Trouble of the World by Sell Zach;

Author:Sell, Zach;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2020-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

From Black Colonization to Chinese Indenture

As British Honduras landholders failed to realize a dream of a new plantation colony based upon the labor of formerly enslaved people from the United States, the interest of landholders and colonial bureaucrats returned to demand for the arrival of indentured labor from China. In this demand, they joined British Caribbean colonies, Queensland, the United States, and beyond in the search for coolies to be subordinated to demands of capitalist production, particularly its plantations. This turn toward coolies reflected back upon what was at the heart of the project to bring formerly enslaved people from the United States to the colony, Asian or Black labor managed by white men for the accumulation of colonial wealth and the expansion of colonial rule and Maya dispossession. For both formerly enslaved people and Chinese laborers it was the contract of indenture which was to at once serve as the sign of freedom and free labor while in reality providing the legal force for coercion and subordination to the demands of the plantation.56 The demands of companies and landholders in British Honduras for Chinese laborers was part of a longer history of predation upon Asian indentured laborers characteristic of British colonies in the post-slavery Caribbean.57 On 4 July 1865, the immigration office in Belize announced that 474 migrants arrived in Belize from Xiamen (Amoy), China, aboard Light of the Age.58 As the immigration agent of Belize noted upon the arrival of Chinese laborers, “The productive interests of the colony must derive from the introduction of so well selected a body of young docile and generally healthy laborers.”59 Here, the emphasis of the immigration agent was not upon the arrival of new colonial subjects but upon docile bodies that would meet expectations for subordination to an emerging plantation economy. This vision of docile bodies would ultimately result in the death of many of the Chinese people who would suffer from the hands and visions of plantation owners.

The racist investment of colonial officials and landholders in coolies was formed in relation to views of Asian laborers as a global replacement for the plantation labor done formerly by enslaved people. Before turning toward free Black labor from the United States, Hodge wrote that British Honduras’s planter class “require Chinese as the Indians from Yucatan have not the necessary intelligence.”60 This vision was what was returned to and, like projects for plantation-making in Australia and the United States, was founded upon the dispossession of Indigenous people from their land rather than their labor. In a conversation with Lincoln about Asian indentured labor, Hodge stated that “coolies” would be turned to only out of necessity should it become impossible to relocate formerly enslaved people to the colony, and once that became impossible, this was where Hodge’s interest returned.

White rumors and fears of coolies abounded. White fears of Chinese sexual perversion, same-sex relations, and gender asymmetries in the disproportionate presence of Chinese men meant that “coolies” would be part of colonial society only to the extent that their bodies were vessels containing labor necessary for colonial progress.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.