My One Minute Argument

The success of Chinese railroad hands during the 1860s became the catalyst for the employment of thousands of Chinese labourers across multiple industries across the United States during the 1870s and 1880s. However, the history of Chinese labour during the mid-late nineteenth century is more than their immense contribution to the building railroads, mining, or agriculture. As the initial experiment with Chinese labour became a national phenomenon, the debate over why and how Chinese labourers were employed, what contemporaries called the “Chinese Question,” began to transform the debate over who would do what and for how much in the emerging industrial economy. By the end of the nineteenth century, the “Chinese Question” had transformed the “Labor Question.”