The “Chinese Question” – A Call for a New Direction

 

Construction of a Chinese camp on the Canadian Pacific Railway, Kamloops, British Columbia, circa 1885

http://www.bcarchives.gov.bc.ca/sn-283FF15/cgi-bin/text2html/.visual/img_txt/dir_121/d_04712.txt

 OAH 2012 

In late April, the historian Mae M. Ngai delivered a paper at the Organization of American Historians (OAH) 2012 conference entitled “Chinese gold miners, the coolie question, and the propaganda of history.” The paper can be found here:

http://annualmeeting.oah.org/pdf/ngai.pdf

I want to highlight this paper because I think it provides not only an excellent overview of the historiographical issues, but persuasively argues for a new direction in our understanding of the “Chinese Question.”

In this blog post, I want to explore some of the key points that Mae M. Ngai makes about the historiography as well as examine her argument further in regards to my own research on Chinese railway labourers.

Historiography

First the historiography. Mae M. Ngai makes a salient point about the disjuncture between Chinese American social history and American labour history. She notes that there is little contact between the two fields because they have focused on different questions. According to Ngai, Chinese American social historians have mostly been concerned with “community formation, transnational social and cultural practices, and politics; and less so with labor, especially in the nineteenth century.” Labour historians on the other hand, Ngai notes, “do not understand the social organization of Chinese American communities and have done neither primary research nor read the secondary literature to learn more about it.” The exception to the rule is Moon-Ho Jung, whose work on Chinese labourers in the South after the civil War, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation, is arguably an essential study in both fields.

Argument

Reviewing the historiography, Ngai argues that our understanding of Chinese labour “must be tackled empirically as well as discursively.” She does so in her paper by studying Chinese gold miners. While Ngai agrees that the introduction of Chinese gang labour in the 1860s “reinforced the view that Chinese labor was unfree,” her research on Chinese gold miners reveals that were neither “unfree or coerced.”

My own studies on Chinese labour support Ngai’s argument. A particular incident involving Chinese railway labourers working on the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), I believe demonstrates that Chinese labour was neither “unfree or coerced.”

Yale, BC – May 14, 1881

On May 14, 1881, around one o’clock about two hundred Chinese labourers working on the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) entered the town of Yale, British Columbia.  They headed toward the “China Department in the Warehouse,” a store for goods that were supplied to the railway labourers.  Approximately a dozen of the men tried to enter the warehouse and confront G.P. White, an overseer stationed at the warehouse. Flanked by two assistants, White resisted attempts by one “riotious character” to “force an entrance.”  In the ensuing tumult the Chinese labourers began “breaking the windows” and “chopping down the doors” to the warehouse.  White responded to the threat, firing two or three shots from his pistol into the crowd.  Soon the police “interferred and quieted them [the Chinese] down, marching several of the ringleaders to gaol.”*

* Daily Colonist, May 17, 1881.

On May 16, 1881, two defendants were brought to trial at the Yale court of assizes.  Ah Loom “the ringleader of the mob of the attack” and Ah King who assaulted a police officer when trying to rescue Ah Loom confronted the prosecution.  Faced with a barrage of evidence against them, both men were held for further trial at a higher court.  On May 17, 1881, G.P. White, the overseer at the warehouse who fired into the crowd of Chinese labourers, faced prosecution.  During the trial several Chinese labourers who were at the warehouse on the day of the violence were called to testify.  Their testimony, translated into English for the court, was reproduced in the Inland Sentinel on May 19, 1881.

The following passages have been extracted from the testimony.  Ah See was the first sworn in.  He testified:

I was there in the afternoon, there were lots of Chinamen there; I saw several Chinamen go in the store; I did not go in; I saw Mr. White shove one Chinaman out of the door, down the steps; I saw White shut the door; I saw one or two Chinamen pushing the door; there were lots of other Chinaman there, who, did nothing. I saw White at the window, a few Chinamen were then standing beside me-15 or 16-I was then on the opposite side of the road, about 17 or 18 yds; I heard three shots fired, it was the first shot that passed my head; there were about two minutes time between each shot; the shots all came from the same window.

Implying that G.P. White as the person who shot into the crowd, Ah See was cross-examined by the defense on the time of the incident and why he was at the warehouse in the first place. Ah See replied:

This happened about 1 p.m.; I came down to see about the two per cent commission, I saw some parties pushing at the door with their hands; I saw no stones thrown at the door or building; did not see anyone attempting to break the door with an axe or crowbar; I stood directly in front of the window, about 18 yds. off; I saw White shut the door before I heard the shooting; I saw three other persons at that time in the store with White; I saw stones thrown at the window; I did not know the names of any of the men I saw about me; I did not know if White intended to shoot me or some one else; I did not see anyone throwing stones at the window, until White fired the shot; the window was closed. I saw the window raised, a shot fired, and then shut down again.

Ah See lay the blame for the violence on the actions of G.P. White (White fired the first shot and incited the crowd to throw stones at the warehouse).

The next Chinese labourer to testify was Ping Sing.  Answering the question why he was at the warehouse, Sing stated:

I came here last Saturday. I came down to the China store to collect some money. I on first going in saw White. I saw the contractor, Lee Lum, and Ah Soon. I was one of the first who entered the store followed by several others, I saw White pushing some of them out; the door was then shut and some Chinamen outside were pushing against it. I was then inside; there were 5 whitemen and 5 Chinamen in the store; White was one of the whitemen. I saw White raise up the window and shoot off a pistol; he fired 3 shots; could not say in what direction he fired. I know there were lots of Chinamen outside; as soon as the first shot was fired, lots of rocks came in; I distinctly swear that the shot was fired before the rocks were thrown into the building, and that there were 3 shots fired. I saw a pistol in White’s hand, an ordinary one.

Sing’s closeness to the action meant he could identify White as the shooter. The defense cross-examined further, trying to pick holes in Sing’s original testimony.  Sing replied:

I went in the store for my 2 per cent. I cannot tell how long I remained in the store; I was there during the whole of the disturbance; cannot tell how long it was from the time the stones were thrown until the crowd left; there were some goods in the room; I stood in the room on the left hand side; White was walking around the room; when White shut the door I was standing at the side of it. I did not arrange to give any evidence at this court to-day. White told me to go out of the store into the next room, but not till after the shooting and rocks had been thrown.

Clearly frustrated by the questioning, Sing stated that he did not “arrange to give any evidence.“  The final Chinese labourer to testify was Ah Lin.  Like Ping Sing, Ah Lin identified G.P. White as the shooter of the pistol.  Ah Lin testified:

I was at the Chinese store on Saturday; I came down to see about my wages. I came to see Ah Soon, the agent; White asked us to go in; lots of Chinamen followed; someone stopped them from coming in; I saw the door shut; someone outside tried to push open the door; I saw White raise the window, and look out; then raise the pistol and fire, I am positive that White did not order us out until all the trouble was over.

After further cross-examination, Ah Lin stated:

I was in the front part of the room when the shooting was going on. I was about 6 feet from White when he fired; cannot say what kind of a pistol he used; heard 3 shots, could not see into the street. I saw nothing but White shooting, and then I left that part of the building. There were 5 whitemen and 8 Chinese in the room at the time. I knew 2 of the Chinamen within the store. I can see 2 whitemen in the court room whom I recognize as 2 I saw in the store. White ordered 3 of us out after the trouble was over, the axe I had in my hand on Saturday at the store I left there, inside the store.

Conclusion

The testimony from these Chinese labourers clearly demonstrates that they were not held in servitude, that they acted in self-interest (e.g. they were by definition “free labor”). Yet, as Ngai concludes in her paper, “our analysis remains limited if our aim is to establish simply that Chinese had ‘agency’.” Something else is going on in regards to Chinese labour. As Ngai notes, Chinese miners “need to be understood in their specificity and on their own terms, and not forced into the Orientalist binary of free and unfree labor; for they are not comprehensible as either.”

This is a useful starting point from which to explore the meaning of the “Chinese Question.”

Chinese immigration: Rethinking the “push and pull” paradigm

For the past thirty years, the cornerstone of immigration history has tended to rest on the “push and pull” paradigm, weighing up the factors that forced migrants from their homeland and drew them to a new world. However, I would suggest that the history of Chinese immigration to North America during the mid-late nineteenth century points to a need to build on the “push and pull”paradigm by focusing on the circular relationship between immigrants in the new world and the old world they did not totally leave behind.

Recent studies have shown that the majority of Chinese immigrants to the United States during the mid-late nineteenth century came from the districts of Guangdong.^⁠1  Significantly these areas underwent an economic and social metamorphosis as the influence of Western capital began to infiltrate the local economy.  The resulting growth in free-market capitalism established a new economic order that not only altered the social fabric of China but the purpose of Chinese immigration to North America.

The Commercialisation of Traditional Chinese Agrarian Society

Traditional agrarian society centred on close family ties and connections.  At the hub of the system was the land itself.  Farming was a well-respected occupation and agriculture formed the core of subsistence living and family life.  Families subdivided the land amongst themselves, industriously harvesting their livelihoods from the soil.  By the turn of the nineteenth century though, access to the land came under strain from a burgeoning populace and the free-market’s expanding control over the land.  The population of the Guangdong region increased by 76 percent (from sixteen million in 1787 to twenty-eight million in 1850), causing the population to land ratio to decrease below the national average: 1.67 mou (0.15 acres) per person compared to 2.19 mou.^⁠2  As pressure upon the land increased, the resulting re-orientatation of small-peasant farming laid the foundation for despair and revolt.

Taiping Rebellion

From 1850 to 1864, the Taiping Rebellion led by the self-proclaimed Son of God, Hong Xiuquan, swept across the Gunagdong districts, claiming the lives of between twenty and thirty million people.^⁠3 An official from the government, Yung Wing, travelling through countryside at the time witnessed the despair.  Wing, the first Chinese to graduate from an American university (Yale), had been born to a poor family near Macao and knew the area well.  Recalling the experience, Yung Wing wrote, “As we ascended towards Taiping, the whole region presented a heartrending and depressing scene of wild waste and devastation.  Whole villages were depopulated and left in a dilapidated condition.  Out of a population of 500,000 only a few dozen people were seen wandering about in a listless, hopeless condition, very much emaciated and looking like walking skeletons.”  For Wing it was almost like a “storm” had “swept away the bulk of the population.”  Wing was not sure of the extent people had suffered.  However, “one significant fact” struck him; the “sparseness of the population,” was “at variance with my preconceived notions.”⁴  Those “swept away” from the land had lost the opportunity to make a subsistence existence.  Instead they were now part of a new landscape.  Addressing this issue Yung Wing wrote, “The labor question … has been so radically disorganized and broken up,” concluding that the changes had, “virtually taken the breath and bread away from nine-tenths of the people of China.”⁵  Many of those without “breath and bread” moved to the coastal ports to find employment. From 1842 to 1895, more than a hundred industrial enterprises were established.  The great majority of these, including shipyards, docks, silk filatures, bean mills, sugar refineries, and other export-import processing industries, were closely related to Western trade with China.^⁠6

Of course, there were winners and losers in this period of industrialization.  Those on the brink, faced a tough decision; to remain in China or to emigrate abroad where there was sanctuary from the domestic troubles and the possibility to work for a higher wage.^⁠7  An estimated 200,000 Chinese immigrants arrived on the West coast of America between 1842 and 1882.^⁠8  One migrant gave his own account of the painful events led him to leave China:

There were four in our family, my mother, my father, my sister and me.  We lived in a two room house.  Our sleeping room and the other served as a parlor, kitchen and dining room.  We were not rich enough to keep pigs or fowls, otherwise, our small house would have been more overcrowded. How can we live on six baskets of rice which were paid twice a year for my father’s duty as a night watchman?  Sometimes the peasants have a poor crop then we go hungry … Sometimes we went hungry for days.  My mother and me would go over the harvested rice fields of the peasants to pick the grains they dropped … We had only salt and water to eat with the rice.^⁠9

A New Paradigm?

So “push and pull” factors were crucial in the decision to emigrate, but in the case of Chinese immigrants “push and pull” factors did not separate the new world from the old world. In fact, the new world became a means to support life in the old world. Wage rates for employment in North American appeared on leaflets distributed in Chinese port cities as well as newspaper advertisements placed by labour agents.  Comparatively, a North American based income could sustain a Chinese family.  As the Reverend Augustus Loomis observed the high pay was such that, “will support them and leave something over to send back to the father and mother, or to the wife and children, left at home.”^⁠10 So instead of a paradigm that separates old and new worlds, the experience of Chinese immigrants suggests a need to investigate the circular relationship between immigrants in the new world and the old world they physically left behind but maintained strong ties with.

References

¹ Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore (Boston; Little, Brown and Company, 1998), 32; June Mei, “Socioeconomic Origins of Emigration: Guandong to California, 1850-1882,” in Lucie Cheng and Edna Bonacich, eds., Labor Immigration under Capitalism Asian Immigrant Workers in the U.S. Before World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) , 232.

² Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore (Boston; Little, Brown and Company, 1998), 33

³ W. Travis Hanes III and Frank Sanello, The Opium Wars: The Addiction of One Empire and the Corruption of Another (London: Robson Books, 2003), 167.

⁴ Yung Wing, My Life in China and America (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1909), 126-127, 127, 93.

⁵ Yung Wing, My Life in China and America (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1909), 84-85.

⁶ Yen-p’ing Hao, The Commercial Revolution in Nineteenth-century China: The Rise of Sino-Western Mercantile Capitalism (California: University of California Press, 1986), 349.

7 John Newsinger, “The Taiping Peasant Revolt,” Monthly Review (Oct 2000) Online. Internet. 10 Apr. 2004. Available: http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m1132/5_52/66937933/p1/article.jhtml

⁸ Lucie Cheng and Edna Bonacich, eds., Labor Immigration Under Capitalism: Asian Workers in the United States Before World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 214.

⁹ Kil Young Zo, Chinese Emigration into the United States, 1850-1880 (New York, 1971), 62.

¹⁰ A.W. Loomis, “How Our Chinamen Are Employed,” Overland Monthly, Vol. 2 (March 1869), 231.

Was the credit-ticket scheme a form of slavery or even indentured servitude?

During the mid-late nineteenth century, the majority of Chinese immigrant workers in the United States were under the supervision of a labour agent.  According to Leland Stanford, the president of the Central Pacific Railroad, labour agents were “shrewd, business men” who essentially advised “their subordinates where employment can be found on the most favorable terms.”^⁠1 The labour agents themselves operated collectively under an organization known as the Chinese Six Companies.  Based in San Francisco, the Six Companies commanded a vast network of intermediaries in both China and California, possessing a virtual monopoly on the migrations of nearly all U.S. bound Chinese immigrants.^⁠2

Credit ticket scheme

The power of the Chinese Six Companies stemmed from the scheme that financed the immigration process. The majority of Chinese immigrants financed their voyage across the Pacific using the debt inducing credit-ticket scheme.  The cost of the voyage was approximately $40, a sum of money out of the reach of the average Chinese migrant.  The credit-ticket scheme effectively became the only way migrants could cross the Pacific. Notably, labour agents cut deals with the steamship companies making sure that no Chinese immigrant could return without the debt being repaid.  This meant that immigrants became financially tied to labour agents, empowering labour agents to redirect immigrants into unskilled labour, such as railroad construction.

Similarities to Indentured Servitude

To many contemporaries, the credit-ticket scheme reduced Chinese immigrants to the status of slaves or a derivative of slaves, “coolies.”^⁠3  However, I would argue that the credit-ticket scheme was essentially a reinvention of indentured servitude.^⁠4

Indentured servitude had been the dominant form of European migration to North America during the eighteenth century.  European migrants who could not pay the cost of the voyage to North America with their own money or were unable to borrow funds from other individuals or financial institutions, turned to indentured servitude to facilitate their migration to the New World.  Through merchants, migrants could borrow the cost of their passage as an advance against their future labour.^⁠5

The credit-ticket scheme followed a similar strategy in regards to repayment of the cost of passage. However, there are some noticeable differences between the two systems.

Differences to Indentured Servitude

The key difference between indentured servitude and the credit-ticket system was the method in repaying the cost of passage.  While indenture servitude rested on migrants being bound to an employer for a length of time in order to pay off the debt, the credit ticket system simply obligated Chinese immigrants to repay the debt rather than to serve a term of years.  As the U.S. Senate reported, “They [Chinese immigrants] often borrow money to get here, and agree to pay high premiums or interest, but the agreement is in the amount of money rather than in the number of years of service.”^⁠6  Frederick Low added, “If I am correct in my supposition, these contracts do not bind them to work for any specific length of time; they only bind them to refund a certain sum of money, and when that money is paid they are as free as you and I.”^⁠7

This still leaves the question, why was indentured servitude reinvented in the mid-late nineteenth century?

Debt and the creation of a new American workforce

The answer perhaps can be found with debt and the creation of a new American workforce. As Sven Beckert has shown in his recent study of cotton production after the Civil War, debt was a powerful tool in re-energising the labour force of the South and developing a new system of labour.  Through schemes such as sharecropping Beckert notes, “[cotton] cultivators were now nominally free,” but, “networks of credit … captured them in an ongoing cycle of indebtedness that required them to grow cash crops.”^⁠8

I believe a similar analogy can be used for understanding the role of the credit-ticket scheme and Chinese immigrants. For Chinese immigrants to escape the cyclical debt of the credit-ticket scheme, meant not only finding work but also sustaining employment. Interestingly, expectations regarding employment were low.  As one contemporary noted, the immigrants hoped “for the present at least, to perform the most common and unskilled labor.”^⁠9

References

¹ Leland Stanford, Central Pacific Railroad. Statement made to the President of the United States, and Secretary of the Interior of the Progress of the Work (Sacramento: H.S. Crocker & Co., Printers, 92 J Street, 1865).

² Gunther Peck, Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and Immigrant Workers in the North American West, 1880-1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 51.

³ See David Gouter, “Drawing Different Lines of Color: The Mainstream English Canadian Labour Movement’s Approach to Blacks and Chinese, 1880-1914,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 2:1 (2005), 55-76.

⁴ Lydia Potts, The World Labour Market: A History of Migration (London: Zed Books, 1940); Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830-1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974); David Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834-1922 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Kay Saunders, ed., Indentured Labor in the British Empire, 1834-1920 (London: Croom Helm, 1984); Jan Lucassen, “Free and Unfree Labour Before the Twentieth Century: A Brief Overview,” in Free and Unfree Labor, ed., Tom Brass, Marcel van der Linder, and Jan Lucassen (Amsterdam: International Institute for Social History, 1993), 7-18.

⁵ D.W. Galenson, “The Rise and Fall of Indentured Servitude in the Americas: An Economic Analysis,” Journal of Economic History XLIV (1984), 16-17.

⁶ “Report of the Joint Special Committee Investigate Chinese Immigration.” U.S. Senate, (1877), 405.

⁷ “Report of the Joint Special Committee Investigate Chinese Immigration.” U.S. Senate, (1877), 83.

⁸ Sven Beckert, “Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide Web of Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War,” American Historical Review (December 2004), 1428.

⁹ Otis Gibson, The Chinese in America (Cincinnati: Hitchcock & Walden, 1877), 55.

Gambling, opium, and life as a Chinese railroad hand

The hard labour of clearing the right of way, grading, laying track or tunneling through granite demanded a release.  Many Chinese hands found that release through gambling.  A variety of games were played like battling bulls, with each man rolling the dice to determine who should throw the dominoes first.  But mostly fan-tan was played.  The dealer placed a small handful of buttons from a pan on the ground under a cup.  After bets were laid down, the cup was lifted and the buttons counted out four at a time.  The men who guessed how many buttons would be left; one, two, three, or none would be the winners.^⁠ Gambling drew the ire of local authorities.  In Washington territory, gambling was outlawed, but “Chinamen continued to take the chances.”  As the Seattle Post-Intelligencer  noted the consequences were that, “Chief Woolery and officer Thompson lit down on two of them and arrested the dealers and captured considerable money.”^⁠1  The two arrested were fined $10 each.

The smoking of opium was another way to take away the painful drudgery of everyday life on the railroad.  Although, according to a Chinese merchant called to testify at the Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration, opium smoking was “not as injurious as drunkenness,” the drug did have addictive qualities that had negative consequences for its users.^⁠2  One railway contractor stated that he had seen labourers “under the influence of opium,” as such they risked impaired judgment at often dangerous work-sites.  Another problem was over use.  One contractor commenting on the advantages of the contract system touched upon opium abuse, noting, “if the boss had to have a certain number of men at the railway the fact that ten of his men might be sleeping off an opium debauch would not prevent ten others being in their places.”^⁠3   After waking the reality for the ten sleeping off the “opium debauch” would have hit, no wages for that day and competition to regain employment on the line.

 

References

¹ Seattle Post-Intelligencer, January 31, 1883.

² Report of the Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration (Ottawa, 1885), 172.

³ Report of the Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration (Ottawa, 1885), xxvii.

Coolieism and Slavery

In 1874, President Ulysses S. Grant during his State of the Union address turned to the issue of Chinese immigration.  Alluding to the system of slavery, Grant proclaimed that, “the great proportion of the Chinese immigrants who come to our shores do not come voluntarily, to make their homes with us and their labor productive of general prosperity, but come under contracts with headmen, who own them almost absolutely.”^⁠1  In an open letter to President Ulysses S. Grant, representatives of the Chinese Six Companies, the headmen who Grant referred to, countered the allegation of slavery, declaring that:

It is charged that all Chinese laboring men are slaves. This is not true in a single instance. Chinamen labor for bread. They pursue all kinds of industries for a livelihood. Is it so then that every man laboring for his livelihood is a slave? If these men are slaves, then all men laboring for wages are slaves.^⁠2

The words of President Ulysses S. Grant and the response of the Chinese Six Companies offers an insight into the broader debate over the hiring of Chinese labourers and the crisis “Free Labor” ideology post-Civil War.

Grant’s allusion to slavery clearly reflected concerns about how Chinese labourers were hired, and how that hiring process undermined the ideals of “Free Labor.” However, the statement by the Chinese Six Companies suggests a different understanding of  “Free Labor” post-Civil War.  Defining Chinese immigrants as wage-labourers and not slaves, the Six Companies offered a critique of industrial capitalism by implying that all workers were being transformed into “wage slaves.”^⁠3

References

¹ Ulysses S. Grant quoted in Patrica Cloud and David W. Galenson, “Chinese Immigration and Contract Labor in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Explorations in Economic History, 21 (1987), 34.

² Memorial from Representative Chinamen in America to U.S. Grant President of the United States, reprinted in Otis Gibson, The Chinese in America (Cincinnati: Hitchcock & Walden, 1877), 322.

³ A number of studies have compared wage work and chattel slavery. See David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1999), 65-94; Eric Foner, “Workers and Slavery,” in Working for Democracy: American Workers from the Revolution to the Present, ed., Paul Buhle and Alan Dawley (Urbana: University of Illnois Press, 1985), 21-30.

The origins of Coolieism

Interwoven throughout the debates over the “Chinese Question” and the “Labor Question” could be heard the term “coolie.” During the 1840s and 1850s, the term came to describe Chinese immigrants coerced to work in Cuba and Peru. In June 1847, several Cuban planters and a railroad company on the island started employing Chinese “coolies” as the supply of the Atlantic slave trade dried up. With the end of the African slave trade, Cuban planters fearful of a slave rebellion as revolutionary as the one in Saint Domingue (now Haiti) looked to contract Chinese labourers in order to stabilize the country’s socio-economic structure. The appearance of contracted Chinese labourers on plantations notably sharpened racial sensibilities and divided labour tasks according to skin colour. Rather than Cuba’s socio-economic structure collapsing, the contracting of Chinese labourers maintained power relations. Although the Chinese government attempted to outlaw the practice of enforced labour and the U.S. government banned “coolies” from entering the United States in 1862, during the 1860s and 1870s the term was increasingly used to describe the supposed slave-like status of Chinese immigrants to America.

References

Matthew Guterl, “After slavery: Asian labor, the American South, and the age of emancipation,” Journal of World History, 14:2 (2003), 209-242.

Evelyn Hu-DeHart, “Chinese coolie labor in Cuba in the nineteenth century: Free labor or neo-slavery?” Slavery and Abolition, 14:1 (1993), 67-83.

Walton Look Lai, Indentured labor, Caribbean sugar: Chinese and Indian migrants to the British West Indies, 1838-1918, (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).

Lisa Yun, The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves in Cuba, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008).