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PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This thesis examines the role of Italian merchants in the so-called Macao coolie trade to Latin America in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Italian traffickers, almost all Genoese settled in Peru, participated intensively in the infamous business and were responsible for about one sixth of its overall volume. Their contribution was particularly significant in the decade 1864-1874, when they held a quasi-monopoly of the introduction of Chinese coolies in the Andean country.
Italian historians have essentially overlooked this topic. With the exception of a few isolated studies in the 1980s, almost nothing has been written on this subject, and a comprehensive account of the Italian role in the coolie trade has yet to be carried out, partly because of the scarcity, fragmentation and dispersion of the available primary sources.
The pages that follow offer my preliminary attempt to fill this historiographical gap. I present here an updated, revised and expanded version of my Bachelor thesis, which I dedicated to the same topic from a perspective of history of international relations.1 Two years of field research in Lisbon, Macau and Hong Kong have made it possible to overcome my original overreliance on Italian diplomatic and consular sources and shift the emphasis of my research from the role of the Italian consuls to the social and economic background of the Italian coolie traffickers. Conducting field reseach in the sites of origin and departure of the coolies, in particular, has enabled me to entrentch my work in a more solid grasp of the local political and social dynamics, moving away from a nation-framed approach towards a more nuanced analysis of the interplay and interaction of local and global factors in a transnational perspective. For the same reason, however, further research into Peruvian and Cuban archives is required to address the life and working conditions of the Chinese coolies, and their Italian traffickers, in their receiving Latin American societies.
1 “La tratta dei coolies cinesi in America Latina: il ruolo della colonia italiana in Perù 1847-1874”,
(Unpublished B.A. thesis, Università di Pisa, 2010). Significant portions of my B.A. thesis have been translated, with some integrations, into this work; in particular, Chapter 6, and parts of Chapter 2.1, 2.3, 4.3, 4.4, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 7.2, 7.4.
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This thesis has been realized within the framework of the Master Européen en Histoire
Politique et Culturelle de l'Europe Médiévale, Moderne et Contemporaine, an
inter-university agreement between the University of Pisa, the ISCTE-IUL of Lisbon and other Higher Education institutions in the European Union. During my time as student at the ISCTE-IUL I have benefited from the insights and support of all the faculty members of the Department of History, and I learned immensely by attending the seminaries and courses of Fatima Sà, Carlos Maurício, Magda Pinheiro and Maria João Vaz. Professor Maurício has provided his precious assistance and encouragement as co-advisor for the elaboration of this thesis, and I therefore owe him a special thank.
This work would not have been completed without the help and support of many people and institutions in different countries and continents. First and foremost, I would like to thank Claudio Zanier, my second de-facto advisor, who has accompanied this project since its inception in my B.A. thesis, and has encouraged and guided me in all my further steps despite his formal retirement.
A significant part of the research for this work has been conducted at the University of Macau thanks to the generous support of the Erasmus Mundus MULTI fellowship
(2012-2013); I have also received financial support from the University of Pisa for my
researches in Portugal in summer 2013. For my stay in Macau, I thank Edith Mok and the staff in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities for their constant assistance with all my practical needs. The Department of History of the University of Macau has been a second home for me, and I found there a stimulating research environment. I am grateful
to Vincent Ho for familiarizing me to the depths of Macao’s fascinating history; I
especially enjoyed our periodical conversations on this project and his always constructive and thought-provoking comments. I have been incredibly lucky to meet Akiko Sugiyama and work under her guidance on her research project on the maritime circulation of Italian and French musicians in nineteenth-century Southeast Asia. I owe her a great debt for sharing sources and ideas on our intersecting subjects, and covering part of my travel and fieldwork expenses. Robert Antony has introduced me to the history of Chinese piracy and gave precious suggestions for the advance of my studies on the connections between piracy and the coolie trade.
In the past years I had the opportunity to present parts of this research in a number of seminaries and conferences. I thank Rogério Puga of the Centro de História de Além Mar (CHAM) in Lisbon for allowing me to discuss my findings, still in a developmental stage, in the framework of his Seminário Permanente de Estudos Sobre Macau in May 2012,
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and for putting me in touch with several historians of Macao and the Portuguese overseas expansion. I am very grateful to Rogério for his continued and enthusiastic correspondence and for supervising my short stay and affiliation at the CHAM from July to September 2013. I also thank the participants in the History Graduate Symposium at the University of Hong Kong (May 2013) and the International Conference Media and
the Portuguese Empire in Lisbon (November 2013), where I presented sections of this
study; I especially thank John Carroll and Chandrika Kaul for their valuable feedback.
Along my numerous and sometimes stressful voyages, I have enjoyed the assistance and kind consideration of the staff of a number of libraries and archives: Biblioteca della Società Geografica Italiana, Polo Bibliotecario Parlamentare, Archivio di Stato di Genova (ASGE), Archivio di Stato di Torino (ASTO), Archivio Storico Diplomatico del Ministero
degli Affari Esteri (ASDMAE), and Archivio Centrale dello Stato (ACS) in Italy; Centro
Científico e Cultural de Macau (CCCM), Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa (SGL), Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino (AHU), Arquivo Historico da Marinha (AGM), and
Arquivo do Ministério dos Negócios Estrangeiros (AMNE) in Portugal; Biblioteca
Central de Macau, Arquivo Histórico de Macau (AHM), Hong Kong Central Library and University of Hong Kong’s Libraries (HKUL) in the People’s Republic of China. I would like to thank also Elena Franchini of the Biblioteca di Filosofia e Storia in Pisa, for helping me collecting books and articles from all over the world.
I have discussed aspects of my work with various scholars of Macao, Chinese and Latin American history, who have always provided insightful comments and
encouragement; in particular I wish to mention Catia Brilli, Gabriella Chiaramonti, Jorge
Santos Alves, Alfredo Gomes Dias, Beatriz Basto da Silva, Teresa Lopes da Silva, Cristina Nogueira da Silva, Isabel Pina, Rogério Puga, and Francisco Vizeu Pinheiro. Needless to say, all errors and omissions are entirely my own responsibility.
Last but not least, a number of colleagues and friends have shared and offered invaluable academic and personal advice in the past long years. I need to thank my peers Antonio Campana, Nicola Gabellieri, Filippo Espinoza, Ettore Bucci, Fabio Santullo, Eugenio Fortunato and the thousand coffee-breaks we spent chatting about our research interests at the (former) History Department in Pisa. João Neves, Emilio Santos and Daniella Mak in Lisbon have also assisted my researches in innumerable ways, as did Chen Bin and all my history graduate and MULTI fellows in Macau. To all them, and the people who have patiently endured my long absences, I wish to extend my utmost and sincere gratitude.
