That's probably the major theme of the book: defining who's a coolie for purposes of legal and racial accounting.
A Little Background
Set in the Gulf Coast region during the Civil War era, the impetus for the text was the burgeoning global sugar trade of the 19th century. Sugar has its origins of use in the far East, and through trade and pilfering via the Crusades, made its way to Europe, where over the course of a few hundred years, saw the construction of refineries in Italy in the 1400s. When Columbus sails to the New World on the eve of the 16th century, he takes a few sugar cane plants with him and [Sweet &] lo and behold, the agriculture blossoms in the Caribbean's ecosystem (pun intended). Mix this with the rise in European sea power and transnational imperialism and you get sweet tea. Joking. What resulted is large tracts of land in South America, the Greater Antilles and what became known as Louisiana being seized and colonized for this cash crop. And wherever there's profit to be made and natural resources to be fleeced in the era of big ships and empire-hungry nation-states, you have free labor.
One thing I learned is that "free labor" is not what it sounds like during the 19th century. Free labor to me has always been synonymous with slave "wages," i.e., nothing. Just working for free. However, from reading this book I was informed of Free Labor ideology of this time which was a direct contrast to slave labor. It espoused a Horatio Alger ideal of "pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps." An egalitarian vision of self-reliance that afforded anyone willing to work hard the keys to prosperity. Slaves on the other hand, weren't self-reliant. And in the early days of the United States, weren't completely human (see the Three-Fifths Compromise). So there's that.
In the 1800s the Gulf Coast was a melting pot of slaves and colonists and indigenous people all with different ideas on the "best" use of the land. The colonists got the jump on the other two, and specifically, the Spanish colony of Cuba proved particularly competitive, what with its tropical environment and lack of mountains. The terrain proved the best place to grow and export sugarcane. But the Portuguese, English and French were not to be outdone: the wealth from producing valuable sugar to export from the backs of slave labor was staggering. These massive fortunes funded even more massive estates back home. But let's not forget the slaves, who actually were human and therefore hated their involuntary and inhumane commoditization. So they rose and and rebelled. The revolution in France (1789-1799) strongly influenced another in its own colony of Saint-Domigue, (1791-1804), which resulted in the elimination of slavery and the commencement of the Republic of Haiti.
This very idea that slaves could be free, human and free laborers was perhaps even more potent that the act of emancipation itself. Across the Gulf Coast, black slaves began to push back with more concentrated frequency. If not by revolting, than by simply not caring. They refused to work, broke tools, ran off and otherwise resisted, making the use of black slave labor very worrisome for plantation owners.
Scientific Race Theory
Jung's text picks up here, with a demand for alternative plantation labor to produce and export sugar in the age of emancipation. "Africans" who were frustrated with slavery were broadly categorized as "indolent," "violent", "untutored" and disloyal in that they were the race "most easily influenced by a bribe" (Jung, 65). So who would work the fields? The infamous - and incorrect - theories of race and vocational hierarchies at the time were expressed in a widely circulated agricultural magazine out of New Orleans called De Bow's Review. In an article printed during the Civil War the periodical published the following: "We fight against nature's laws in seeking to impose tropical field labor on the white and olive races, and to release the black race from it....and we, moreover, violate true liberty in so doing" (Jung 66).
One answer to this was coolie labor. Importing laborers from the birthplace of sugar itself, Asia.
Scientific race theorists and other political opportunists could not classify Asian workers as black or white, and as such, sidestepped the messy ordeal of perpetuating slavery. But if the coolies were slaves, then could they be imported as factors of production? In the United States, the growing power war between Northern industrialists and Southern planters was centered around who could control Congress. The planters were numerous and rich, but their wealth and livelihoods were threatened by emancipation. Knowledge of this meant abolition spread quickly in the North, but to protect white, male political rights, rather than black human rights. Importing coolies helped to undermine the uncertainty of emancipation. However, importing anyone undermined emancipation. Still, American legislators shied away from allowing these workers to immigrate, as that would put them on the path towards naturalization, and that was reserved for whites. Noting the racial traits of the Asian workers, author Augustin Cochin wrote in his book The Results of Emancipation (1863) that the "East Indian" was comparatively "sober, more intelligent than the black, but less robust," while the Chinese were "generally robust and laborious" and acclimated to sugar cane production (Jung 66)"
So Chinese workers, who were not racially black or white, who were neither imports nor immigrants, but definitely not citizens, were acquired from "crimps" (Chinese body brokers), and transported by "clippers" (their American counterparts) to work the sugar cane plantations when blacks would no longer be forced to were "coolies." Wow. That's a lot of work and words to describe slavery by another name.
Race and the Ideal Plantation Labor Force
Yeah, so the ideal plantation labor force is just that: an idea. It doesn't exist. And paradoxically, neither do coolies. Both were propaganda cooked up by overzealous imperialists obsessed with race to justify their own rent-seeking classist ambitions. First, the coolie proved to be just as human and conscious as the black, and by the end of Jung's book, are just as resistant to exploitation. In his study on British Guiana, historian Walter Rodney argued that "to rely solely on planter propaganda would be to miss a hidden history of shared responses to common circumstances, regardless of race," (Jung 205). Second, efforts to deny the Chinese citizenship while demanding his labor (women were not transported to the U.S.) under strict, and often violently enforced contracts, left the door open for some form of emancipation for the coolie, that is, legal status as immigrants, a title reserved only for selective Europeans, again on a sliding scale, as all Europeans weren't created equal in the eyes of Americans either.
Jung's book is littered with legal precedents that were necessarily challenged by all parties. As the legal and illegal coolie trade grew alongside growing racial tensions, the influx of laborers led to our nation's first broadly restrictive immigration law, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Jung concludes his history of coolie labor there amidst a dynamic landscape of people, ideas, and goods in the years following Reconstruction. By this time the coolie had began to redefine himself away from the oppressive sugar plantations and into cities were "Chinatowns" were autonomous and thriving and even more foreign to white America. It would be another 61 years before the Chinese Exclusion Act would be repealed, and then only in the interest of boosting morale between the U.S. and China as allies against the Axis powers during World War II.
Scientific Race Theory
Jung's text picks up here, with a demand for alternative plantation labor to produce and export sugar in the age of emancipation. "Africans" who were frustrated with slavery were broadly categorized as "indolent," "violent", "untutored" and disloyal in that they were the race "most easily influenced by a bribe" (Jung, 65). So who would work the fields? The infamous - and incorrect - theories of race and vocational hierarchies at the time were expressed in a widely circulated agricultural magazine out of New Orleans called De Bow's Review. In an article printed during the Civil War the periodical published the following: "We fight against nature's laws in seeking to impose tropical field labor on the white and olive races, and to release the black race from it....and we, moreover, violate true liberty in so doing" (Jung 66).
One answer to this was coolie labor. Importing laborers from the birthplace of sugar itself, Asia.
Scientific race theorists and other political opportunists could not classify Asian workers as black or white, and as such, sidestepped the messy ordeal of perpetuating slavery. But if the coolies were slaves, then could they be imported as factors of production? In the United States, the growing power war between Northern industrialists and Southern planters was centered around who could control Congress. The planters were numerous and rich, but their wealth and livelihoods were threatened by emancipation. Knowledge of this meant abolition spread quickly in the North, but to protect white, male political rights, rather than black human rights. Importing coolies helped to undermine the uncertainty of emancipation. However, importing anyone undermined emancipation. Still, American legislators shied away from allowing these workers to immigrate, as that would put them on the path towards naturalization, and that was reserved for whites. Noting the racial traits of the Asian workers, author Augustin Cochin wrote in his book The Results of Emancipation (1863) that the "East Indian" was comparatively "sober, more intelligent than the black, but less robust," while the Chinese were "generally robust and laborious" and acclimated to sugar cane production (Jung 66)"
So Chinese workers, who were not racially black or white, who were neither imports nor immigrants, but definitely not citizens, were acquired from "crimps" (Chinese body brokers), and transported by "clippers" (their American counterparts) to work the sugar cane plantations when blacks would no longer be forced to were "coolies." Wow. That's a lot of work and words to describe slavery by another name.
Race and the Ideal Plantation Labor Force
Yeah, so the ideal plantation labor force is just that: an idea. It doesn't exist. And paradoxically, neither do coolies. Both were propaganda cooked up by overzealous imperialists obsessed with race to justify their own rent-seeking classist ambitions. First, the coolie proved to be just as human and conscious as the black, and by the end of Jung's book, are just as resistant to exploitation. In his study on British Guiana, historian Walter Rodney argued that "to rely solely on planter propaganda would be to miss a hidden history of shared responses to common circumstances, regardless of race," (Jung 205). Second, efforts to deny the Chinese citizenship while demanding his labor (women were not transported to the U.S.) under strict, and often violently enforced contracts, left the door open for some form of emancipation for the coolie, that is, legal status as immigrants, a title reserved only for selective Europeans, again on a sliding scale, as all Europeans weren't created equal in the eyes of Americans either.
Jung's book is littered with legal precedents that were necessarily challenged by all parties. As the legal and illegal coolie trade grew alongside growing racial tensions, the influx of laborers led to our nation's first broadly restrictive immigration law, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Jung concludes his history of coolie labor there amidst a dynamic landscape of people, ideas, and goods in the years following Reconstruction. By this time the coolie had began to redefine himself away from the oppressive sugar plantations and into cities were "Chinatowns" were autonomous and thriving and even more foreign to white America. It would be another 61 years before the Chinese Exclusion Act would be repealed, and then only in the interest of boosting morale between the U.S. and China as allies against the Axis powers during World War II.
