Giuseppe Lovera, “Sulla tratta dei coolies a Macao,”

Chi tratta l'uomo quale bestia da soma o da serraglio deve aspettarsi che esso si faccia tale per rivendicare la propria oltraggiata dignità e libertà.

Giuseppe Lovera, “Sulla tratta dei coolies a Macao,”

Rivista Marittima V, no. 12 (1872), 567.

1 CHAPTER 1:

INTRODUCTION

Between the late 1840s and 1874 more than 280,000 semi-coerced contract laborers, commonly known as coolies, were shipped from South China to Peru, Cuba and other Latin American countries in replacement of the declining Atlantic slave trade. By the early 1860s the Portuguese entrepôt of Macao had emerged as the primary center of this controversial endeavor, attracting a multi-national network of speculators and maritime entrepreneurs allured by the perspective of huge and easy profits.

Among them, a number of Italian emigrants in Peru, almost all of Genoese or Ligurian origins, established themselves as key players in the business of Chinese emigration, almost dominating its Peruvian branch amidst its most flourishing years, from the mid- 1860s to 1874. Part of a wider commercial diaspora, settled in the main Latin American ports since the last days of the Spanish colonial administration, they engaged in almost all the segments of the trade, acting either as seamen, ship-owners, charterers, consignees or emigration agents; Italo-Peruvian landowners also employed Chinese labor in their cotton and sugar estates on the Peruvian coast.

The purpose of this thesis is to assess the scope and significance of this involvement, so-far almost entirely neglected by the Italian and international historiographies. Drawing on a broad set of primary sources from Italy, Portugal, Hong Kong and Macao, we disclose the critical role held by these Italian merchants in the resumption and reorganization of the coolie trade after the withdrawal of British and North American carriers in the early 1860s, and the Spanish-Peruvian conflict of 1864-1867. The study of a single group of traffickers, from a perspective of “history from the middle”,

sheds light on some hidden aspects of the organization and mechanisms of the coolie traffic at its apex, paradoxically less studied than its earlier experimental stages.

From this standpoint, special emphasis is paid to the traffic’s maritime dimension; in other words, we cast light on the historical experience of the transpacific passage as the primary stage for the dramatic encounter of the entangled histories of Italian traffickers

1 I borrow the term from Lisa Rose Mar, Brokering Belonging. Chinese in Canada’s Exclusion Era, 1885- 1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 4. By “history from the middle” I intend to stress the focus of this study on the emigration middlemen and agents rather than on the emigrants themselves, in contrast with the approach of “history from below”, or historia de la gente sin historia (expression coined by Pérez de La Riva), adopted in several accounts of the coolie condition in the Cuban and Peruvian plantation systems.

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and Chinese emigrants. In a sea-centered approach, we examine the manifestation of agency and resistance on the high seas, addressing the bloody episodes of shipboard revolts that marred the historical record of the coolie trade impacting and influencing the contemporaries’ imagination.

This introductory chapter presents an overview of the main themes and questions addressed in the thesis, drawing its conceptual foundations and establishing its theoretical framework. First, we define the terms “coolie” and “trade/traffic” used throughout the text, and justify the choice of Macao as the geographical core of our inquiry. The study of this subject, besides, requires a comprehensive understanding of the mechanisms of the nineteenth-century globalized world and its flows of commodities and people, and calls for a reflection on the interplays between local and global levels of analysis. A second part reviews the available historiographical literature, outlining the major themes and debates surfaced in the past decades, with special emphasis on the Italian and Portuguese historiographies. The chapter then concludes with a brief sketch of the structure and contents of the thesis.

1.1 Definitions

In this work we employ the terms “coolie”, “coolie trade” and specifically “Macao coolie trade” as conceptual anchors to circumscribe a single and coherent stream from the composite and multifaceted Chinese emigration of the mid and late-nineteenth century. In particular, our definition delimits the migration of:

indentured laborers, signing five or eight years contracts to work at fixed wages in exchange of their relocation costs;

departing mainly, but not only, from Macao;

destined to Cuba, Peru and other plantation-driven Latin American economies;

limited to the 1840s-1874 timeframe.

This choice does not rest on a full historiographical consensus. In the panorama of

contemporary Chinese migration studies, for example, there are currently two main

alternative categorizations. The first model, adopted by the huaqiao shi (華 僑 史 ,

Overseas Chinese studies) and crafted by its undisputable doyen Wang Gungwu,

distinguished four classes of emigrants, separating manual and unskilled workers

(huagong, 華工) from merchants (huashang, 華商), circular “sojourners” (huaqiao, 華),

3

and second generation migrants (huayi, 華裔).

The present leading paradigm among Western trained scholars, instead, divides these emigrants according to their legal status at departure: free passengers, debt-bonded migrants—the so-called “credit-ticket” system

— and formally indentured laborers; a classification, it should be noted, that builds upon categories elaborated and already in use in the nineteenth century.

In this view, contract or indentured migrants can be distinguished from the so-called “credit-ticket” passengers or other grey forms of debt-bonded migration—more typical of the emigration of Chinese laborers to Southeast Asia and North America—for the specifically active role of non- Chinese recruiting agents and the penal enforcement of the signed agreements in the host countries.

1.1.1 What is a “coolie”?

Our definition of “coolie” is meant to further separate, for operational purposes, a coherent geographical and chronological unity within this third group of indentured migrants. Its character as a deeply loaded, non-neutral term, however, requires some further disambiguation. First of all, the word “coolie” itself has carried very different meanings in the past. The term emerged from the corruption and incorporation of South Asian words into the languages of the Western commercial empires in the Early Modern era. Linguists have not been able to trace unequivocally the source of this contamination, but the current interpretation propends towards three possibilities: the Tamil expression kuli, meaning to hire (or, by extension, hired labor), the Urdu quli, slave, or, less likely, the name of a local tribe kuli from South-East India.

What seems more interesting, though, are the passages that brought this word to its

2 Wang Gungwu, China and the Chinese Overseas (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1991), 3–12.

3 There have been, however, contrasting interpretations of the nature of this so-called “credit-ticket” system:

a classical view of the credit-ticket migrants as little different from formally indentured workers, defended for example by Gunther Barth in the 1960s, has been convincingly challenged by more recent accounts stressing the existence of a deep gulf in individual agency between them. Cf. Gunther Barth, Bitter Strength: A History of the Chinese in the United States 1850-1870 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964); Patricia Cloud and David W. Galenson, “Chinese Immigration and Contract Labor in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Explorations in Economic History 24, no. 1 (1987): 22–42. More recently Elizabeth Sinn has further questioned the opportunity of calling this method a “system”, noting the large constellation of arrangements employed by Chinese migrants to fund their voyages; Elizabeth Sinn, Pacific Crossing:

California Gold, Chinese Migration, and the Making of Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013), 337, n.25.

4 See Lynn Pan, ed., The Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999); Lynn Pan, Sons of the Yellow Emperor. A History of the Chinese Diaspora (New York:

Kodansha Globe, 1994).

5 Lydia Potts, The World Labour Market: A History of Migration (London-New Jersey: Zed Books, 1990), 63–65; Jan Breman and E. Valentine Daniel, “Conclusion : The Making of a Coolie,” The Journal of Peasant Studies 19, no. 3–4 (1992): 268–95.

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modern usage. Its first known record, in the Portuguese form cule, is reported in Japan, in a letter by the Portuguese Jesuit Luís Frois discussing the movements of a Japanese feudal army of 10,000 soldiers and 10,000 coolies—in other words, servants or porters.

Ostensibly, Frois had picked the term in his earlier permanence in Goa, between 1548 and 1563. The word spread into the South, Southeast and East Asian pidgins and patois in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, taking its prevalent English spelling “coolie.” It then spread to China through the early Sino-Western commercial contacts and was incorporated in the Chinese language in a variety of transliterations; the modern form kuli 苦 力 , literally “bitter work”, consolidated probably only in the Late Qing and Early Republican periods.

At this stage, the word “coolie” held a non-specific meaning of hired laborer, porter, servant or menial worker, but starting with the nineteenth century it became increasingly associated with the concept of Asian—Chinese and Indian—

immigrants abroad.

A specific “commercial connotation”

of the term, to identify exclusively the indentured migrants, appeared in this context, but coexisted with its alternatives. The

“coolies” were, according to this reading, only the emigrants pressed into service by coercion—the victims, in other words, of the coolie “traffic”—and designed as a specific class of “cargo” by the Western merchants.

Other terms shared this meaning: the Cantonese chu chai (pinyin: zhuzai, 猪 仔, literally “piglets”),

while in the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking world their most common label was “chinos contratados” or

“colonos asiáticos”—Asian settlers: a fictional and somewhat ironic euphemisms to describe laborers intended as temporary by the very letter of their contracts.

6 Louis Frois, Cartas do Japão, ll. fl.4, quoted in Ibid., 269; Beatriz Basto da Silva, Emigração de cules:

dossier Macau 1851-1894 (Macau: Fundação Oriente, 1994), 27.

7 As discussed by Robert Irick, Chʼing Policy Toward the Coolie Trade, 1847-1878 (Taipei: Chinese Materials Center, 1982), 6–8.

8 We borrow this poignant expression from Giovanni Battista Beccari, Il commercio Chinese nel 1865:

cenni geografici, statistici e commerciali (San Giovanni Valdarno, Fi: M.Righi, 1869).

9 Barth, Bitter Strength, 51.

10 According to Samuel Wells Williams, it was a reference to the way employed to catch and carry swines, which emphasized the dehumanizing treatment they were submitted to. See “Subsídios para o estudo dos dialectos crioulos do Extremo Oriente: Textos e notas sobre o dialecto de Macao”, in João Feliciano Marques Pereira, Ta-Ssi-Yang-Kuo. Archivos e Annaes do Extremo Oriente Portuguez (Lisboa: Bertrand, 1901), 458. The origin however seems to have indicated the practice of feeding the emigrants from a single long trough, according to Adam McKeown, “How the Box Became Black: Brokers and the Creation of the Free Migrant,” Pacific Affairs 85, no. 1 (2012): 28.

11 As underlined by Lisa Yun, The Coolie Speaks : Chinese indentured laborers and African slaves in Cuba (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008), xix. It is not entirely clear whether the term “colono” was deliberately employed to disguise the real conditions of the contract concluded with the coolies (in fact it had no equivalent in the Chinese-language copies of the contracts, translated as worker), or rather, as it seems more probable, it derived from the common roots that the traffic shared with the state-sponsored

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Another issue arises from the derogatory and racist connotation the word acquired in the late nineteenth-century, especially in the debate over Chinese exclusionary laws in the United States and other “White settler colonies” of the British Empire.

The “coolie stereotype” will be employed to picture the Chinese communities abroad, independently from their legal status, as alien and constitutively unfree “self-exploiting” cheap workers.

Recently, however, a process reappropriation of the term “coolie” as historical category has been coherently promoted by scholars in the field of Asian American studies, in a twofold effort to emphasize the self-identification of Chinese laborers abroad as victims of unjust and excessive exploitation,

and rescue their neglected experiences of conflict and resistance from the oblivion of mainstream narratives of the Chinese diasporic communities structured around the success-stories of merchant and businessmen.

1.1.2 Humans as commodity

The expressions “trade”, “traffic”, “commerce” or “sale” of coolies were used by the contemporary critics of the traffic to underline its analogies with the African slave trade.

For almost all its duration, in fact, the coolie trade was targeted by a powerful humanitarian campaign, pivoted by the English-language global press, calling for—and eventually influencing—a radical reform of its abusive features or its total abolition. As explained by the Italian Navy officer Giuseppe Lovera, stationed in the China Sea in 1872, this lexicon had been explicitly adopted to separate this traffic—as practiced in Macao—from other, more legitimate, strands of Chinese migration:

Il traffico dei Coolies, quale lo si pratica in Macao, deve a mio avviso dirsi Tratta, giacché riflette uomini che, schiavi della miseria loro fruttata dal vizio, mancando di

“white colonization” projects devised, both in Cuba and Peru, to import European permanent settlers in the 1840s.

12 The literature about Chinese exclusion has grown exponentially in the last two decades. Fundamental have been the works by Adam McKeown, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); Erika Lee, At America’s gates: Chinese immigration during the exclusion era, 1882-1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003);

Mar, Brokering Belonging. For an overview of this scholarship refer to the collection of essays Sucheng Chan, ed., Chinese American Transnationalism: The Flow of People, Resources and Ideas between China and America during the Exclusion Era (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006).

13 It is singular to observe how this meaning partly evolved out of the humanitarian campaign against the coolie traffic, shifting from a sympathetic image of the coolie as slave – victim of coercion – to that of the self-exploited worker, bounded to unfree labor by his inner racial, cultural and historical heritage; in Kuhn’s words, “it was as if the evil of slavery had tainted the very people who were its victims.” Philip A. Kuhn, Chinese Among Others: Emigration in Modern Times (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), 211; Lee, At America’s gates, 27; Sinn, Pacific Crossing, 52.

14 Yun, The coolie speaks, xix–xx.

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ogni altro mezzo per soddisfarlo, cedono alle lusinghe degli agenti della Tratta […]

contro la piena rinunzia in loro favore del proprio libero arbitrio e volontà nello impiego delle loro forze. Tale tratta è diretta verso l’Havana ed il Perù, ove i Coolies, succedendo agli schiavi africani, sono considerati e trattati siccome tali per la durata del loro impegno

Excepting some inevitable exaggerations, the coverage given by these humanitarian activists generally holds the scrutiny of a serious historical analysis. Although terms neo- slavery, disguised slavery, semi-slavery, para-slavery have been variously employed by historians to better contextualize the analogies and differences of the two phenomena, the majority of the scholars approaching this field have resisted, to quote Lisa Yun, the revisionist temptation to dismiss as pure “sensationalism” these coeval representations.

The designation of “trade” also emphasizes one of the crucial and defining features that distinguishes this specific migration from other flows of indentured or debt-bonded Chinese emigrants

: the use of transferrable contracts as a means to actually buy and sell for profit—in the fictive form of exchanging “a piece of paper”—the laborers themselves.

In the words of the Italian ambassador in China and Japan, Vittorio Sallier de La Tour, that was the “original sin” of the traffic, the key to explain the overexploitation and the abuses it carried in comparison with other emigration schemes:

Finché vi saranno arrolati cinesi comprati sopra un mercato per essere rivenduti in un altro, non si potrà mai distruggere l’idea che essi non sieno uomini, ma merci, non si potrà mai sperare che sieno trattati umanamente nei luoghi di partenza o di arrivo o a bordo delle navi, non si potrà ottenere che i loro salarii salgano fino al livello delle mercedi accordate agli uomini liberi

Keeping a focus on contract migrations as a trade in laborers allows to bridge a gap between studies of migration and the slave trade, avoiding concerns on the identities and labor conditions of the emigrants—which have already been adequately covered—and highlights the importance of commercial networks in influencing, shaping and organizing contract migration flows, particularly in a stage preceding a chain-driven mass migration.

15 Giuseppe Lovera, “Sulla tratta dei Coolies a Macao,” Rivista Marittima V, no. 12 (1872): 566.

16 Lisa Yun, “Under the Hatches: American Coolie Ships and Nineteenth-Century Narratives of the Pacific Passage,” Amerasia Journal 28, no. 2 (2002): 51.

17 Some scholars have argued that this feature distinguished for-profit private-run emigration schemes from other state-supervised indenture colonization projects, like the Indian indenture for most of its course, characterized by less exploitative intents; see Walton Look Lai, “Asian Diasporas and Tropical Migration in the Age of Empire : A Comparative Overview,” Journal of Chinese Overseas 5 (2009): 44.

18 Vittorio Sallier de la Tour, “L’emigrazione cinese”, Bolettino Consolare, 1872, 57.

19 We refer here to the theoretical concepts of “commerce of migration” and “migration industry”

developed by studies of the brokering networks in the nineteenth century European migration and recently readapted to modern migration flows; Cf. Robert F. Harney, “The Commerce of Migration,” Canadian

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This approach, historian Adam McKeown argued, has sometimes informed a tendency to over-victimize the Chinese coolies and deny them their rightful historical agency.

If many of the coolies were indeed victims of kidnapping, decoy, and other questionable recruitment methods, it would be unfair to entirely disregard the experiences of those who consciously chose to migrate in a hope to improve their individual condition, and in a relative understanding of the arrangements they were accepting. On the other hand, we contend, the fact that coolies, even the voluntary ones, were considered commodities—

and treated as such—by their traffickers and employers bore very tangible and practical consequences on their lives; it is the duty of the historian to portray also this side of the picture. Various strategies of deprivation of individuality and sheer violence, we contend, were deliberately and consciously pursued by traffickers and planters to subdue the coolies to an architecture of oppression instrumental to the maximization of their profits.

The idea of the commodification of the labor force, finally, is a powerful conceptual framework to understand the position of the coolie trade in a middle ground between slavery and supposedly “free” labor relations. An interesting corollary can be added if we read this process through the lenses of Karl Polanyi’s conception of the embeddedness of labor in a network of social and cultural relations. A distinctive feature of the “great transformation” of the long nineteenth century, Polanyi stressed, had been the processes of disembeddedment of the so-called fictitious commodities—labor, land, money—from their cultural and social milieu;

in the case of labor, abstracted from the person of the laborer, the result of this process would have been ultimately the “destruction of the human being”

through its eviction from its existential social and cultural web of support.

Extending Polanyi’s analytical framework, we may try to interpret the experience of the coolie in the destination countries as that of people abruptly displaced and uprooted

fails to Explain International Migration,” International Migration Review 39, no. 1 (2005): 4–44; Rubén Hernández-León, “Conceptualizing the Migration Industry,” in The Migration Industry and the Commercialization of International Migration, ed. Ninna Nyberg Sorensen and Thomas Gammeltoft- Hansen (London: Routledge, 2012), 25–45. Cf. also the essays of Ulbe Bosma, Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, and Aditya Sarkar, “Mediating Labour: An Introduction,” International Review of Social History 57, no. S20 (August 2012): 1–15; Amarjit Kaur, “Labour Brokers in Migration: Understanding Historical and Contemporary Transnational Migration Regimes in Malaya/Malaysia,” International Review of Social History 57, no. S20 (August 2012): 225–52.

20 Adam McKeown, “The Social Life of Chinese Labor,” in Chinese Circulations: Capital, Commodities, and Networks in Southeast Asia, ed. Eric Tagliacozzo and Wen-Chin Chang (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011), 61–65.

21 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, 3rd edn (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 71–81.

22 Ibid., 171.

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by a system built precisely for their oppression and exploitation. The story of the coolie trade is also the story of the efforts these coolies had to made in order to rebuild from scratches a survivable social environment—a “niche”, to use Kuhn’s concept

—in conditions far worse than those encountered by the free or credit-ticket Chinese migrants, whose exodus was tied in a more familiar web kinship, lineage and district-based network of security, mutual aid and cooperation.

This fundamental difference explains as well their adoption of more radical and extreme expressions of resistance and agency.

1.1.3 Macao: an emigration in-between place?

The third conceptual anchor we used to define the object of this study is geographical.

We identified a specific Macao coolie trade (emphasis mine), characterized by a coherent historical development, clear chronological limits, and a relatively autonomous organization. As we can see from the following chart (Fig. 1.1), based on a selection of primary and secondary sources, the Portuguese colony concentrated three-fourths of all of contract/indentured emigration from various Chinese ports between 1847 and 1874, practically monopolizing the trade after the early 1860s. This largely justify its structural association with Macao in the discourse of the anti-coolie trade humanitarian campaign of these years, and explains the persistence of this connection in the imaginary of the contemporaries after its ending.

The choice of Macao as the main focus of our inquiry, moreover, allows us to move from a national to a more nuanced sub-regional perspective, diverging from a tradition of Beijing-centric narratives which has mainly interpreted the nineteenth-century Chinese emigration through the filter of the Qing dynasty policies and attitudes, overlooking some of its specifically local, Cantonese, actors and features.

23 Kuhn, Chinese Among Others, 42–43.

24 Elizabeth Sinn, “Xin Xi Guxiang: A Study of Regional Associations as a Bonding Mechanism in the Chinese Diaspora. The Hong Kong Experience,” Modern Asian Studies 31, no. 2 (1997): 375–97. Also Michael Williams, “Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta Qiaoxiang,” Modern Asian Studies 38, no. 2 (May 2004): 257–82.

25 See Chapter 4.3.

26 See, for example, Irick, Ch’ing Policy Toward the Coolie Trade; Ching-Hwang Yen, “Ch’ing Changing Images of the Overseas Chinese (1644-1912),” Modern Asian Studies 15, no. 2 (1981): 261–85; Ching- Hwang Yen, Coolies and Mandarins: China’s Protection of Overseas Chinese during the Late Ch'ing Period (1851-1911) (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1985).

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Analyzing the competing emigration hub established in the British colony of Hong Kong in the same years of the Macao coolie trade—but oriented principally towards California, Australia, Canada, and Southeast Asia—historian Elizabeth Sinn has recently introduced the concept of “in-between place”

in the study of human migrations, defined as an intermediary station in the circular movement of “migrants and migrants’ things”, acting as a node for the flow of remittances, goods, letters and people’s rests—what Kuhn defined as “corridors”

—between the emigration countries and the emigrants’ native places. According to Sinn, this concept can be appropriated and adapted to different geographical and historical settings:

I also offer Hong Kong as in-between place to alert scholars to the possibility that in- between places exist in other migration movements as well—although perhaps not functioning in exactly the same ways as Hong Kong. Perhaps they could explore other types of “inbetweenness.” […] The migration trajectory was seldom a bee-line

27 Elizabeth Sinn, “Hong Kong as an In-between Place in the Chinese Diaspora, 1849–1939,” 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), 225–247.

28 Kuhn, Chinese Among Others, 4.

0 5000 10000 15000 20000 25000 30000

1847 1849 1851 1853 1855 1857 1859 1861 1863 1865 1867 1869 1871 1873

Amoy (11.339) Canton, Whampoa, Cumsingmoon (18.377)

Swatow (24.953) Shanghai, Ningbo (512)

Hong Kong (10.934) Macao (213.233)

Fig.1.1: Annual departure of coolies from South China 1847-1874. Source: Author’s elaboration; AHU, SEMU, DGU, Correspondência de Macau e Timor, cx. 42 (1873); BO (1851-1874), Arnold Meagher, The Coolie Trade: The Traffic in Chinese Laborers to Latin America 1847-1874 (Philadelphia: Xlibris, 2008) 371- 406; Mario Castro de Mendoza, El Transporte Marítimo En La Inmigración China, 1849-1874 (Lima:

Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología, 1989). Data is approximated by defect and relatively inaccurate for the earlier years.

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and dead ends, and what lay in between inevitably affected the migration experience in profound ways.

Can we assume a similar paradigm to describe the peculiar case of Macao in the years of the coolie trade? As a migratory node, Macao’s harbor saw the departure of at least 210,000 emigrants between 1851 and 1874, and the transit of a considerable number of people, estimated in above 40,000,

stopped from embarking to Latin America thanks to the latest Portuguese emigration legislation’s prescriptions. In strict terms, moreover, Macao never became a source of emigrants—at least not significantly—but kept its role as a center of recruitment and shipment for the duration of the traffic. Most of the coolies sent overseas from the Portuguese colony had been hired by emigration brokers in the surrounding, densely populated, areas of the Pearl River Delta: the agricultural “four counties”, sze yup (pinyin: siyi, 四邑) of Xinhui, Enping, Kaiping, and Xinning (later renamed Taishan ); the manufacturing “three counties” of sam yup (sanyi, 三邑) Panyu, Shunde, and Nanhai; or the districts of Xiangshan,

bordering Macao to the northwest, and Yangjiang, further south.

On the other hand, many specificities of Macao’s traffic fail to fit properly Sinn’s original model. The transnational links between the Portuguese entrepôt and the coolies shipped abroad were by no means as developed as those of the British colony. In particular, there was nothing comparable in scale to the jinshanzhuang (the Chinese commerce with California), nor equivalent flows of returnee emigrants and remittances.

Employed mainly in rural plantations, under oppressive systems of exploitation and labor control, coolies departed from Macao had no access to the variety of consumption choices of corresponding emigrants in urban environments like San Francisco or Vancouver, and were far less reachable by merchandises from China, with the notable exception of opium.

This explains a higher rate of assimilation. “Chinese who had finished their indentures”, McKeown observes, “were left isolated and impoverished, with few active connections to China. They tended to take Spanish names, intermarry, and gradually

29 Sinn, “Hong Kong as an In-between Place...,” 247.

30 Alfredo Gomes Dias, “Do tráfico de escravos à emigração dos cules,” Revista Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias, no. 4–5 (2001): 109–17. Statistics of repatriation are available only for the years 1869-1873 (through the BO); it may be argued, however, that before the establishment of the Superintendencia in 1868, repatriations were a marginal phenomenon (see Chapter 3.3).

31 Modern-day Zhongshan (中山), renamed in 1925 in honor of Sun Yatsen (Sun Zhongshan 孫中山).

32 Sinn, Pacific Crossing, 48–49.

33 See Chapter 4.4. Also, Evelyn Hu-DeHart, “Opium and Social Control: Coolies on the Plantations of Peru and Cuba,” Journal of Chinese Overseas 1, no. 2 (2005): 169–83. As exception to ships commonly navigating in ballast to maximize the coolies’ numbers, at least until 1866 there was also a significant trade in firecrackers on the return voyages of several coolie ships to Peru.

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integrate into the […] lower classes, creating no strong transnational links”

in the traditional sense. In addition, whether they managed to return to China, send remittances, or import goods to and from their qiaoxiang—native places—they generally opted for the better established Hong Kong channel rather than going through Macao.

From this point of view, we suggest, instead, to look at Macao and Hong Kong as part of an integrated binary migratory system.

The two cities were connected by continuous flow of people, goods and information, separated by only three or four hours of navigation by steamer, seven or eight by sail.

The literature on the coolie trade has sometimes paid attention to this link, addressing the participation of Hong Kong business firms in the Macao coolie trade and the important contribution of the British colony as a site for outfitting or repairing coolie ships on their route to Macao.

However, little or nothing has been said on the services provided in the form of maritime insurance and financial coverage, or the position of Hong Kong—and San Francisco—as ports of call in the common coolie ship’s routes from and towards their Latin American destinations, and other details that surface from a closer scrutiny of the primary sources.

One more key element in Sinn’s definition of in-between place is the presence of underlying institutions aimed at facilitating and organizing emigration links. Hong Kong affirmed itself as the main port for free emigrants from China, Sinn claims, thanks to its capability to provide a safe atmosphere and basilar services in the field of credit, communications and entertainment to prospective emigrants, through a synergy of governmental initiatives and mediating civil agencies and associations.

In sharp contrast little is known, mostly due to a chronic lack of sources, about the social, economic and institutional infrastructures that may have sustained the exportation of coolies in Macao, playing a comparable role as in Hong Kong or other emigration ports. The distinctive features of the Macao emigration network, however, seems to have been concentrated in the services and protection—notwithstanding the feeble efforts of

34 Adam McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago, Hawaii, 1900-1936 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), 68.

35 An exercise in integration of Macao and Canton into the Hong Kong emigration system, with an economical history approach, has been suggested in Takeshi Hamashita, “From Tribute Trade to Migration Center: The Ryukyu and Hong Kong Maritime Networks within the East and South China Seas in a Long- Term Perspective”, in Donna Gabaccia and Dirk Hoerder, eds., Connecting Seas and Connected Ocean Rims, Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans and China Seas Migrations from the 1830s to the 1930s (Leiden: BRILL, 2011), 172–195.

36 These same steamers, whose line extended generally to Canton, were used as one of the main channel to convey coolies to Macao from the inner Guangdong province. See Chapter 4.1.

37 Gov. Kennedy to Kimberly, Colonial Secretary, Hong Kong, 19 October 1872, BPP, Measures taken to prevent the fitting out of Ships at Hong Kong for the Macao Coolie Trade, 1873.

38 Sinn, Pacific Crossing, 302.

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the Portuguese authorities to reduce the abuses, at least in the latest years—offered to recruiters, brokers and traffickers, rather than the emigrants; including a huge gambling and prostitution industry that diverted a wide portion of the revenues of their human sales.

The dramatic returns of the gambling houses allowed the free port of Macao, although deprived of the income of import or export duties, to become considerably self-sufficient, and a relief for the passive balance of payments of the Portuguese Empire along these years.

1.2 Conceptual framework

In the previous paragraphs we defined the object of our research as the “Macao coolie trade”, delimiting a conceptual perimeter through the terms “Macao”, “coolie” and

“trade”, and debated the role of Macao as migration hub in relation with the neighboring port of Hong Kong. The ensuing pages discuss the underlying theoretical background of this stance, periodization and positioning this research into the contemporary historiographical literature on “world history” and the transnational history of migrations.

Therefore, a final paragraph conceptualizes the figure of the Italian coolie dealers in the frame of the Genoese commercial diaspora of the early and mid-nineteenth century, describing it as an example of surviving network of cross-cultural trade and family-scale business in what has been called the “modern” age of globalization.

1.2.1 The space: a world history approach

The approach of this thesis integrates a local focus on Macao and its complex society with a global perspective over the multiple ties and interconnections created by the coolie trade in a trans-national dimension. By choosing the whole globe as the perimeter of our investigation, we posit the theoretical coordinates of this study into the domain of the so- called “world history”, broadly defined, along Patrick Manning, as “the story of connections within the global human community […] with a focus on connections among historical localities, time periods, and themes of study.”

The recent “global turn” in

39 Fernando Figueiredo, “Os vectores da economia,” in História dos Portugueses no Extremo Oriente:

Macau e Timor do Antigo Regime à Républica, ed. António H. de Oliveira Marques, vol. III (Lisboa:

Fundação Oriente, 2000), 267–273.

40 Christopher A. Bayly, “‘Archaic’ and ‘Modern’ Globalization in the Eurasian and African Arena, c.

1750–1850,” in Globalization in World History, ed. A.G. Hopkins (London: Pimlico, 2002); Christopher A.

Bayly, “From Archaic Globalization to International Networks, circa 1600–2000,” in Interactions:

Transregional Perspectives on World History, ed. Jerry H. Bentley (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005).

41 Patrick Manning, Navigating World History, Historians Create a Global Past (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 3.

13

historical studies evolved as a coherent trend from the late ‘80s and the ‘90s, when the founding of institution such as the World History Association or the Journal of World History gave it a formal reference and organizational structure. Early studies in “world history” may be divided in two main historiographical streams. The first group, inspired by a cross-disciplinary blend of history, economics and social sciences, focused its attention on macro-processes of economic globalization, such as Wallersteinian’s “world system” school and its latter epigones.

With an eye on the evolution of early modern and modern Chinese history, scholars following these footsteps have developed new comparative frameworks to understand the “Great Divergence” and argued against classical Eurocentric narratives of the rise of Western capitalism and industrialization.

A second strand, to which our dissertation relates more closely, sprung from a series of studies about cross-cultural and trans-regional interactions, following the appearance of pioneering works by Philip Curtin or William McNeill between the 1960s and 1980s.

This tradition, which in the 1990s found theorists in scholars as Jerry Bentley, Patrick Manning, Sanjay Subrahmanyam,

has stressed the importance of connections and interactions of people and ideas distancing the field from the social sciences and introducing micro-scale analyses of individual lives and trajectories. More recently, they have also drawn the attention to the relations between the local and the global dimension of the historical analysis,

reflecting on the possibilities of this field to develop a “global

42 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origin of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974); The Modern World-System II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600-1750 (New York: Academic Press, 1980); The Modern World-System III: The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730-1840s (San Diego: Academic Press, 1989); Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

43 Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Jean-Laurent Rosenthal and R. Bin Wong, Before and Beyond Divergence: The Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe (Cambridge, Mass.:

Harvard University Press, 2011).

44 See, for some of the seminal contributions, William H. McNeill,The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962); Philip D. Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

45 Jerry H. Bentley, “Cross-Cultural Interaction and Periodization in World History,” The American Historical Review 101, no. 3 (1996): 749–70; Patrick Manning, “The Problem of Interactions in World History,” The American Historical Review 101, no. 3 (1996): 771–82; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories : Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asian Studies 31, no. 3 (1997): 735–62.

46 A.G. Hopkins, “Introduction : Interactions Between the Universal and the Local,” in Global History, Interactions between the Universal and the Local, ed. A. G. Hopkins (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Jerry H. Bentley, Renate Bridenthal, and Anand A. Yang, Interactions Transregional Perspectives on World History (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005); Bartolomé Yun Casalilla, “‘Localism’, Global History and Transnational History. A Reflection from the Historian of Early Modern Europe,”

Historisk Tidskrift 127, no. 4 (2007): 659–78. Some historians and scholars of contemporary globalization have further elaborated this concept into the category of “translocality”: Ulrike Freitag and Achim Von

14 microhistory.”

Since this thesis has been conceived and elaborated in the context of the Italian academia, we feel compelled to spend a few words over the reception of these historiographical trends in the Italian research environment. After a fifteen to twenty years’ delay the international literature on world history has finally called the deserved attention of Italian-based scholars, giving birth to a series of stimulating historical reflections on its methodological and theoretical elements.

Albeit limited by structural constraints in facilities and resources, and slowed down by the natural conservatism of conventional academic sectors and teaching curricula, there seem to be some space for this new historiographical turn to open fresh opportunities of debate and catch up with already established patterns of research in an international environment.

A comprehensive study of the coolie trade, indeed, is an enterprise that requires the historian to cross different disciplinary borders and track wide-ranging connections in distinct geographical, cultural and linguistic contexts. In fact, only through a global overview it is possible to link together studies of overseas Chinese, economic history and international politics, Latin American social and labor conditions, the global sugar and cotton markets, South China society between the opium wars, and the many other issues profoundly intertwined with its historical evolution.

Its crucial maritime component, furthermore, calls for the inclusion of the world’s Oceans—and the decks and steerages of the ships sailing them—into the historical narrative.

As Marcus Rediker stressed in his recent incursions in the literature of the Atlantic slave trade, it is necessary to emphasize and recover the often neglected maritime dimension of history, and investigate the sea and the oceans as part of the space in which

47 Tonio Andrade, “A Chinese Farmer, Two African Boys, and a Warlord: Toward a Global Microhistory,”

Journal of World History 21, no. 4 (2010): 573–91.

48 A fundamental guidebook, although grossly modeled over Manning’s Navigating World History,is the recent Laura Di Fiore and Marco Meriggi, World History: Le nuove rotte della storia (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2011). For earlier but less systemic contributions see Giovanni Gozzini, Le migrazioni di ieri e di oggi: Una storia comparata (Milano: Bruno Mondadori, 2005); Carlo Fumian, Verso una società planetaria. Alle origini della globalizzazione contemporanea (Roma: Donzelli, 2003); on the field of labor relations and exchanges, cf. Christian De Vito, “La proposta della Global labour history nell’era della ‘globalizzazione,’”

Passato e Presente, no. 85 (2012): 177–89.

49 On the connective role of ocean basins as unity of historical analysis for cross cultural interactions cf.

Jerry H. Bentley, “Sea and Ocean Basins as Frameworks of Historical Analysis,” Geographical Review 89, no. 2 (1999): 215–24; Jerry H Bentley, Renate Bridenthal, and Karen Wigen, eds., Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007).

15

the “human’s drama is played.”

Taking Rediker’s advice, we paid special attention to the study of the maritime passage of the coolie ships, with its dramatic corollary of revolts, struggles and mortality. Scattered sources from Italian and Portuguese archives, in several cases untapped, revealed a new and more nuanced picture of the interactions of captains, sailors and emigrants, challenging consolidated assumptions about linguistic and cultural barriers and displaying instead, amidst much violence, a handful of episodes of collaboration, understanding and even complicity.

1.2.2 Transnationalism in migration studies

By addressing the movement of people across borders and spaces, the history of migrations is by definition a receptive field for research in global themes and scope. In this sense, traditional migration studies have undergone harsh criticism for their overreliance on binary models and simplifications, which, McKeown explains, have tended to “a polarization between concepts like push and pull, emigration and immigration, sending society and host society, or tradition and adaptation, which privilege the perspectives of nations that frame the two ends of migrant journeys.”

On one hand, several studies have been concerned simply with the problem of assimilation and integration of the migrants into the host society; hence revealing, McKeown continues,

“how interest in migration is usually justified by an ultimate interest in the inclusion of migrants into a national identity.”

On the other hand, historians of the sending countries have often focused their attention on how original homeland’s identities and loyalties are kept and strengthened through the migration process.

These challenges have led in the past years to what has been termed the “transnational turn” in migration studies and migration history. In the early 1990s, anthropologist Nina Schiller introduced for the first time the concept of transnationalism in the study of contemporary migrations as the ensemble of “processes by which immigrants build social fields that link together their country of origin and their country of settlement.”

Historical research has subsequently appropriated the concept, clearing it of its original evolutionary frame, as a tool to underscore the non-linear character of historical

50 Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (London: Viking, 2007). On the necessity to recover a humanistic approach to individual lives and experiences in Global history, cf. the aforementioned Andrade,

“A Chinese Farmer...,” 574.

51 See Chapter 7.1 and 7.2.

52 McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks..., 7–8.

53 Ibid.

54 Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc-Szanton, “Transnationalism: a New Analytic Framework for Understanding Migration,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 645 (July 1992): 1.

16

migrations and bring a new and more fragmented perspective over the circulation of peoples and a more fluid conception of the migrant’s identities and experiences.

This thesis adopts a transnational approach in two senses: first, we follow Donna Gabaccia’s call “to query the tyranny of the national in the discipline of history”,

to

“track migrant streams, networks, and cultural production in a global scale”, in other words across the national borders of the multiple States involved;

second, we historicize the role of nation states in the complex history of the coolie trade, framing our analysis over a web of interconnected localities and emphasizing the interaction of localized endogenous and exogenous forces in the construction and evolution of the traffic. In fact, the Macao coolie trade marked one of the last phases of a globalization stage based on the flexibility and porousness of inter-state borders, before the hardening and the organization of stricter devices of control in the 1880s, pioneered by the anti-Chinese laws in the United States.

We may find a sign of this transitory process in the legal and bureaucratic apparatus deployed by the Macao government to curtail the reports of abuses in the emigration system and ensure the safety and “voluntariness” of the contracts signed by the emigrants; apparatus which, deemed by many observers little more than a smokescreen, increased its size exponentially in the last decade of the traffic.

1.2.3 Cross-cultural trade and family business networks in the modern world

The large majority of the available studies on the coolie trade, as we will better discuss below, approached the topic as a whole, through the model of the monographic “grand synthesis”—either of the traffic to a single country, or globally—with the result of only sketching in superficial ways—often employing similar and overlapping sets of sources—

its overall features. This has left unanswered many fundamental questions about its day- to-day practices and deep mechanisms:

we still lack a circumstantiated study of the roles of different Macao administrations in covering and supporting rather than contrasting the reported traffic’s “abuses”; a serious assessment of the relations between the traffic and

55 A brief survey in Christiane Harzig and Dirk Hoerder, What is Migration History ? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 83–85. On transnational history sensu lato, see Ian Tyrrell, “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History,” The American Historical Review 96, no. 4 (1991): 1031–1055, and other contributions in that monographic issue of the American Historical Review

56 Donna Gabaccia, “Is Everywhere Nowhere ? Nomads , Nations , and the Immigrant Paradigm of United States History,” The Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (1999): 1116.

57 Erika Lee and Naoko Shibusawa, “Guest Editor’s Introduction: What is Transnational Asian American History?: Recent Trends and Challenges,” Journal of Asian American Studies 8, no. 3 (2005): vii–xvii.

58 Erika Lee, “The Chinese Exclusion Example: Race, Immigration, and American Gatekeeping, 1882–

1924,” Journal of American Ethnic History, no. Spring (2002): 36–62; McKeown, Melancholy Order.

59 See Chapter 3.3.

17

Cantonese piracy; a study of the little but not insignificant return migration from both Cuba and Peru; or of the experience of coolies in non-agricultural contexts or tasks. There has been, moreover, a fundamental neglect of the diachronic dimension of the traffic in Macao, whose accounts generally flattens its modes of operation through its two decades of activities without marking out their historical evolution and their links with the broader history of South China and the South-East Asian region in the mid-nineteenth century.

The traces of the Italian participants in the coolie trade, therefore, offer us a thread to provide a more in-depth analysis organizing the work around a solid and coherent documentary core. This exercise poses several questions of methodology. First of all, how could we define this specific group of traffickers as Italian? Indeed, a criterion of national belonging may sound quite contradictory for a study aspiring to adopt a global and trans- national perspective. In fact we recognize behind this label a complicate mixture of local and national identities. As many studies of the “Italian diaspora” have pointed out, Italian migrants in the nineteenth century carried fluid transnational identities, dividing their loyalties among their home towns and villages, regional community, and shades of nationalist commitment towards their home and host countries.

Almost all the Italian coolie traffickers were natives of Genoa and its surrounding villages in the Ligurian Riviera di Levante, areas with a longstanding tradition of circular, trade-related, emigration. Many of them established themselves permanently in Peru, integrating in a thick web of interpersonal ties of business with the Peruvian landowner’s elite. Their descendants, in many cases, split themselves equally between the two nations.

We applied to these people, with some caution, the categories of “trade diaspora”, conceptualized by Philip Curtin in regard to networks of migrants specialized in long- range trade between distant societies and civilizations.

According to Curtin’s model, trade diasporas lost their determinant role as commercial and cultural brokers in the mid- nineteenth century, with the expansion of imperialism and of the first Western-led structured and modern organizations of commerce. The role of Genoese merchants in the coolie trade shows a good example, instead, of how familiar based merchants adapted to new organizational and technological challenges—the sail-steam transition—and actually managed to extend their operational range in the context of a growing global economy

60 There is ample scholarship on this; for an introduction, see Donna Gabaccia, Emigranti: Le diaspore degli italiani dal Medioevo a oggi (Torino: Einaudi, 2003).

61 Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History.

18 and the expansion of imperial polities.

Genoese and Ligurian immigrants had started to settle into the Spanish American colonies as early as the late eighteenth century, through their links with the commercial hub of Cadiz, in continental Spain, and its thriving community of naturalized Genoese merchants.

Taking advantage from the liberalization of external trade of the Spanish American colonies in 1812, and then of the commercial opportunities opened by the birth of South American republican regimes, they built a transoceanic migration network, whose fulcrums were Buenos Aires and Montevideo, but which extended through the Pacific to Peru, Ecuador and California. These early settlements functioned as coagulation poles for subsequent migratory movements of mid and late-nineteenth and later for the mass migration of the early twentieth century.

This wider context is crucial to determine, in a perspective of “history from the middle”, the achievements and success of the Italian traffickers in coolies in Peru. Trying to reconstruct their biographies, we may observe two typical patterns: some traders belonged to so called “maritime dynasties”,

entrepreneurial families costumed to long- range trade and usually only temporarily involved in the Peruvian scene; while others fitted the description of ambitious parvenus, self-realized men coming from a lower middle-class or poorer background, that rapidly ascended the social ladder benefiting from favorable conditions posed by the Peruvian guano boom after the 1840s.

Adopting local costumes, names and citizenship, those transnational entrepreneurs invested their guano and coolie-driven fortunes in the rising plantation sector, becoming ironically both exporter and employer of Chinese coolies, but on the same time strengthened their connections with their hometowns through philanthropy and land investments.

62 Other interesting example may be the Armenian and Parsee networks in Macao. Cf. Carl T. Smith and Paul A. Van Dyke, “Armenian Footprints in Macao,” Review of Culture (International Edition), no. 8 (2003): 20–39; Guo Deyan, “The Study of Parsee Merchants in Canton, Hong Kong and Macao,” Review of Culture (International Edition), no. 8 (2003): 51–69.

63 The Cadiz-South America link was the subject of a recent PhD dissertation in the University of Pisa by Catia Brilli, which is completely pioneering the topic in Italian scientific literature: Catia Brilli, “La diaspora commerciale ligure nel sistema atlantico iberico. Da Cadice a Buenos Aires (1750-1830)”, (Unpublished Ph.D dissertation, Università di Pisa, 2008); also Brilli, “The Genoese Response to the Collapse of the Spanish Empire in America,” Jahrbuch für Geschichte Lateinamerikas, no. 47 (2010): 247–

72. In part, the organization of archives makes difficult to further trace these networks after the incorporation of the former Genoese State into the Kingdom of Sardinia in 1815. The period also coincides with an overstressed disciplinary rift between early modernists and contemporary history scholars.

64 Marco Doria, “La marina mercantile a vela in Liguria dalla metà dell’Ottocento alla prima guerra mondiale,” in A vela e a vapore. Economie, culture e istituzioni del mare nell’Italia dell’Ottocento, ed.

Paolo Frascani (Roma: Donzelli, 2001), 83–107.

65David Hollett, More Precious than Gold : the Story of the Peruvian Guano Trade (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008).

19 1.3 Literature review

The issue of the coolie trade has been approached from many different perspectives, national historiographies, and disciplinary areas. The ensuing section provides a comprehensive review of the literature produced on this subject in the past decades. For the sake of simplicity, we will divide the review into four parts, addressing the studies developed in various language and national historical traditions. In the first part, we discuss the main studies developed in the English and Spanish-speaking world, including some works not specifically dedicated to the coolie trade but bearing interesting methodological insights and interpretations. Next, we sketch a general picture of the achievements of the Chinese-language scholarship. A third section addresses the main trends of the Portuguese oriented (broadly defined) literature, including general works on Macao’s history, while the fourth and last paragraph presents a balance of the coverage of the Italian involvement in the coolie trade in the current Italian historiography.

1.3.1 Works in English, Spanish and French

Earlier pioneering works on the coolie trade generally approached the theme from the perspective of a single immigration country. This was the case of the work of Persia Campbell, which in 1923 addressed the broad ensemble of Chinese immigration in the British Empire, including indentured, credit-ticket and free immigrants.

In 1927, Chinese-Cuban Antonio Chuffat Latour published the first significant account of the Chinese immigration in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Cuba.

In 1951 North American historian Watt Stewart published his Chinese Bondage in Peru; a ground-breaking account of the Peruvian coolie trade based on rare Peruvian sources. Subsequently translated in both Spanish and Chinese, this highly successful work is still a fundamental reference for the subject, despite a tendency to over victimize the Chinese coolies.

The 1960s saw the emergence of a new generation of Cuban based social historians, that approached the topic of the coolie trade focusing on the comparative aspects of Chinese indentured labor and African slavery, whose coexistence constituted a peculiar

66 Persia Campbell, Chinese Coolie Emigration to Countries within the British Empire (London: P. S. King and son, 1923).

67 Antonio Chuffat Latour, Apunte Histórico de los Chinos en Cuba (Habana: Molina y Cia, 1927).

68 Watt Stewart, Chinese Bondage in Peru: A History of the Chinese coolie in Peru, 1849-1874 (Durham:

Duke University Press, 1951).; translated as La servidumbre Chine en el Perú : una historia de los culies chinos en el Perú, 1849-1874 (Lima: Mosca Azul, 1976) and Bilu hua gong shi, 1849-1874 秘魯華工史, 1849-1874 [History of the Chinese laborers in Peru] (Beijing : Haiyang chu ban she, 1985).

20

feature in the island’s history. This gave rise to various competing interpretations of the role of the coolies, whose experience could be seen as a form of slavery under false colors, according to the demographer Juan Pérez de La Riva;

a transition from slavery to free labor essential to the development of a mechanized sugar industry according to Manuel Fraginals;

or, on the contrary, an expedient to delay the demise of a backward productive system, that facilitated the perpetration of slavery, as argued by Rebecca Scott.

In this line of inquiry, some recent studies in the field of the “global labor history”

have tried to overcome the opposition slavery – “free” labor defending a structural continuity between slavery, indenture and wage labor as the multifaceted expression of capitalist’s commodification of labor.

They have argued, furthermore, for a reconsideration of the modern Western notion of “free labor” overall, defined as a work which the laborer has the possibility to quit, showing how the debate on indenture and migrations contributed to its formation.

In the mid-seventies Arnold Meagher produced the first really systematic and comprehensive study of the coolie trade on a global scale. Meagher defended his Ph.D dissertation, defended at the University of California at Davis in 1975. His work, although, published only in 2008, had been until then well-known and highly regarded by the scholarly community and represents even now an indispensable reference work for any historian engaging with the coolie issue.

Through a painstaking and still unsurpassed research over British, American and less in detail Portuguese archives, Meagher’s successfully tied together in a coherent picture all the distinct flows of coolies with a scope hardly followed by any of historian after him. Central in Meagher’s interpretation is the recognition of the external causes of the coolie trade, “initiated and sustained, not by spontaneous action of free agents, but […] by the persuasion, deceit, and coercion of emigration brokers and recruiters in the employ of Western entrepreneurs

69Juan Pérez de la Riva, El barracon y otres ensayos, (La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1975);

Some of his work on the coolie trade has been systemathized, edited and published posthumously: Juan Pérez de la Riva, Los culíes chinos en Cuba, 1847-1880 : contribución al estudio de la inmigración contratada en el Caribe (La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 2000).

70 Manuel Moreno Fraginals, El ingenio : el complejo económico social cubano del azúcar, (La Habana, Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1978).

71 As argued, for example, by Rebecca Scott, Slave Emancipation In Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860-1899, (Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 1985).

72 Marcel van der Linden, Workers of the World: Essays towards a Global Labor History (Leiden: BRILL, 2008), 10; Yann Moulier Boutang, Dalla schiavitù al lavoro salariato (Roma: Manifestolibri, 2002)..

73 Robert J. Steinfeld, Coercion , Contract , and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2001); Gunther Peck, Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and Immigrant Workers in the North American West, 1880-1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

74 Arnold Meagher, The Coolie Trade: The Traffic in Chinese Laborers to Latin America 1847-1874 (Philadelphia: Xlibris, 2008).