives (18th-21st Century), Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2016, pp. 35-57 (online: http://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-3733-5/Bonded-Labour (13 de octubre de 2016)).

Between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, an influx of Europeans, Asians, and Arabic speakers indelibly changed the face of Latin America. While many studies of this period focus on why the immigrants came to the region, this volume addresses how the newcomers helped construct national identities in the Caribbean, Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil. The essays, from some of the most respected scholars of migration history, examine the responses--some welcoming, some xenophobic--to the newcomers. The contributors also look at the lasting effects that Jewish, German, Chinese, Italian, and Syrian immigrants had on the economic, sociocultural, and political institutions. They explore themes of assimilation, race formation, and transnationalism to enrich our understanding not only of migration to Latin America but also of the impact of immigration on the construction of national identity.

Today, the 'rise' of China is omnipresent: whether articulated as opportunity or threat, expected or surprising, China's global prominence is consistently proclaimed as new and noteworthy. Yet the Victorians held similar beliefs that China was rising in importance, and that its rise was integrally tied to the success of the West. This book traces the development of this perception of China and the Chinese from the Opium Wars to the 1911 demise of the Qing dynasty. It surveys an array of literary and cultural materials, from short stories produced by British expatriates in China and distributed locally to representations of the Chinese on the British stage, from the sensational fiction surrounding the Chinese community in London's East End to turn-of-the-century invasion novels with their 'Yellow Peril' villains. Ross Forman demonstrates that China, as much as India, occupied the Victorian imagination; in so doing, he reassesses British imperialism in Asia.

More than ten years after the British experience in Malaysia, the medical protection of farm workers, in particular the fight against malaria, became in the mid-1920s an economic and social issue in Indochina, in order to protect the future of the huge rubber trees plantations set up shortly before by major industrial and financial groups, where losses due to death, repatriation or escape could amount to over half of the workforce within two years. This situation sparked off numerous publications by the health department of the colony. Several large companies like Michelin, encouraged by the authorities, which had to observe new sanitary measures contained in the 1927 regulation on increased protection for contract coolies, developed their own health programs, similar to that of Malaysian planters. The turning point in Michelin’s plantations was the recruitment of Dr Warnecke, a colonial medicine specialist, and his subsequent assessment of the workers’ health condition in early 1929. From then on, and even if these plantations did not have the highest death rate unlike what is asserted in many works, the management back in the metropole decided to set up a health system with no equivalent in the private sector of Indochina. As a symbol of this effort, a hospital was opened at the end of 1928 in the Dầu Tiếng plantation. It was regarded as a model due to his size and equipment. Michelin also got an early support by the Pasteur Institute, notably following a substantial donation to the latter's malaria-dedicated unit in 1928. The company developed its own methods of quinine inhalation and its medical laboratory, and was at the time the only private company to hire an engineer specialized in antimalarial treatment. A large set of measures to protect workers, women and newborns was taken. Unlike the history of the fight against malaria and of the sanitary supervision in the plantations, which was recently tackled in Michitake Aso’s thesis, that of the health department is still to be written. This paper is based on the Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (National Archives of the Overseas Territories), on those of the Pasteur Institute, and above all on several unpublished documents stored in Michelin's own archives, particularly the reports of Doctor Warnecke (89 pages and 69 photographs) and those of Dr Morin from the Pasteur Institute regarding Michelin's Phú Riềng plantation. This communication aims at assessing the efforts made by a company regarded in the metropole as a model in the implementation of a social policy and their limited impact in the special environment of capitalist concessions subjected to productivity requirements, where racial prejudice against the coolies prevailed. Yet, consideration for the human dimension of the workforce came too late to avoid the death of so many workers in the first years (17% of them in Phú Riềng for the year 1928 alone). The behavior of nurses was criticized within the company as they had to fulfill contradictory demands from the management : on one hand dissuading workers from feigning injury or sickness to skip work, on the other hand preventing the worsening of existing wounds which could immobilize coolies for a long period. Dr Warnecke's report demonstrates with figures that this massive investment proved fruitful compared with health care costs in public hospitals, insofar as fewer workers were actually unable to work. It details the entire set of measures taken to improve the coolies’ condition: diet, disease and injury prevention, necessity of getting central medical facilities with competent staff, improvement of the drainage system, etc... Efforts in the sanitary and medical fields admittedly improved the physical and moral condition of workers, but this in the end contributed to an increase in productivity and consequently to a greater exploitation of the workforce, in such a way that the image of the living and working conditions in these plantations has remained negative despite genuine advances.

Today, the 'rise' of China is omnipresent: whether articulated as opportunity or threat, expected or surprising, China's global prominence is consistently proclaimed as new and noteworthy. Yet the Victorians held similar beliefs that China was rising in importance, and that its rise was integrally tied to the success of the West. This book traces the development of this perception of China and the Chinese from the Opium Wars to the 1911 demise of the Qing dynasty. It surveys an array of literary and cultural materials, from short stories produced by British expatriates in China and distributed locally to representations of the Chinese on the British stage, from the sensational fiction surrounding the Chinese community in London's East End to turn-of-the-century invasion novels with their 'Yellow Peril' villains. Ross Forman demonstrates that China, as much as India, occupied the Victorian imagination; in so doing, he reassesses British imperialism in Asia.