32 CHAPTER 2:
THE GLOBAL BACKGROUND: GUANO, SUGAR, ABOLITIONISM,
AND THE BIRTH OF A NEW WORLD LABOR MARKET
This chapter investigates the origins, causes and specificities of the Macao coolie trade within the nineteenth-century global system of labor migrations. The first part examines the consequences of the abolitionist policies in both the British Empire and the broader Atlantic world, and their links with the earliest attempts to introduce coolie labor in the British West Indies and Cuba. The second part addresses, instead, the social, political and economic conditions of the departure regions in South China. The coolie trade is interpreted in light of the century-old history of Chinese emigration, and its continuities and ruptures. Special attention is paid to the development of a labor migration network in Amoy (Xiamen) from the eighteenth century onward, and the rise of the Guangdong area as a source of labor migrants in the eve of the California gold rush. We then establish a connection between these events, the development of the guano industry in Peru, and the final takeoff of the coolie trade in the late 1840s and early 1850s.
2.1 Global migrations, indenture and the abolition of slavery in the Western hemisphere
Recent scholarship has identified the long nineteenth century (1830-1940) as the “age of global migrations;”1 a historical period characterized by the emergence of three major migratory streams, on a totally unprecedented extension and volume: the Atlantic migration of 55 million Europeans to the American continent; the internal colonization of Siberia and Manchuria by 48 million Chinese and Russian settlers in the second half of the century; and finally, the mass emigration of about 50 million Chinese and Indians to several destinations in Asia, Africa, Oceania and Northern and Southern America. Overall, more than 150 million people set in motion across the world’s landmasses and oceans.2
Part of this larger exodus, a smaller but significant movement of about two million indentured laborers was mobilized from several locations in Asia, Africa, Oceania and
1 Gabaccia and Hoerder, Connecting Seas and Connected Ocean Rims, 1. Cf. Adam McKeown,
“Periodizing Globalization,” History Workshop Journal 63, no. 1 (2007): 218–30.
2
Adam McKeown, “Global Migration 1846-1940,” Journal of World History 15, no. 2 (2004): 155–89. Slightly smaller figures are provided by Dirk Hoerder, Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).
33
Europe in response to the global processes of slave emancipation. As illustrated by David Northrup’s seminal Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, the revival of indenture in the nineteenth century was instrumental to the survival and expansion of the global plantation economy in a context of increasing demand and decreasing prices of tropical produced commodities.3 The success of indenture did not depend, Northrup continued, on lower costs of labor or higher productivity, but on the ecological constraint of scarcely populated production sites in the Western colonial world, and—especially in the case of sugar production—on plantation owners’ need to exert high degrees of labor control and coercion in the completion of crucial labor-intensive tasks, for example during the sugarcane reaping season (zafra).4 In this sense, he concludes, the providential inflow of contract laborers delayed and prevented the crisis of the plantation economy in the critical transitional timeframe until advances in technology and the organization of labor—hybrid forms of sharecropping and the separation of sugar mills from the plantations—radically transformed its classical configuration at the end of the century.
2.1.1 The British efforts to abolish the slave trade and slavery and their consequences Traditionally, the historiography on the abolition of the slave trade and slavery in the Atlantic world has been divided along the lines of the advocates of economic against cultural interpretations. According to Eric William’s classic Capitalism and Slavery (1944),5 for instance, it was the rise of a new form of industrial capitalism, fed up by the profits of the slave trade, which made the British plantation system—and its underpinning mercantilist policy—outdated and conflicting with the industrial lobbies pushing for “freedom of trade.” In this view, the final abolition of sugar protectionist tariffs in 1846 (Sugar Duties act) certified the newly dominant circles of cotton-manufacturers’ resolve to favor the import of cheap sugar from foreign sources (again, the slave importing Cuba and Brazil) over the survival of the plantation system inside the Empire.6 Other historians, lead in the seventies by Seymour Drescher, instead, have contested this “decline thesis”
3
Indenture had been, in fact, a crucial legal instrument in the European colonization of the American continent in the early modern era. For a comparison of the early modern and modern systems of indentured migrations see David W. Galenson, “The Rise and Fall of Indentured Servitude in the Americas: An Economic Analysis,” The Journal of Economic History 44, no. 1 (1984): 1–26; and the essays in Pieter C. Emmer, ed., Colonialism and Migration: Indentured Labour before and after Slavery, Comparative Studies in Overseas History (Leiden: Leiden Centre for the History of European Expansion, 1986).
4 Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834-1922, 33. An even more extreme example is
the digging of guano beds in the Chincha islands in Peru, which demonstrates how contract labor could become indispensable to compel workers to unhealthy, destructive and often lethal productions. See below.
5 Eric Williams, Capitalism & Slavery (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1944). 6 Ibid., 137.
34
arguing about the vitality of the British West Indies plantations at the time of abolition, and stressing the negative repercussion of the abolitionists’ policies calling this process a genuine “econocide”, the sacrifice of a flourishing economic sector to political and ideological motives.7
In the introduction of his dissertation on the coolie trade, Arnold Meagher pointed the attention on the failure of these two historiographical traditions, taken alone, to explain the substantial replication of slave-like labor relation through the resuscitated indentured system.8 If slavery had been inexorably surpassed by the rise of industrial capitalism, he stressed, why did it survive for over a century under the only relatively more socially acceptable form of indentured labor? And if it was the humanitarian stance of the British government that fostered abolition, continued, how could that very actor play a determinant role in the setting up of a “new system of slavery”?9 For obvious reasons of scope, we cannot undertake here a systematic analysis of this nexus. A persuasive attempt to answer Meagher’s questions has come from historians in the “world system” school— Dale Tomich, for instance—who suggested looking at the emancipation processes in a broader geographical perspective. The British Caribbean abolition can only be comprehended, Tomich argued, as integral “part of the cyclical expansion and restructuring of world economy”,10 in other words a global reorganization of the slave-driven sugar production system that incorporated, on one hand, the continuation of an illegal slave trade and slavery for most of the nineteenth century in places like Cuba and Brazil, and, on the other hand, the experimentation of hybrid forms of bonded labor— including the new Asian indenture in other formerly slave-driven areas of production.11
In fact the British abolition of 1807 did not put an end to the Atlantic slave trade, but simply shifted its barycenter from the British colonies to Cuba and Brazil. Current estimates calculate in over three millions the overall figure for the post-abolition
7 Seymour Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 1977). A synthesis of the debate in David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage : The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 231–250; see also Gabriele Turi, Schiavi in un mondo libero: storia dell’emancipazione dall'età moderna a oggi (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2012), 312–319.
8 Meagher, The Coolie Trade, 21–22.
9 The expression “a new system of slavery” is taken from John Gladstone, planter in British Guyana,
commenting the introduction of Indian coolies in the 1840s; Tinker adopted it as the title of his groundbreaking work on Indian indenture in the British Empire: Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas 1830-1920 (London: Oxford University Press, 1971).
10 Dale Tomich, Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor, Capital and World Economy (Lanham: Rowman and
Littlefield, 2004), 106.
11 Dale Tomich, “World slavery and Caribbean capitalism: The Cuban sugar industry, 1760-1868,” Theory
35
clandestine slave trade.12 The British policy of bilateral treaties and naval patrols, inaugurated after the Congress of Wien,13 did not bring significant results until the 1840s, and annual imports of slaves remained comparable to the highest averages of the eighteenth century until this date. As shown by David Eltis, moreover, the reorganization of the Cuban and Brazilian plantation system in these years relied on a massive inflow of British and foreign capitals; there was, in other words, a “positive correlation between exports of British products to Cuba and Brazil and the flow of slaves to those regions”,14 and even after the official abolition “British subjects owned, managed, and manned slaving adventures; they purchased newly imported Africans in the Americas; they supplied ships, equipment, insurance, and most important of all, trade goods and credit to foreign slave trader.”15
It is in this context that the British government extended its anti-slave-trade agenda by declaring the complete abolition of slavery in the British Empire (1833). Historians generally agree that the negative impact of the 1807 slave trade abolition on the British West Indies had been alleviated by the presence of a substantial reserve of slaves that had saturated their productive capacity, and by the abrupt disappearance of the principal direct competitor in the region, Saint Domingue, after the Haitian revolution.
The 1833 emancipation, instead, led almost directly, after the buffer of the apprenticeship system (1834-38), to a dramatic fall in productivity and land value of the plantations. What happened was that many former slaves, freed from the yoke of apprenticeship refused to prolong their work for their old masters, turning into self-employed cultivators on marginal lands (squatters), while those remaining on the plantations were often able to negotiate improved wages and working conditions, hence rendering the British plantations non-competitive with its slave-employing direct rivals.16
The Cuban demographer Juan Pérez de la Riva has called this attitude “the
12 Cf. the massive database edited by David Eltis et al., “Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade
Database,” 2008, http://www.slavevoyages.org/. (accessed 05/14). Also, David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York-Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 243–245.
13
Turi, Schiavi in un mondo libero, 66; Leslie Bethell, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade: Britain, Brazil and the Slave Trade Question 1807-1869 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 14. Cf. also João Pedro Marques, The Sounds of Silence: Nineteenth-century Portugal and the Abolition of the Slave Trade (New York-Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006).
14
Ibid., 68.
15 David Eltis, “The British Contribution to the Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade,” The
Economic History Review 32, no. 2 (1979): 211.
16 Walton Look Lai, “Sugar Plantations and Indentured Labor : Migrations from China and India to the
British West Indies, 1838-1918” (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1991), 1–15, also published as Walton Look Lai, Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian Migrants to the British West Indies, 1838-1918, (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1993).
36
fundamental population law” in plantation colonies: “cuando se produce un cambio social favorable al proletariado indígena, éste tiende a abandonar no sólo su ocupación anterior, sino también su lugar de residencia, produciéndose una gran movilidad geográfica.”17 This phenomenon was contained in the smaller islands, where the absence of free available land forced most of the ex-slaves manpower to remain on the plantations, but its repercussions were felt much heavily in the larger and most important colonies—Jamaica, and British Guyana—where sugar production shrunk respectively from an average yearly output of 54,225 to 33,431 (Jamaica) and from 51,278 to 31,865 (British Guyana) tons between 1834-38 and 1839-46.18
Tab. 2.1: The rise and fall of some sugar-producing countries, 1780-1880. Estimates in metric tons., selected years
B. Guyana Jamaica Mauritius Cuba St. Domingue Brazil
1780 2,400 44,386 12,654 58,928 - 1790 2,997 55,600 15,577 70,313 - 1800 1,210 70,100 28,419 8,929 - 1810 12,214 73,700 477 37,334 - - 1820 30,062 88,456 7,485 43,119 1,211 75,000 1830 59,790 68,962 32,750 73,200 83,000 1840 35,619 26,453 36,559 160,891 82,000 1850 32,695 28,750 55,163 223,145 138,000 1860 54,423 26,040 134,048 447,000 56,927 1870 75,776 24,598 98,742 726,000 101,501 1880 95,370 16,845 108,475 530,000 218,582
Source: Noel Deer, The History of Sugar (London: Chapman and Hall, 1950), 112, 131, 198–199, 203–204, 240.
2.1.2 Alternative sources of labor: West Africa, India, China
In his Dalla Schiavitù al Lavoro Salariato, Yann Moulier Boutang drew insightful conceptual linkages between slave, contract and wage labor. He identified a common denominator in a range of economic and extra economic forms of coercion—from the whip to vagrant and poor laws—shaped to prevent absenteeism and extract from the laborers what plantation owners called “a continuous and regular output”, averting the flight/escape from dependent labor.19 Looking at the response of British plantation
17 Pérez de la Riva, Los culíes chinos en Cuba, 1847-1880, 28.
18 Estimates by Lai, “Sugar plantations and indentured labor : Migrations from China and India to the
British West Indies, 1838-1918,” 522.
19 “Tutta la storia della costruzione giuridica del contratto di lavoro può essere riletta come la difficile
37
owners in the aftermath of emancipation, we observe a similar dynamics. On one hand, a stricter legislation tried to prevent the flight from the plantations by placing obstacles to the acquisition of land and self-employment by the freed slaves, and punishing vagrancy and unemployment. On the other, plantation owners turned to alternative channels of labor import. The initial attempts were made to substitute the slaves with “free” African laborers. Five years (or longer) contracts of indenture, paid in “exchange” for the transportation expenses, were selected as the most convenient legal tool to enforce a sufficient degree of labor control on the plantations without incurring the wrath of anti-slavery associations. Results, however, were hardly satisfactory. Along the first forty years of the nineteenth century only a few thousands African laborers were recruited through this scheme, mostly from coastal areas of West Africa, in particular those corresponding to modern Sierra Leone, where the local Kru population had traditionally furnished wage maritime labor on European oceangoing vessels.20 Projects to recruit free laborers in the African interior—that is from the same supply areas of the still ongoing slave trade—posed insurmountable problems, for the competition of the local slave drivers, which could gain better profit by selling slaves than selling indentured laborers, and for the predictable resistance of local populations.21
A more easily accessible source of laborers came as the collateral “byproduct” of the abolitionist crusade: freed slaves, rescued manu militari from the slave ships or coastal slave depots by the Royal Navy patrols, could be indentured and sent to the British colonies.22 However, it became soon apparent that this source could not provide a stable nor sufficient supply of labor. By adding up these two sources, it is estimated that the British West Indies received no more than 60,000 African contract laborers between 1807 and the 1860s, and only 8,000 between 1842 and 1847, at the peak of the critical post-emancipation labor scarcity crisis.23 Among plausible substitute labor sources, further 12.000 contract laborers were recruited from the Portuguese islands of Madeira and the
schiavitù al lavoro salariato, 17. A reflection on the flight in a contemporary perspective in Sandro Mezzadra, Diritto di fuga. Migrazioni, cittadinanza, globalizzazione (Verona: Ombre Corte, 2001).
20
Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834-1922, 46–47. A similar context facilitated, for instance, the emigration of specific Pacific Islanders: Laurence Brown, “‘A Most Irregular Traffic’: the Oceanic Passage of the Melanesian Labor Trade,” in Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World, ed. Emma Christopher, Cassandra Pybus, and Marcus Rediker (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 184–203.
21 Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834-1922, 50–51.
22 Monsieur Lawrence C Jennings, “French Reaction to the ‘Disguised British Slave Trade’ : France and
British African Emigration Projects , 1840-1864,” Cahiers d’études africaines 18, no. 69–70 (1978): 201– 13.
38
Azores and sent to Trinidad and British Guyana between the 1830s and the 1850s.24
Although all these means of recruitment reminded in some way the former slave trade, there is no doubt that the idea of substituting chattel slaves with contract laborers had taken roots firmly by the 1830s.25 It was in the heart of the Asian continent, with its massive population, however, that laid the most appealing source of contract labor. The first to penetrate this still untapped manpower reserve were the British and French planters in the Mascarene islands (Mauritius and Reunion). These colonial possessions had grown as major sugarcane production centers in the first decades of the nineteenth century, harboring a large and unchecked illegal slave traffic from both Africa and the Asian continent from about 1810 to the early 1830s.26 Already during the 1820s, building on existing South Asian networks of coerced labor mobility, the Mascarene’s plantations started to import, along with the slaves, small numbers of Indian indentured workers.27 After 1834 this flow began to be organized on a massive scale and with the support of the colonial authorities. Mauritius introduced more than 94,000 Indian coolies between 1834 and 1847, witnessing an increase of 10% in the sugar production that contrasted sharply with the contemporary decline of the Caribbean sugar colonies.28
The success of the Mauritius experience suggested that Indian laborers could have been brought with comparable results in the West Indies. Starting from 1838, and more consistently in 1845, Demerara (Britsh Guyana) became the first recipient of a imperial-organized Indian labor relocation that will bring until the aftermath of the first world war no less than 238,000 coolies to British Guyana, and over 438.000 in the whole West Indies; an overall 1.330.000 is estimated to have been exported to all destinations (including Mauritius) in the same timespan (Tab. 2.2).29
24 For a general overview Jo-Anne S. Ferreira, “Madeiran Portuguese Migration to Guyana, St. Vincent,
Antigua and Trinidad: A Comparative Overview,” Portuguese Studies Review 14, no. 2 (2007): 63–85. Also Steve Garner, “Atlantic Crossing: Whiteness as a Transatlantic Experience,” Atlantic Studies 4, no. 1 (2007): 117–32.
25 It became a global trend. Even in the Portuguese debate over abolition of slave trade, for instance,
projects to convey indentured African workers from Angola to Brazil were discussed as a potential replacement of the clandestine slave traffic. Marques, The Sounds of Silence, 145.
26
Richard B. Allen, “Satisfying the ‘Want for Labouring People’: European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500–1850,” Journal of World History 21, no. 1 (2010): 56; Richard B. Allen, “Licentious and Unbridled Proceedings : The Illegal Slave Trade to Mauritius and the Seychelles during the Early Nineteenth Century,” The Journal of African History 42, no. 1 (2001): 91–116.
27
Richard B. Allen, “European Slave Trading , Abolitionism , and ‘ New Systems of Slavery ’ in the Indian Ocean,” PORTAL, Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies 9, no. 1 (2012): 6–7.
28 Richard B. Allen, “Capital, Illegal Slaves, Indentured Labourers and the Creation of a Sugar Plantation
Economy in Mauritius, 1810–60,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 36, no. 2 (June 2008): 151–70.
29 Scholars have long argued about the extent to which Indian and other sources of indentured labor were to
39
Tab. 2.2: Transcontinental movement of indentured workers, 1831-1920, by area of departure.
Source: Destination years Quantity
Africa All destinations 1831-1870 96,032
British Caribbean 1831-1867 39,332
Reunion (Fr.) 1841-1860 37,200
French Caribbean 1851-1870 19,500
China All destinations 1841-1920 386901
British West Indies 1851-1884 18,587
French Caribbean 1851-1860 2,250 Suriname 1851-1874 2,979 Cuba 1847-1874 138156 Peru 1849-1874 117432 Mauritius 1841-1860 850 Reunion 1841-1850 1,350 Tahiti 1861-1870 1,100 Queensland 1841-1860 5,950 Hawaii 1851-1900 34,309 Traansvaal 1903-1907 63,938
India All destinations 1831-1920 1336030
British West Indies 1831-1920 438231
Mauritius 1831-1910 455187 Reunion 1841-1890 74,854 French Caribbean 1851-1890 79.089 Suriname 1871-1920 34,503 East Africa 1891-1920 39,437 Natal 1861-1920 152932 Fiji 1871-1920 61,015
Japan All destinations 1861-1920 85,202
Peru 1891-1920 20,168
Hawaii 1861-1920 61,015
Pacific Islands All destinations 1861-1920 96,046
Peru 1861-1864 3,470
Queensland 1861-1910 62,795
Fiji 1861-1920 27,334
Hawaii 1861-1890 2,444
Yucatan Cuba 1849-1871 About 2,000
Java Suriname 1851-1920 19,330
Source: David Northrup, Indentured labor in the age of imperialism, 1834-1922, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, New York 1995, p.156-157; Stanley L. Engerman, “Contract Labor, Sugar, and Technology in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Economic History, 1983, 635–59.
cases benefited the migrants, and involved their agency. Cf. Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834-1922; Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas 1830-1920; Verene A. Sheperd, “The ‘Other Middle Passage?’: Nineteenth-century bonded labour migration and the legacy of the slavery debate in the British-colonised Caribbean,” in Working slavery, pricing freedom: perspectives from the Caribbean, Africa and the African diaspora, ed. Verene A. Sheperd (Kingston: Ian Randle Publisher, 2002). It seems safe to assume, maybe with the exception of the early years, the conditions of Indian indentured laborers were less coercive than those experienced by their Chinese counterparts, both in the process of recruitment, in the sea voyages and in the labor exploitation at their destination. The difference may be shown by the comparison of mortality rates, return voyages and remittances, as defended by Walton Look Lai, “Asian Contract and Free Migrations to the Americas,” in Coerced and Free Migration: Global Perspectives, ed. David Eltis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 229–58. Crucial as well, is the absolutely unparalleled number of revolts, suicides, and other acts of passive and active resistance before, during and after the maritime voyages, documented by overwhelming sources (see Chapter 4 and 7).
40
After India, the Chinese Empire was soon identified as a second, arguably inexhaustible, pool of laborers, thanks to its teeming population, and its well-known disposition to migrate in the Southeast Asian European settlements. The option to import Chinese labor in the West Indies, in fact, had already been tested by the British government even before the end of the slave trade. In 1806, the favorable reports of a Royal Navy captain, William Layman, in regards to Chinese laborers observed in the Southeast Asian colonial environment, pushed forward a preliminary scheme of emigration.30
Under these auspices, in October 1806, 192 (of 200) subject of the Celestial Empire landed on Trinidad from the East India company ship Fortitude, mostly recruited by Captain Layman through agents in Macao. The whole operation, however, resolved in failure, as it did not match the expectations of the labor importer to subdue the emigrants to a labor regime sufficiently hard to make their investment profitable. Most of them actually travelled back to their homeland with their guaranteed return tickets rather than staying on the plantations.31 Replying to Layman’s appeals to repeat his experiment, a parliamentary commission appointed in 1811 further concluded that enforcing more coercive means of recruitment on a large scale would endanger the existing commercial ties with the Qing Empire.32
In the 1840s, however, the state of subjection imposed by the First Opium War on the Chinese Empire made possible for the Western powers to access more freely to that labor reserve. In 1843, an experimental plan to convey Chinese coolies to Mauritius was implemented with success in British controlled Singapore. As we will see in the next paragraphs, the emigration avenue that since the late seventeenth century had connected
30 “They were inured to hot climate, are frugal, illustrious and peaceful, skilled in tropical produce [...]
excellent cultivators of sugar”, Lai, The Chinese in the West Indies, 1806-1995, 23-27. On the European admiration for Chinese agriculture cf. Meagher, The Coolie Trade, 48–51. A parallel plot of skilled labor import was devised by the Portuguese imperial court in Brazil during the Napoleonic wars, with the ultimate goal of establishing a commercial link with Macao and introducing a large scale production of tea in the Latin American country. Cf. Ibid., 198–201; Carlos Francisco Moura, “Relations Between Macao and Brazil in the Nineteenth Century,” Revista de Cultura, no. 22 (1995): 33–54.
31
William Layman further stressed that the cause of that failure relied in the character of the emigrants and the form and place in which he had obtained them: “By means of a Portuguese agent at Macao, about 200 Chinamen (without a single female) were procured, having nothing of Chinese about them but the name, and obtained from the diseased and profligate refuse of the indolent and degraded population of a Portuguese town, unaccustomed to the habits of their industrious countrymen, and total strangers to the qualifications requisite for their future employments in the West Indies.” Walton Look Lai, The Chinese in the West Indies: a Documentary History, 1806-1995 (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 1998), 43. Of the few dozen staying after the expiration of their contracts, the majority established urban retail shops.
32 “Report from the Select Committee appointed to consider the practicality and expediency of supplying
41
China to the Malaysian strait and Singapore played a major role in the early stages of the coolie trade. However, it was not until the establishment of the Peruvian and Cuban routes that the coolie trade as we commonly define it, would finally blossom.
2.1.3 Cuba: the nineteenth-century sugar boom
Unlike the heavily state-backed immigration projects pursued across the British imperial system, Cuba and Peru began importing Chinese laborers in a context of sustained economic growth—result of the expanding sugar and guano exports—which gave the local elites the required private capitals to operate the risky but rewarding labor recruiting endeavor.
Northrup emphasized the privileged connection between the expansion of the global sugar market and the establishment of a worldwide contract labor system. In fact, world sugar exports grew from 300,000 metric tons. in 1790 to over 10 million by 1914,33 driven by the redefinition of the consumerist models of the Euro-Atlantic rising urban population—the British “tea with sugar” combination34—and a steady tendency to the decrease of world sugar prices. Sugar was, by all respects, the absolute “king”35 of the nineteenth-century Cuban economy and the main attractor factor for the clandestine slave trade and the indentured labor trade.
The rise of the Cuban sugar complex needs to be treated more in depth. By the early 1760s the production of sugar cane in the Spanish colony was almost non-existent. Sugar was produced more for domestic consumption than export, despite the existence of ideal climatic conditions and soil fertility. The initial stimulus for the birth of a modern sugar industry was given by the investments of British entrepreneurs during the short-lived occupation of the island in 1762, which outlined the first long-term plans of mass sugarcane cultivation.36 A second push came from the immigration of wealthy French planters fleeing the Haitian revolution of 1790. This providential inflow of capitals and know-how allowed a decisive takeoff, aided by a positive conjuncture created by the disappearance of the major regional competitor and the increasingly attractive North
33 Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834-1922, 30. 34
Ricardo Rene Laremont and Lisa Yun, “Chinese Coolies and African Slaves in Cuba, 1847-74,” Journal of Asian American Studies 4, no. 2 (2001): 105. Also fundamental in this transformation the introduction of other “drugs”, stimulant beverages like coffee or chocolate; see the classic Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking, 1985).
35
“El rey azúcar y otros monarcas agrícolas”, Eduardo Galeano, Las Venas Abiertas de América Latina (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI editores, 1980), chap. 2, 83.
42
American demand, freed from British monopoly after independence.37
Compared to the exhausted soils of the British Isles, consumed by decades of intensive exploitation, Cuba could rely on several competitive advantages: large areas of fertile land, a rising number of slaves (thanks to the persistence of the clandestine slave trade) and the technological advantages of a latecomer.38 In the early 1830s Cuba surpassed the production of the British colonies in the Caribbean, emerging as the world leading producer of sugar with a gross output of more than 100,000 tons per year, which will more than double in the following decade.
This extraordinary expansion of the Cuban plantation complex had been made possible by a huge and continuous influx of slaves on the island. Notwithstanding the official abolition proclaimed by the Spanish government in 1818, Cuba imported over 430,000 slaves in the first forty years of the nineteenth century; accounting for over the 43% of the Cuban population in 1841.39 The clandestine slave trade itself, managed by some of the major local planters, stimulated the inflow of capital and reinvestment in productive innovations. The deployment of the most advanced technologies of the time in both the production and the transportation of sugar, through the organization of an extended network of plantation-serving railroads, accelerated the concentration of extraction and refining operations into huge and efficiently managed industrial-scale factories.40
This virtuous circle depended entirely on the availability of continuous replacements for the naturally decreasing plantation’s manpower, in a demographic regime characterized by high mortality (5% per year) and an unbalanced male to female ratio (circa 5:1) that obstructed a natural replication of the slaves population.41
In the mid-1840s a temporary inability to attain a sufficient slave supply menaced to bring the Cuban sugar industry on the verge of collapse. A renewed diplomatic and
37 David Murray, Odious Commerce: Britain, Spain and the Abolition of the Cuban Slave Trade
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
38
Tomich, “World slavery and Caribbean capitalism,” 307.
39 Tomich, Through the Prism of Slavery, 61.
40 The industrial transformation of the Cuban sugar production is well represented in the classic work by
Manuel Moreno Fraginals, El ingenio : complejo económico social cubano del azúcar (La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1978). As we mentioned, Fraginals suggested this compelled a transition to wage labor, as slaves were unable to adapt to these new conditions; this view has encountered several convincing critiques: cf. Tomich, “World slavery and Caribbean capitalism,” op. 310–316; and, more broadly, Rebecca Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860-1899 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).
41 Architraves of this new policy were Lord Palmerston’s Bill of 1839, which allowed the search and
seizure of Portuguese ships; the ensuing Portuguese abolitionist treaty of 3 July 1842, the 1845 Act of Aberdeen, which allowed the capture of Brazilian vessels, and the Spanish Ley penal de abolición y represión del tráfico negrero passed in the same year, but generally deemed a failure: Murray, Odious Commerce: Britain, Spain and the Abolition of the Cuban Slave Trade, 241; Turi, Schiavi in un mondo libero, 214; Marques, The Sounds of Silence, 123–126.
43
military effort of the British government to suppress the slave trade, in fact, started to produce its first appreciable successes, at least towards the Spanish colony, whose annual imports of slaves dropped by 90% to an average little above 1,000 slaves per year between 1845 and 1848, to rise again only after 1849.42 Increased shipping risks had also impacted on the price of slaves, which grew by about 25% between the 1830s and 1840s.43
These factors of crisis presented the Cuban elite with the imperative to find alternative sources of manpower. The issue was taken in the hands of the Real Junta de Fomento y de Colonización an institution that represented the interests of the largest Cuban landowners and sugar barons. Initially, they discussed the immigration of free white settlers from Europe, but the predictable failure in that direction of the designated Comisión de Población Blanca, after the arrival of around 2,500-3,000 “unruly” galizian braceros,44 soon turned the Cuban planters towards different markets. As De La Riva explains, in fact,
lo que la industria azucarera pedía insistentemente entonces no eran colonos, sino braceros, y en un país de esclavos aterrorizados, resultaba absurdo pensar en introducir jornaleros libres […] Mas, lo cierto fue que ni la Junta de Fomento ni el Gobierno parecen haber nunca tomado muy en serio ninguno de estos pueriles planes de colonización blanca.45
The first schemes for the import of Chinese coolies in Cuba were devised in 1844 by the brothers Julián and Pedro Zulueta of the Zulueta & Co. (London), businessmen of international stature, with strong interests in both the slave trade and in the sugar production. In 1846 they organized in collaboration with a prominent British merchant in Amoy, James Tait (appointed Spanish Consul in the city) the expedition of an initial contingent of 600 coolies to the island. The project was approved by the Comisión de Población Blanca, of which Zulueta had taken the direction that year. The two ships contracted for the first load, the Oquendo and the Duke of Argyle reached Havana on 3 and 12 June 1847, landing in total 571 coolies, contracted for 8 year terms for a salary of 3 pesos per month. Upon arrival they were detained in quarantine in a former warehouse for fugitive slaves,46 transferred to the Junta for 170 pesos each (per contract), and
42 Ibid., 164. Brazilian traffic survived relatively unscathed until the early 1850s, but would then meet its
end earlier than their Caribbean counterpart: Bethell, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade.
43 Pérez de la Riva, Los culíes chinos en Cuba, 1847-1880, 39. 44
“Un caso de trata de blancos: los gallegos de Feyjoo Sotomayor” in Ibid., 47–50.
45 Ibid., 50.
44
auctioned in batches of 10 at a subsidized price of 70 pesos. Most of them ended on the plantations, but small groups were destined to public works, railway construction. Two Chinese were given to the island’s governor, Leopoldo O’Donnell, for his private service.47
However, after this first experiment, the traffic was suspended and until late 1852 there were no further shipments. The reasons for this interruption are not entirely clear: according to Pérez de la Riva, “Varias causas contribuyeron, en primer lugar, la hostilidad de los negreros que temían que la competencia hiciese bajar el precio de su mercancía.”48 Some owners complained about the difficulties of communication (in the absence of interpreters), emphasizing the unruliness and lack of discipline of their coolies, who were a bad example for the slaves of their plantations. To manage the newcomers and ensure “la subordinación y disciplina, sin los cuales podrán dañar en vez de producir beneficios a la agricultura”,49 the Cuban government issued a specific regulation in 1849, which advised the planters to assign a corporal (mayoral) every ten Chinese, “to guide, assist and watch over the laborers in their work” (art.10), and authorizing the use of physical punishment comparable, if not identical, to those enforced towards the slaves, including runaways (art. 11 and 14).50
In December 1851 a new commission appointed by the Junta de Fomento reopened the traffic allowing private enterprises into the affair. In 1853 as many as 15 new shipments arrived in Havana landing 4,307 coolies.51 From this point on the traffic would grow steadily, expanding and moving from Amoy to other points on the China coast.
2.2 The Chinese “migratory tradition”
De La Riva’s explanation of the 1847-1853 gap does not assess satisfactorily the dynamics of the supply in Amoy and its hinterland. In fact, it is impossible to understand the birth of the coolie trade without addressing the historical conditions of the Chinese
47 Ibid., 78; cf. also Urko Apaolaza Avila, “Un análisis sobre la historiografía en torno al alavés Julián de
Zulueta y Amondo,” Sancho el Sabio, no. 18 (2003): 121–40.
48 Pérez de la Riva, Los culíes chinos en Cuba, 1847-1880, 78. 49
Ibid., 211.
50
“Art. 10: Ten Asiatics on the same estate require the direction of a white mayoral, who will take care of and watch them, and attend with them at their work; Art.11: The colonist disobeying the voice of the superior, whether it be refusing to work, or any other obligation, may be corrected with 12 lashes; if he persists, with 18 more, and if even thus he should not enter on his course of duty, he may be put in irons, and made to sleep in the stocks […] Art.14: the colonist that runs away, besides being subject to Article 6, shall be placed in irons for 2 months; for 4 in case of repeating it; and for 6 in the second.” “Reglamento April 10, 1849”, in Meagher, The Coolie Trade, 301–303.
51
As we shall see in Chapter 4.2, the maritime expeditions were concentrated in two stages of the year, following the trend of the monsoon in the China seas. In fact, this number includes 8 shipments departed at the end of 1852.
45
southern and eastern provinces and the evolution of its centuries-old migratory links with Southeast Asia and the Pacific world.
2.2.1 Migrations and the State in Imperial China
Interactions between China and the Nanyang (南洋), its southeastern maritime frontier date back to the very beginning of Chinese civilization, but rose consistently during the Song (960-1279) and Yuan (1277-1368) dynasties. The Mongol invasions of the late thirteen century, in particular, are conventionally assumed to have set in motion the first mass migration of Chinese refugees into Southeast Asia.52
It is during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) however that a general pattern of State policy towards emigration and overseas commerce took shape, aimed at regulating commerce through the channel of official “tributary trade” and to contain the political implications of a Chinese presence in the area.53 The management, control and submission of Chinese settlements overseas, along with the establishment of tributary relations was one of the objectives of Zheng He’s great expeditions to Southeastern and South Asia in the early fifteenth century (1405-1431).54 In this context, a ban on private overseas trade was in place discontinuously for almost all the duration of the Ming dynasty (1371 to 1405, and 1424 to 1567),55 but it did not curtail the flourishing of unlawful private run maritime enterprises in the shape of smuggling or piracy (enlarging the ranks of the so-called Japanese pirates, wokou).56
Since these times, the discrepancy between the official policies and the actual local practices became a constant in the history of Chinese maritime frontier.57 The background of the imperial policies lied in the Confucian ideological order of Chinese society, where merchants occupied the lowest rung of the social ladder and permanent emigration from one’s native place was considered a betrayal of the Emperor, as well as of the cardinal value of “filial piety” towards the ancestors.58
The rise of the Manchu Qing dynasty (1644) reproduced and toughened these policies
52
Yen, Coolies and Mandarins, 6–7.
53
Takeshi Hamashita, China , East Asia and the Global Economy Regional and historical perspectives (London-New York: Routledge, 2008), 12–38.
54 Pan, Sons of the Yellow Emperor, 4–5. 55
Yen, Coolies and Mandarins, 12–13.
56 Kuhn, Chinese Among Others, 9.
57 Overestimating the impact and effectiveness of imperial measures against emigration, past studies of
Chinese emigration have contributed to convey an inappropriate image of China as a closed and isolationist country—and interpreted subsequently both early modern and modern Chinese migratory movements as the product of a modernizing impact of the West, whether in its Early Colonial or Imperialist configuration.
46
under a major security concern, as the Qing armies engaged in a long and exhausting campaign of repression of Ming loyalist resistance organized by powerful merchant/pirate warlords like the notorious Zheng Chenggong (Koxinga). In 1661, a draconian measure of “scorched earth” (the Haijin, 海 禁) ordered the forced relocation of the coastal settlements of Guangdong and Fujian under 50 li (miles) from the seaside.59 However, most of the restrictions to maritime commerce were lifted soon after the defeat of the Zheng family’s domain in Taiwan (1683), leading to a general recovery of legal maritime commerce in the eighteenth century.60 This corresponded to a new wave of Chinese settlement abroad, although a harsh policy against emigration—the punishment for returning emigrants was beheading—remained nominally in place. 61 Emigrant communities took the role of cultural and economic mediators in the crucial nodes of the European commercial empires in Asia (i.e. Batavia, Manila, Malacca) and the consolidating indigenous states of Southeast Asia, contributing in the processes of early modern globalization and intercontinental trade.62
Conventional periodizations of Chinese migration have indicated in the first Opium War and the “opening” of China the watershed between a limited regional pre-modern migratory pattern of merchants (huashang), and a foreign driven global mass migration of indentured proletarians (huagong), whose “demographic and spatial scale abrupt[ly] depart[ed] from the past.”63 This vision however has been questioned by historical evidence pointing the dynamism, scale and the scope of the seventeenth and eighteenth-century movements, and by a reassessment of the continuities between these two periods.
In fact, consistent numbers of Chinese migrants had started to settle outside the traditional Nanyang area already during the early modern era. Recent studies have shown,
59 Pan, Sons of the Yellow Emperor, 7–8.
60 Anthony Reid, “Le oscillazioni dell’interazione cinese con il Sud-Est asiatico sul lungo periodo,” in
Cinesi d’oltremare: L'insediamento nel Sud-Est asiatico, ed. Anthony Reid (Torino: Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli, 2000), 41–78.
61 Under Qing legislation of 1712 and the partial amnesty of 1717 Chinese residing abroad were subjected
to capital punishment as suspects of conspiracy and treason. However, more specific regulations and decrees issued between the eighteenth and mid-nineteenth century adopted less draconian punishment for the emigrants. Harsh treatment was also reserved to migration brokers. According to Wang Sing-wu, specific rules were set up by emperor Yongzheng and Qianlong towards passage brokers and headmen (ketou), normally subjected to the cangue, flogging or deportation. A 1734 decree by Yongzheng held shipmaster responsible of the death of illegal passenger by beheading. Wang, The Organization of Chinese Emigration, 18–20.
62 Meagher, The Coolie Trade, 63; Geoffrey C. Gunn, First Globalization: The Eurasian Exchange,
1500-1800 (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003); Eric Tagliacozzo and Wen-Chin Chang, Chinese Circulations: Capital, Commodities, and Networks in Southeast Asia (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011); Leonard Blussé, “Chinese Century. The Eighteenth Century in the China Sea Region,” Archipel 58 (1999): 107–29.
47
for example, how the establishment of the Galeon de Manila brought to the settlement of 60,000 to 100,000 Chinese in the American continent either as free men, or as servant or slaves.64 Moreover, it has been demonstrated, substantial labor migration links were established through Southeast Asia as early as the mid-eighteenth century, through various formal or informal debts or contracts with individuals or organizations. The major change in the nineteenth century was a progressive (but not complete) substitution of native junks with Western vessels65—and later steamers—which enabled a quantitative shift after the 1870s.
2.2.2 Social and geographical background of the nineteenth-century Chinese emigrants
Common explanations of the origins of the nineteenth-century Chinese mass migration generally refer to a number of internal pushing factors that coincidentally summed up after the 1850s. The first was overpopulation. Supported by increasing agricultural outputs and new intensive cultivations, in effect, Chinese population experienced a dramatic rise after the end of the Ming-Qing transition, growing from 150 to 300 million between 1700 and 1800, to reach a peak of 380 to 450 million at the middle of the nineteenth century.66 Other regularly accepted explications include the impact of revolts, famine, natural disasters and mass poverty, exacerbated by the progressive economic and military penetration of Western imperialism.67 These arguments however are twofold: in a sense, the first Opium War set the preconditions for the direct ingress of Western interests in the issue of emigration. In 1842 the Treaty of Nanjing ended the hostilities imposing the opening of five Chinese ports (Canton, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Ningbo, and Shanghai) to
64
Edward R. Slack Jr., “The Chinos in New Spain: A Corrective Lens for a Distorted Image,” Journal of World History 20, no. 1 (2009): 35–67. See also Tatiana Seijas, “Transpacific Servitude: The Asian Slaves of Mexico, 1580— 1700”, (Unpublished Ph.D dissertation, Yale University, 2008).
65 It seems clear from such scattered evidence that for all the 1840s and earlier Chinese laborers were being
engaged on Western ships in an unsystematic way. These shipments did never brought however to the setting up of a stable emigration system. We may include under this category, for example, the shipment of coolies from Amoy to French Reunion in 1845, sometimes regarded, but without sufficient reason as the starting date of the coolie trade. Meagher, The Coolie Trade, 135.
66
William T. Rowe, China’s Last Empire: The Great Qing (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 291. Official censuses analyzed by the classic work of Ho Ping-ti return an estimate of 430 million: Ho Ping-ti, Studies on the Population of China, 1368–1953 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959). These numbers were criticized as huge overestimations by William Skinner, who proposed the lower figure of 380 million based on its analysis of Sichuan province local records: G. William Skinner, “Sichuan’s Population in the Nineteenth Century: Lessons from Disaggregated Data,” Late Imperial China 8, no. 1 (1987): 75. There is no clear evidence, however, that migrants originated from particularly overpopulated districts, and the major outflow of migrants of the last part of the century, unfolded in conditions of demographic stagnation.
67 This traditional view is well represented by June Mei, “Socioeconomic Origins of Emigration: Guandong
48
Western merchants. The British acquired a further foothold with the occupation of Hong Kong, which would rapidly growth into a major commercial entrepôt and later the major center for the free Chinese emigration. Moreover, several unlawful opium stations were also organized on the Chinese coast in non-treaty areas, some of which will later become—like Cumsingmoon (Jinxingmen) and Swatow (Shantou)—major centers of coolie export. Extraterritorial jurisdiction in these places allowed Western subject and their employees to circumvent with impunity existing Chinese norms on opium smuggling and the recruitment of emigrants.68
On the other hand, as stated by Kuhn, “the ‘opening of China’ not only produced the mechanisms for recruiting labor but also uprooted that labor socially and economically.”69 The illegal opium trade and its effects on the Qing Empire’s balance of payments and its silver-copper monetary system profoundly disrupted Chinese society in the coastal provinces, deepening a cyclical economic depression; military defeat and natural calamities accelerated the loss of prestige of the ruling dynasty and its mandate of heaven (Tianming, 天命), paving the way to two decades of major insurrections in several core and peripheral provinces, including the large-scale Taiping revolt (1850-1864), responsible of an estimated 20 million deaths.70 Related more closely with the emergence of the coolie traffic in Southern China, the loss of employment of around 100,000 boatmen and porters in the Guangdong-Jianxi route after the relocation of the bulk of Western trade from Canton to the tea producing areas of Fujian and Zhejiang, propelled the Red Turban revolt which ravaged the Pearl River Delta between 1853 and 1855.71
From all these events, according to this line of interpretation, derived a strong natural push to migrate abroad: “thousands were torn from their livelihoods, impoverished, and driven to desperate measures (including emigration) merely to survive.”72 Push factors alone, however, seem inadequate to provide explanations for the actual configuration of migration routes and practices.
In general terms, traditional “push-pull” models in migration history have been criticized and discarded in favor of explanations based on chain networks, agency and
68 Ibid. 69
Kuhn, Chinese Among Others, 111.
70 Jonathan D. Spence, God’s Chinese Son: The Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan (London:
HarperCollins, 1996); John King Fairbank, ed., The Cambridge History of China, Vol.10: Late Ch’ing 1800-1911, Part 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 264–318.
71
Kuhn, Chinese Among Others, 111; Frederic E. Wakeman Jr., Strangers at the Gate: Social Disorder in South China, 1839-1861 (Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966).
49
intermediary structures.73 Studies of the European Atlantic migration have completely dismissed the so-called “uprooted” paradigm,74 while similar explanations are still employed to describe the causes of Asiatic migrations. Depicting the nineteenth century Chinese migration as a desperate flight from poverty of displaced people, McKeown argues, means “to understand it as having existed in isolation from the forces that shaped European emigration and Chinese people as having behaved according to categorically different impulses than Europeans.”75 Revisionist interpretations are revaluating instead the role of agency, chain migrations and cultural traditions of mobility.76 According to Haiming Liu, for instance,
For most Chinese, immigration, instead of being an exotic adventure, was a rational choice based on aspirations for social advancement. Coming from such an environment, Chinese immigrants were by no means land-bound, conservative, and inward-looking people with no potential to settle down overseas. Many of them were not the impoverished and needy peasants who would take whatever jobs were available, but they were highly motivated people aspiring to upward mobility.77
Moreover, overpopulation, famine and revolts do not explain convincingly the cluster-regional78 distribution of the active Chinese migration areas in Guangdong and Fujian, rather than in provinces like Jiangsu and Zhejiang, more severely affected by natural disasters and revolts with equal if not superior, on paper, infrastructure for the shipment of migrants overseas in the ocean-bound ports of Shanghai and Ningbo.79 They also fail to grasp the role of internal inequalities and social stratification of Southern Chinese society, nor to the proactive activity of local crime, bandits and pirates involved in the coolie “migration industry” at large.80
A consolidated migratory tradition and the drawing of structural chains-links, or corridors,81 between the emigration destinations and the place of departures seems to
73 Harzig and Hoerder, What is Migration History ?, 62–64. 74
Gabaccia, “Is Everywhere Nowhere?,” 1129.
75 McKeown, “Chinese Emigration in Global Context, 1850–1940,” 96.
76 Chen Yong, “The Internal Origins of Chinese Emigration to California Reconsidered,” The Western
Historical Quarterly1 28, no. 4 (1997): 520–46; Haiming Liu, “The Social Origins of Early Chinese Immigrants : A Revisionist Perspective,” in The Chinese in America: a History from the Gold Mountain to the New Millennium, ed. Susie Lan Cassel (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002).
77 Ibid., 26.
78 Gozzini, Le migrazioni di ieri e di oggi: Una storia comparata, 86; Giovanni Gozzini, “The Global
System of International Migrations, 1900 and 2000 : a Comparative Approach,” Journal of Global History 1, no. 3 (2006): 321–41.
79 McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks..., 66–67.
80 As argued in the previous chapter, the concept of migration industry is borrowed from a growing spate of
studies in historical and contemporary migrations; cf. Hernández-León, “Conceptualizing the Migration Industry”; Ivan Light, “The Migration Industry in the United States,” Migration Studies, 2013, 1–18.
50
have provided the former with a major advancement in establishing a durable pattern of migration, both in the form of free migration and the coolie trade. Also essential was the continuity of the structures of emigration with patterns and practices of the Chinese internal labor market and household economy. The fundaments of migration in China, as shown by Kuhn’s seminal study, rested in a prolongation of the “adaptive strategy of family labor export”, which allowed household unities to rely on the remittances of their able-bodied young males working in urban or manufacturing centers or abroad.82 As McKeown notes:
A Cantonese villager was just as likely to migrate to the local county town, Canton, Shanghai, or some other urban center as to go abroad. Similarly, as villagers from relatively poor counties like Kaiping in Guangdong province migrated abroad in search of profit, so even more impoverished villagers from further inland would migrate to Kaiping to work as wage laborers on the lands left behind.83
Migrant’s management became an extension of labor agency. Chinese wage laborers were commonly hired, even across considerable distances, by middlemen “labour agents” (baogong or gongtou), linked to them by a common regional background, that earned a share of their salary and administered food and lodging in behold of the employer.84 This way, Kuhn suggests a link between internal migration patterns of wage laborers inside the Pearl River Delta region and the development of the transoceanic Cantonese emigration. Seasonal labor was regularly mobilized from the rural or cash-cropping (silk, tobacco and sugar) areas of the four counties (sze yup) to the more urbanized and commercially active centers in the three sam yup districts, like the iron and porcelain producing Foshan, or the manufactory center of Shunde.85 The port cities of Canton and Macao also offered opportunities for wage earning, and small numbers of migrants are reported buying tickets or contracting with Chinese, but also foreign ship captains in these ports to find employment in Southeast Asia for the winter seasons.86
82
Ibid., 36.. On the extended family’s structure of Taishan county’s emigrants see Hsu, Dreaming of Gold. Male-dominated migration was the gender repercussion of this relation; cf. Adam McKeown, “Transnational Chinese Families and Chinese Exclusion, 1875-1943,” Journal of American Ethnic History, 1999.
83
McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks..., 65.
84 Kuhn, Chinese Among Others, 125. In fact, as emphasized by Elizabeth Hu De-Hart, coolie contracts
were regularly termed labor contracts, gugong hetong (雇工合同) in their Chinese versions; Evelyn Hu-DeHart, “Huagong and Huashang: The Chinese as Laborers and Merchants in Latin America and the Caribbean,” Amerasia journal 28, no. 2 (2002): 70.
85 Kuhn, Chinese Among Others, 36.
86 The earliest reference to Chinese contracting employment overseas with foreigners is mentioned,
according to McKeown, in the 1827 Registrar for the Straits Settlements, where the Governor Stanford Raffles complained about “the great profits that Portuguese from Macao made in transporting debtor servants to the Straits […] evading inspection and ignoring regulations requiring such servants to be
51
Some of the observations made above are also valid when we shift our attention from the general context of Chinese migration to the specific case we defined as “coolie trade.” We must premise that what we are assessing was a minor fraction of the total Chinese migration of the time. McKeown estimates that only about 750,000 people, about the 4% of the total migration of Chinese between 1840-1930, was engaged through formal indenture to European contractors; including along with the proper “coolie trade”, different systems of labor employed in Sumatra and Bangka under the control of Dutch colonial authorities (300.000 people between 1870-1920), the early twentieth century state-organized migration to South Africa (ca. 60.000) and minor streams to Malaya, Australia and islands in the Pacific and Indian oceans (around 200.000).87 The percentage rises significantly, however, if we limit the timeframe to the middle nineteenth century. According to Zhu Guohong’s gross estimates, adjusted by Yu,88 between 1800 and 1850 more than 200,000 out of 320,000 migrants from China went to the Nanyang, and only a few hundreds as coolies to Latin America;89 in the third quarter (1850-1885) however, the coolie trade had risen to a number of over 280,000 (21%) out of a total migration of 1.28 million people including 350,000 to the Malay Peninsula and the Strait Settlements, 45,000 to Philippines, 250,000 to the East Indies, 25,000 to Hawaii, 55,000 to Australia, 30,000 to Canada, 160,000 to the US.
In this last case then, as recognized even by McKeown,90 proactive recruitment practices (including kidnapping), and individual circumstances (gambling losses, opium addiction, escaping criminal sentences or debts) seems to have played a role at least as important as the general “push of misery” in providing potential migrants for the Western
registered with the police. He concluded that, ‘A profit derivable from the importation of human beings seems nearly allied to slave dealing and very likely to give cause to degenerate into such abominable practice,’ and recommended more stringent interventions.” McKeown, “How the Box Became Black,” 28. A second classic reference in the literature is the account of migrant brokers boarding ships at Macao made by Commissioner Lin Zexu in 1839: McKeown, “How the Box Became Black”; Mei, “Socioeconomic Origins of Emigration: Guandong to California, 1850-1882”; Wang, The Organization of Chinese Emigration.
87
McKeown, “Chinese Emigration in Global Context, 1850–1940,” 102.
88
Zhu Guohong 朱國宏, Zhongguo de haiwai yimin: yixiang guoji qianyi de lishi yanjiu 中国的海外移民: 一 项 国 际 迁 移 的 历 史 研 究 [Chinese Emigration: A Historical Study of the International Migration] (Shanghai: Fudan Daxue Chubanshe, 1994), quoted in Henry Yu, “The Intermittent Rhythms of the Cantonese Pacific,” in Connecting Seas and Connected Ocean Rims, Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans And China Seas Migrations from the 1830s to the 1930s, ed. Donna Gabaccia and Dirk Hoerder (Leiden: BRILL, 2011), 393–394.
89 Zhu’s original estimates of 10,000 to Cuba and 10,000 to Peru before 1850 appears greatly exaggerated. 90 McKeown, “Transnational Chinese Families and Chinese Exclusion, 1875-1943,” 315–316.
52
labor recruiters.91 In addition, preexisting labor mobility patterns in Guangdong province shaped the practice of coolie recruiting, as displayed by the innumerable reports—which we will discuss more in detail later in this text92—of people deceived to depart for Macao under false offers of labor in that city, and hence forced to embark for Cuba or Peru under threat and violence. In fact, contrasting with the practices of the Credit-ticket system, the coolie trade was organized as a sale of people in which the potential emigrants did not need to pay any service to the coolie brokers, whose remuneration derived directly from the Western led shipping companies and ultimately from the Latin American landowner’s need to import and purchase manpower.
Similarities and connections may be drawn, instead, between this system and the practice of selling child, often women (mui tsai; pinyin: mei zai, 妹仔) in a hybrid form between slavery, adoption and apprenticeship. Of the very small number (a few hundred) of women and children departing from Macao for Latin America, most had been recruited in this form, with a high probability to be employed as domestic servants or prostitutes in their destinations. According to Sucheta Mazumdar, the shadow of slavery in Chinese society reemerged in the coolie recruitment practices. China possessed ‘‘one of the largest and most comprehensive markets for the exchange of human beings in the world’’, and in many parts of China ‘‘nearly every peasant household was directly or indirectly affected by the sale of people’’.93 We may add to this picture, as we will expose in Chapter 7, the custom of kidnapping people for ransom (or sexual exploitation) commonly exercised by Cantonese pirates in South China.94
2.2.3 Rise and fall of the Amoy coolie network, 1847-1852
Some historians have tried to identify the exact point in time when the coolie traffic
91 Nor is the case to trust the opinion of contemporary Sinophobes and supporters of the traffic, according to
which the emigrants were the worst and poorest outcaste of the Chinese society, “men who have probably lived all their days in poverty, the most abject, outcasts, from all communion with a better class, and too deficient in common intelligence to better their lot; who, perhaps, until within the walls of a barracoon, have never tasted one decent meal, and have neither the industry nor ability to secure one. Beggar in purse, energy and intellect”; Mr. Cleverly to Acting Consul Winchester, Macao, 24 December 1859, BPP, Correspondence respecting emigration from Canton, 1860, 61.
92 See Chapter 4.1.
93 Sucheta Mazumdar, “Localities of the Global: Asian Migrations between Slavery and Citizenship,”
International Review of Social History 52, no. 1 (2007): 130. See also Pamela Kyle Crossley, “Slavery in Early Modern China,” in The Cambridge World History of Slavery. Vol. 3, AD 1420-AD 1804, ed. David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 190; David M. Pomfret, “‘Child Slavery’ in British and French Far-Eastern Colonies 1880-1945,” Past & Present 175–213, no. 201 (2008).
94 We will discuss the links between the coolie trade and piracy more in detail in Chapter 4.1 and especially
