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CONCLUSION:
The final act of the Macao coolie trade took place on the morning of 27 March, 1874.
In a typically foggy day, the Peruvian ships Emigrante, Callao, San Juan, Camillo Cavour, Oracle, Macao, Agostinha, Providencia and Fray Bentos, sailed to the Outer
Harbor, “Macao roads”, facing the government’s house in the Praya. With their flags at half mast, they started firing salvos of mourning to commemorate, provocatively, the
“assassination” of the emigration system by Macao’s “illiberal” authorities. Several minutes later a messenger sent by Governor Januário reached the vessels and stopped the disrespectful outcry. The following day the ship Lola cleared Macao’s harbor with the last load of 363 coolies for the Peruvian plantations, effectively ending, a quarter of century after its inception, one of the most controversial chapters in the history of the Portuguese settlement in China. 1
The nine vessels mentioned above, unable to find alternative cargoes, remained in the port of the Portuguese colony until late summer 1874, awaiting in vain a possible resumption of the traffic. At the same time, an amnesty negotiated between Januário and the Viceroy of Guangdong-Guanxi Ruilin conceded forgiveness to the corretores that had preyed the Chinese hinterland in the previous years. 2
The larger flow of Chinese emigration did not cease with this decision, nor did it diminish its size. Several thousand Chinese continued to head for Cuba and Peru, now as free immigrants, integrating the local communities of post-indentured settlers. 3 The final years of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries witnessed an exponential growth in the volume of departures from South China ports, especially Amoy, Swatow, Canton and Hong Kong. But the date of 1874, despite some attempts to resuscitate the coolie traffic in its immediate aftermath, effectively closed a parenthesis in the history of Chinese migration, characterized, as stated by McKeown, by probably the only (partially) self-sustainable attempt by Western capitalists to impose a foreign structure
1
Hong Kong Daily Press, 2 April 1874. A more sympathetic account of this episode in the pro-coolie trade newspaper O Independente, 2 April 1874. The Peruvian consul in Macao Ulysses Delboy and the Peruvian representatives in Lisbon tried to obtain a prolongation of the traffic, arguing about the $300,000 advanced by Peruvian-based entrepreneurs to the said ships for the spring 1874 season; cf. Delboy to Januário (copy), Macau, 29 December 1873, forwarded to AHU, SEMU, DGU, Correspondência de Macau e Timor, cx.43 (1874).
2
Copy of the proclamation enclosed in Viceroy Ruilin to Gov. Januário, 9 March 1874, AHM, Administração Civil, Secção Administrativa, Processos, P-72.
3
McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks...
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of indentured emigration over the Chinese migratory tradition. 4 Several factors caused the demise and prevented the resumption of the coolie traffic, with its inherently abusive and coercive characteristics. The opposition of the Chinese authorities and several Western Powers has traditionally taken a large part in the historical accounts of this episode, but the resistance of the Chinese population of South China also played a crucial role. Significant as well was a general retreat of piracy in the South China Sea, which removed one of the main channels for the recruitment of unwilling emigrants already during the early 1870s. Developments in Macao and its political scene held some importance, too. The election of an anti-coolie trade Macanese deputy to Lisbon’s Cortes in March of 1874, in this sense, sealed officially a major reversal in the colony’s geography of power, sanctioning a long-term effort of the governors Sergio de Sousa and Januário to build a base of support for a reform of the coolie trade within the fractures of the Macanese society. 5
This thesis has followed a double track. On one hand, we addressed the Italian participation in the international coolie traffic. We revealed the substantially neglected picture of a large community of Genoese and Ligurian maritime merchants, and its deep commercial interests on a global scale. On the other hand, the study of the sources left by the Italian traffickers, and the focus on their trafficking activities has allowed us to reconstruct a number of controversial and debated aspects of the Macao coolie trade tout court, trying to provide answers to several unanswered questions about its sudden growth and similarly abrupt demise.
In the first chapter we established the theoretical coordinates of the work at the crossroads of the fields of world history, migration history, and maritime history. What was clear from the outset, however, was the interconnectedness of the coolie trade with the broader phenomena of the global nineteenth-century world. In Chapter 2, we expanded our focus to encompass the three main events that set in motion the coolie trade in its actual forms: the abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade and the restructuring of the global sugar market; the Chinese migratory tradition and its reaction to the
integration of the Pacific world after the so-called Californian Gold Rush; and the less known contribution to this integration of the discovery of guano deposits in mid-
4
McKeown, “Chinese Emigration in Global Context, 1850–1940,” 101.
5
“O deputado por Macau”, Gazeta de Macau e Timor, 3 March 1874. The defeated pro-coolie trade
candidate Francisco Magalhães had been sponsored by a coalition of interests led by the director of the
aforementioned newspaper O Independente José da Silva. Cf. Teixeira, A Imprensa Periódica Portuguesa
no Extremo Oriente. I have discussed more deeply this topic in Maldarella, “A New and More Infamous
Algiers?.”
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nineteenth-century Peru. From this standpoint we moved on to a local scale of analysis, aiming to understand the local dynamics of Macao’s history in the period between the two opium wars. These years saw the emergence of three interconnected businesses that revitalized the Portuguese colony in spite of the aggressive competition of the neighboring Hong Kong; the gambling industry, the lorcha convoy system and the
coolie trade. The demise of the convoy system in the late 1850s stimulated the reconversion of Macao’s fleet of hybrid lorchas from the “protection” of the Chinese coastal trade to the “recruitment” of coolies in the maritime frontier of China, in both cases in tight connection with the resurgent Cantonese piracy. In the same chapter we also analyzed the system of regulations issued by the Portuguese authorities in Macao and Lisbon under the pressure of a mounting international press and diplomatic campaign. The abusive characters of the traffic, in particular the harrowing system of kidnapping and deception adopted to recruit the prospective emigrants, and their mistreatment along their maritime voyages, are elucidated with plenty of examples and testimonies in Chapter 4. Special attention is given to the resistance and agency of the involuntary coolies deported overseas, in line with a tradition of studies more pertinent to the history of the slave trade than the history of migrations.
In Chapter 5 we moved our focus on the other side of the Pacific to identify, describe and analyze the individual biographical trajectories of the Italian coolie traffickers settled in Peru. Providing a first census of the Italian contribution to the traffic, we estimated that Italian entrepreneurs were responsible for between one sixth and one fifth of the overall enterprise. This participation, moreover, was particularly effective, concentrated and specialized. Italian merchants, captains and sailors were certainly among the most regular participant in the coolie trade, and traffickers like the Canevaro or Figari profited immense sums from the enterprise, from which they built a large part of their lasting commercial empires and political influences.
In the sixth and seventh chapters we examined the ambiguous involvement of the Italian authorities and their reaction to the reports of this inconvenient participation.
Despite taking an official stance of condemnation, actual measures to limit the
involvement of Italian businessmen in the controversial coolie traffic came only from
isolate initiatives of local actors, like the provisional Italian consul in Peru Pietro
Castelli in 1865-1866. The situation appeared to change after the grave episode of revolt
aboard the ship Teresa provided for the first time the Italian audience with a public
debate on the issue. Chapter 7 further elaborated an in-depth study of this affair, using
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the records of the Teresa’s mutiny as a starting point to interrogate the multiple connections of the coolie trade with the world of the Chinese maritime piracy, and attempt to restore the voice and subjectivity of some Italian sailors and captains involved in the trade.
To conclude this work, we highlight a series of issues that are viable to further investigation, and set a preliminary agenda to proceed in this path. From a generally theoretical point of view, this research questioned the focus on the supply side of the migratory experience too much emphasized by the historiography on the migration
“networks.” Following the suggestions developed by contemporary sociologists studying the concept of “commerce of migration”, or “migration industry”, we shifted the focus on the predominance of the demand over supply factors as explanation for the movement of people under a system of contract labor. In other words, to paraphrase Krissman, we reinstated the demand side as a crucial element of the migration equation in nineteenth-century China. As suggested by Prabhu Mohapatra, this helps to dispel some inconsistencies and restore to their historical dimension the unbalances and asymmetries of power that oversee, in different proportion, every process of migration. 6 On a more practical ground, this thesis’s main original contribution to the literature on the coolie trade is its attempt to examine a selected group of coolie “traffickers,” as a case study to further a deeper understanding of the mechanisms and the forces behind the development of the traffic. Following what has been called an approach of “history from the middle”, 7 we examined the business and personal trajectories of these migration intermediaries. Distinctive features of the Genoese-Peruvian trade diaspora during the years of the coolie trade were the prevalence of sea-based commercial activities, the retaining of strong ties with the hometowns through investments and philanthropy; a nodal structure centered on prominent families (Canevaro; Larco;
Pratolongo etc.) scattered across various port cities and linked by a web of intermarriage; and close integration within the local society and economic elite. It may
not have been only a coincidence, we observe, that a major role in the organization of the coolie trade was taken by first-generation immigrants, Italian or Basque, for instance, benefiting in their business from their experience of mobility and their seafaring skills. The other way around, there are also clues—particularly in the short-
6
Krissman, “Sin Coyote Ni Patrón”; Prabhu P. Mohapatra, “Eurocentrism, Forced Labour, and Global Migration: A Critical Assessment,” International Review of Social History 52, no. 01 (2007): 114–115.
7
Mar, Brokering Belonging, 4.
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lived parenthesis of the Lloyd Italiano—of at least attempts made by some of these
“transnational” coolie traffickers to reinvest the capitals and know-how accumulated from the coolie trade in the transportation of Italian or Iberian migrants to the American continent, even under system of indentured or assisted migration. 8 This suggestion, certainly fascinating, needs to be addressed in a separate work.
By looking at the experience of the coolies, sailors and ship captains, finally, this thesis has attempted to re-orientate the debate on the coolie trade to a sea-centered perspective. Special emphasis has been paid to the interactions of the Chinese “water world,” the Portuguese settlement in Macao, and the Sino-foreign frontier created by the treaty system and the foundation of Hong Kong. This calls for a broader study of the resurgence of piracy in the mid-nineteenth century, and of their links with the world of the Macao-based corretores during the highest stages of the coolie traffic.
On these largely unexplored historiographical routes, the compass to orient our research has been a privileged relation with untapped or largely ignored Italian and Portuguese primary sources. The thesis has drawn from three especially innovative sets of documents. First of all, the records of the Italian (Merchant) Marine and Foreign Affairs Ministries, containing scarce but extremely precious information on the traffickers and their voyages. Secondly, the study has employed a number of underexploited collection from Portuguese-language archives in Lisbon and Macao: the correspondence of Macao’s harbor master, disappeared from Macao’s historical archive (AHM) in the 1990s but available in Lisbon’s Arquivo Historico da Marinha (AGM);
and Macao’s judicial records, microfilmed by the Genealogical society of Utah in the 1970s, also available for consultation, albeit in poor conditions, in Macao’s historical archive (AHM). Finally, we complemented these sources with a thorough study of Hong Kong’s correspondence with the British Colonial Office, signaled long time ago by Fok Kai Cheong as a precious source for the study of Macao’s nineteenth century. 9 Other relevant, but less innovative, sources in Portuguese archives have been consulted as well, and crucial information has been extracted from the contemporary Macao or Hong Kong-based press, especially valuable for its general (and reciprocal) outspokenness on a series of delicate issues that would have not otherwise escaped the filter of the official
8
As recently suggested by Paulo Cesar Gonçalves, “Mercadores de braços: Riqueza e acumulação na organização da emigração européia para o Novo Mundo” (Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Universidade de São Paulo, 2008), 239–240.
9
Fok Kai-Cheong, “The Importance of the Hong Kong Archives for the Study of the History of Macao: A
Brief Introduction,” Revista de Cultura, no. 19 (1994): 143–46.
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“archive-producing” institutions.
Further research is needed in Cuban, Spanish, French and especially Peruvian archives to give a final shape to this work. The Peruvian National and Diplomatic archives, in particular, are expected to preserve huge amount of documentation on the management and control of the coolie trade. The main focus of the Peruvian historiography, however, has been pointed on the agricultural settlement and labor history of the Chinese coolies. Particularly covered have been in this light the records of the Agrarian archive (Archivo Agrario) and the court records of the labor conflicts on the plantations, 10 while little attention has been paid so-far on the commercial and maritime aspect of the coolie traffic. More insights are also needed to integrate the study of the Italo-Peruvian traffickers within the context of a series of transnational maritime diasporas that controlled large sections of the Latin American external commerce in the early and mid-nineteenth century.
10
