The Chinese Coolie Trade

The abolition of slavery in the United States, marked by the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and the passage of the 13th Amendment in 1865, was a significant turning point for industries reliant on enslaved labor. Alongside the 19th-century abolitionist movement and the end of the Civil War, these events served to shift global attitudes, morals, and political views on enslavement. They also exposed many contradictions: countries, like the United States and Britain, that had legally abolished slavery, still needed and wanted cheap and exploitable sources of labor exported from abroad.

As slavery was slowly dismantled in the U.S. and South America, European colonies and regions heavily reliant on an enslaved labor force faced an urgent need to replace their workers. The idea of "coolie" labor replacing enslaved African-Americans had already been raised during the Civil War, when southern plantation owners echoed Caribbean plantations in attempting to contract Chinese and Indian workers.¹ In the post-Civil War era, colonial European powers—such as the British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese—continued to seek out new forms of cheap and exploitative labor, particularly for agriculture and infrastructure projects.

While attempts were made to use existing populations, such as European and Indigenous labor from the Yucatán for sugar fields in Cuba, these efforts proved unsuccessful. Eventually, colonial powers turned to Asia, initiating what is now known as the global coolie trade. This system, characterized by the mass migration of indentured Asian workers to fill labor shortages in European colonies, led to the emergence of a new diaspora. Among the affected communities were South Asians, whose descendants are now often referred to as Indo-Caribbeans, and the Chinese. Both groups have significantly influenced the culture and history of the Americas and the United States through various waves of migration. The exploitation of Chinese laborers during this period has come to be known as the Chinese coolie trade.

While some Chinese laborers arrived to the Americans voluntarily, the majority were victims of kidnapping or deceptive labor recruitment practices.² It is important to note that most laborers were young men; Chinese women made up a very small minority in the Chinese coolie trade. Before embarking on their journey to Latin America, laborers were held in barracoons, similar to those used in the Atlantic Slave Trade that confined enslaved African people. Traveling on former African slave ships, Chinese laborers being sent to places like Cuba and Peru were kept below decks with armed officers who enforced strict corporal punishment. Conditions on the ships were overcrowded and unsanitary, leading to high mortality rates among documented voyages.

Although the coolie trade differed from slavery in its legal framework — compared to chattel slavery, which allowed for the enslavement of children born to enslaved people and extended ownership until death — the experiences of Chinese coolies can be seen as paralleling the exploitative conditions faced by enslaved Black people. Legally classified as indentured servants, Chinese coolies signed contracts, written in both Spanish and Chinese, committing to work for eight years upon their arrival in the Americas. Many were promised a monthly wage of four dollars, along with food, shelter, clothing, and medical care. Some historians argue that these contracts were primarily designed to distinguish indentured labor from the now-illegal slave trade, despite the fact that the conditions endured were strikingly similar to those of enslavement.

Chinese laborers were seen as a preferable alternative to the freed Black workers for a number of reasons, many rooted in racist tropes. Evelyn Hu-DeHart and Kathleen López, who have extensively studied Chinese-Latino history, explain that “white planters and officials perceived Asian migrants as more industrious, more economical, and less threatening than Africans.”³ The two historians also note that many planters and officials hoped that Asian workers would come to occupy a sort of in-between position in Latin American racial hierarchies, somewhere between the top (white) and the bottom (African and indigenous), and that this could have a "civilizing" influence on Black and indigenous workers. In many cases, Chinese workers were contracted to replace recently empancipated slaves. Consequently, regions like Cuba, heavily reliant on sugar production, became dependent on the exploitation of Chinese workers to sustain their economies.