Networks of Indenture: Local Practices and Global Effects of Trade and Trafficking in 19th-Century China

The late Qing period was an era of significant socioeconomic changes in commodity markets, land use, and labor migrations. One of the most globally visible of these changes was the rise of the so-called “coolie trade” or trafficking of Chinese and South Asian indentured laborers to plantation societies in the Americas in the second half of the nineteenth century, as the incremental end of New World slavery sparked a search for new sources of labor. This paper examines the Chinese side of this overseas migration and shows how the mass movements of Chinese workers—both forced and unforced—built in underappreciated ways upon preexisting trends of maritime brokerage and opium trafficking on the South China Coast, as smuggling networks, practices, and ships became adapted for new purposes in tandem with China’s increasing immersion into a global labor market. While existing scholarship on the coolie trade has primarily emphasized labor histories focused on the Atlantic World, this paper argues that China-centered markets and migration patterns played an equal part in shaping the early development of the coolie trade, as opium traffickers and other transnational intermediaries leveraged their experiences and networks to facilitate early experiments with exported Chinese labor in the Americas in the early nineteenth century, several decades before Atlantic abolitionism and the spread of foreign treaty ports in China would bring several hundred thousand Chinese indentured laborers to sites such as Cuba and Peru. The paper combines Qing records of commercial practices in the Pearl River Delta with case studies of Chinese contract labor in Trinidad, Rio de Janeiro, and St. Helena to show how local practices on the South China Coast would have far-reaching effects in shaping broader trends of Chinese outmigration, as well as the racialized experiences of individual migrants, in the era after the First Opium War.