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This chapter examines how the space of the township gradually became marked and coded as a space that was interior to Indian life. It traces the emergence of the figure of the charou in the township as the constant other of the emergent, respectable Indian community in Chatsworth. Mainly based on archival material, narratives, and ethnographic material, the chapter also shows how the older figure of the “coolie”—the stereotyped, lower-caste plantation worker—gives way to a new and deracinated menace within the township that is equated with “backwardness” and stubborn, traditional conservatism, which needs to be reformed in order for the community to fully evolve.

This chapter presents an exploration of the role theories of Chinese bodies played in the American experience of coolie labor. One of the chapter's major texts is an anti‐coolie pamphlet, “Some Reasons for Chinese Exclusion,” which with the phrase “meat vs. rice” opposes American manhood to Asiatic coolieism. The pamphlet, published by the American Federation of Labor in 1901, imagines an American Gulliver held down by numerous Lilliputian Chinese, a figure for the difference between an American masculine strength and a Chinese “strength in numbers” that has long been a feature of American “Yellow Peril” racism. The chapter connects the pamphlet's arguments about the nature of Chinese bodies to late‐nineteenth‐century discourses about Chinese people in general, including Arthur Smith's notorious Chinese Characteristics (1894), which made much of Chinese “nervelessness.” Much of the chapter focuses, however, on Arthur Vinton's Looking Further Backward, a dystopian science fiction novel which imagines the takeover, in 2023, of the United States by an army of the Chinese. All of these are finally understood not as expressions of simple racism but as articulations of particular kinds of economic anxiety in which Chinese bodies became figures for the dehumanizing threats of industrialized modernity.

Chapter 1 mines an under-examined archive of American travelogues to Cuba to explore the emergence of Chinese “cooliesm” as a transatlantic racial formation enmeshed in the geopolitics of U.S. Empire and in national debates over labor versus capital. Controversies over U.S. participation in the lucrative “coolie trade,” involving the transport of thousands of Chinese indentured laborers to Cuba and Peru, intensified as sectional tensions over the future of slavery threatened to erupt into Civil War. This chapter explores how popular travel narratives by writers, including Richard Henry Dana and Eliza McHatton Ripley, refracted and reshaped American ideas about slavery, citizenship, and free labor, especially in relation to contract ideology and its associated concepts of self-ownership and free will. These narratives helped disseminate the specter of the Chinese “coolie-slave,” which influenced U.S. debates over slavery and later became a potent symbol for the enduring legacy of slavery in Reconstruction America.

Over the course of the past two centuries, millions of people from the South Asian subcontinent moved to the continents of the world. Unlike earlier migrants, Indians who formed part of this more recent diaspora tended to retain links with their homeland, making their diaspora one which was more inflected by colonialism and nationalism. Consequently, the diaspora that has emerged in Britain and North America cannot be easily disentangled from the anti-colonial struggles of the last century and a half and as a result the emergence and manifestation of nationalism in modern South Asia has played an integral part in defining and structuring the desi diaspora.

In 1897, there were approximately 57,000 Chinese and 26,000 Koreans counted in Russia’s census. The Chinese and Korean coolies, miners and other laborers were not a problem in themselves. However, Russian nationalist groups such as the Panslavists and the Slavophils considered that “Russian resources” were meant for Russians and saw the East Asians as a drain on their economy and resources. During the Second World War, over 1 million Poles, Jews and Germans from the Russian empire were branded as “internal enemies.” They had their business confiscated and were deported from western Russia to Siberia and other areas. Many Chinese in Russia at that time were labeled as “potential German spies” and deported outside of the Russian empire. Luckily, the Koreans were not affected by the First World War. Four thousand Koreans even served in the Russian Army during this war.

This chapter argues that the creation of cultural difference was, in fact, dependent on direct social contact. Furthermore, this resulted in anticipated future relations between the Indo and Agro-Trinidadians. The chapter then introduces a discourse on cultural difference that set official boundaries between the “Negro” and the “Coolie.” The chapter shows that these two “naturalized” characteristics are used by the Trinidadians to set distinctions between people of African descent and Indian descent. It also historicizes the current ethnic stereotypes, anchors them to a specific political economy, and offers a broad critique of cultural essentialism.

This chapter examines the impact of two Pacific voyages that Twain undertook on his attitude toward the Chinese. Sent by the Sacramento Union as a correspondent to the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) in 1866, Twain supported US annexation of the Islands and the importation of Chinese “coolie” labor to the plantations there. On this trip Twain became friends with Anson Burlingame, the then US Minister to China (1861-1867), who helped to deepen Twain’s understanding of and acquaintance with the Chinese. As Twain revisited the Sandwich Islands thirty years later in 1895 as part of his lecture series along the equator, he had become increasingly skeptical of European, and soon after, American colonization by means of economic dominance and missionary involvements in foreign territories. The cultural and ethnic diversity that Twain encountered beyond the American shore complicated the racial assumptions that he grew up with in the slave-holding South.

Hong Kong assumed a new identity as a safe and free embarkation port when thousands of Chinese emigrants began pouring through it for Gold Mountain, and thrived. This significantly distinguished it from ports for coerced migration, often called the “coolie trade”. Its popularity among free emigrants exiting and returning to China was maintained long after the gold rush as Chinese continued going to California to work on the railroads and other occupations, and through San Francisco to other parts of the North America. Besides the legal structure, other elements in Hong Kong society, including Chinese-language newspapers and Chinese organizations –– especially the Tung Wah Hospital –– brought security and comfort to emigrants. The chapter also offers rare descriptions of passenger experience

By the late 1860s, middle-class employers in eastern cities shifted their attention to the labor supply of Chinese immigrants in California, and the possible importation of male servants who were portrayed as invaluable assets to western homes. In this period, Democrats seized upon abolitionism and free labor ideology, which were previously associated with Republicans, to critique Chinese laborers as “coolies” and push for restriction. Chapter 3 argues that employers produced a version of Chinese servants’ difference that referenced how they were naturally submissive and mechanically efficient—and therefore ideal as domestics. Employers overlooked the more complicated structural dynamics that relegated Chinese immigrants to service work through racial discrimination and legal marginalization as migrants barred from naturalizing. In these contexts, this chapter also explores the doubts that surrounded Chinese restriction as a policy and how proponents of allowing Chinese immigrants to do work labeled menial and unworthy of citizenship linked the continued employment of Chinese servants to the Pacific Coast’s imperial advantages as the gateway to Asian labor supplies.

This chapter argues for a radically new reading of the canonical author Pío Baroja. Although usually grouped with the writers in the Generation of ’98, Baroja’s prose does much more than examine Spain’s nature for fatal flaws that prompted the imperial disaster of the Spanish-American War. His maritime novels revisit one of the murkier chapters of Spanish imperial history and narrate the lives of fictional Basque mariners who transported Africans across the Middle Passage to Cuba after the trade had been outlawed. Baroja’s novels present a highly self-conscious attempt to use fiction to reverse a growing social amnesia and retain knowledge of what the novels deem to be a crucial aspect of Basque culture. In the process, the author suggests a reconsideration of the Atlantic as a sphere of the Spanish empire.

This chapter recovers the history of recruited Chinese laborers, known as motores de sangre, for use in national colonization. Records from cientificos, or technocratic officials, of the Porfirian regime show how racialized notions of Chinese migrants as disposable workers informed Mexican modernization programs. The chapter traces agents of industrialization and how they appropriated streams of contracted Asian coolie laborers, to advance railroads and plantations. The highest concentrations of Chinese people in Mexico occurred in the states of Sonora and Yucatán. Chinese workers were primarily used in contentious territory with rebellious indigenous populations. The chapter turns to the development of treaty relations with China and national debates about Chinese immigration. These debates demonstrate how racial discourses of Indians and Chinese were linked. The more that Indians were seen as obstacles of modernization, the greater the reliance upon the Chinese; and when Indians were seen as agents of modernization, the more the Chinese were despised. Finally, a close look at the near complete reliance upon Chinese in national colonization of Baja California

This book begins with the story of fifteen-year-old Tung Kun Sen (Dong Gongcheng), a native of Dongguan County in Guangdong Province, China, who was kidnapped and taken to the Spanish Caribbean colony of Cuba as part of the infamous coolie trade. He signed a contract of indenture that obligated him to work for eight years on a sugar estate in Cardenas, Matanzas Province. There he was baptized and given the name Pastor Pelayo, after Cuban planter Ramon Pelayo. After completing his term of service, he was forced to be recontracted for another eight years. When Pastor Pelayo finished his indenture, he was in his thirties and had no hope of returning to China. He migrated eastward to the sugar districts of central Cuba. There he moved from estate to estate, earning wages as part of a cuadrilla, or work gang, and eventually became a labor contractor. When out of bondage, the former indentured laborer came into daily contact with enslaved African men and women on the cusp of emancipation.

This chapter shows how tens of thousands of Chinese, who survived indenture and remained on the island of Cuba during the 1870s and 1880s after becoming free slaves, experienced physical, occupational, and even social mobility. After the 1877 treaty between Spain and China, coolies who completed their term of service could no longer be forcibly recontracted, and the entry of new Chinese contract labor was prohibited. This change in the official status of the Chinese overlapped with the gradual end of slavery in Cuba. For years, slaves had been gaining their freedom through a variety of mechanisms, including self-purchase. The 1870 Moret Law granted liberty to any child born to a slave mother after 1868 and to any slave over the age of sixty. Slaves were freed by the emancipation law of 1880 but obligated to serve their owners under the patronato, or apprenticeship system, until final emancipation, scheduled to occur in stages between 1884 and 1888.

From his first arrival in Ceylon, James Taylor showed awareness of the ethnic diversity of the population, especially Tamil and Sinhalese estate labour. This chapter examines his impressions of the workforce and those of other peoples whom he encountered during his four decades in Ceylon. Particular attention is given to his perceptions at the time of the Indian ‘Mutiny’ and his graphic testimony of that event. His opinions are not treated in a vacuum but within the broader context of nineteenth-century racial thought. The chapter concludes with a tantalising account of his intimate interracial encounters.

This chapter places Mark Twain's Those Extraordinary Twins in two related contexts: the establishment of corporate personhood (along with Fourteenth Amendment protections for corporations) in the U.S. Supreme Court case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886) and popular representations of Chinese railroad workers as swarming, monstrous “coolies” functioning as collective—rather than individuated—agents. The chapter shows how Those Extraordinary Twins connects Pudd'nhead Wilson's interest in the legal fiction of race with other legal fictions central to the broader economic transformations of the Gilded Age. Unsuccessfully prosecuted “as a corporation,” the conjoined twins embody postwar disruptions precipitated by industrialization, monopoly capitalism, and the increasing prominence of immigrants as both a labor source and a means of dividing and controlling the U.S. working class.

This chapter explores a seminal moment in the history of modern prostitution. In 1871, when one of the Chinese coolies from the Peruvian cargo ship, the Maria Luz, ran away to seek asylum, his plight became an international incident. Japanese officials subsequently freed the coolies on board the Maria Luz on the basis of the illegality of their contracts, but Peru's legal representative quickly sued. He argued that indentured prostitution in Japan was a practice equivalent to the coolie “trade,” so there was no legal basis for Japanese actions. Ōe Taku (1847–1921), the judge presiding over the case, agreed that the two practices were similar violations of individual rights and that both represented a subversion of the justice demanded by international norms. In the wake of his decision in the Maria Luz case, Ōe issued the first Meiji era ruling intended to improve the condition of prostitutes in Japan.

This chapter discusses how the Marxist critics of “the radical 1930s” frequently overlooked the efforts of colonial writers of socialist fiction, such as Mulk Raj Anand, who apparently fits into the projects of subaltern studies and comparative literature. Anand was initially viewed as a nationalist anticolonial writer. However, his 1936 novel, Coolie, is in fact set within the context of the global trade depression and currency crisis. It is a re-sketching of Rudyard Kipling's imperial adventure story, Kim, in terms of depicting migrant coolie labor (a child-worker's search for work). The novel attempts to reconstruct history and theory to a tradition of literary internationalism and nonrevolutionary socialism prompted by anticolonial labor struggles.

This chapter tackles the question of colonialism by exploring the connection between James Joyce and Mulk Raj Anand. It examines the complex correspondences that link Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Ulysses (1918) to Anand's Untouchable (1935) and Coolie (1936). The chapter argues that the works of Joyce and Anand are a complex textual exchange that highlights the geographical specificity of their colonial critiques. A reading of Anand's works reveals that his modernism links back to Joyce's work, situated within a broader postcolonial geography. This modernist narrative helps Anand craft a cosmopolitan Indian modernism rooted in matters of caste, poverty, national identity, and colonial status in India. The chapter concludes by discussing how both writers revise the tradition of the bildungsroman, using narrative experimentation to challenge the political model of the exemplary, representative man within the geographical spaces of colonial modernity.