| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Moon-Ho Jung. Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2006. Pp. x, 275. $48.95.
In this important and well-researched work, Moon-Ho Jung argues that southern sugar planters looked to Asian "coolies" to solve their labor problems after the Civil War. Early reports from the Caribbean suggested that these Asians were docile and would not press for things like American citizenship. Many planters surmised that coolies could not be worse than slaves, those "impudent" and disloyal workers who went "on strike" soon after the Civil War began, and who would need new forms of discipline and competition after emancipation.	1
Americans ridiculed British use of Asian laborers on their newly "emancipated" colonial possessions as replacing one form of slavery with another. But were these coolies in fact slaves, or were they free migrants working as "apprentices" in the British West Indies or Cuba? There were stories of Chinese men who came freely to work, men who married white women and lived and mixed with white people; but there were also stories of kidnapping, deception, and corporal punishment swirling around "Caribbean coolieism." After 1860, Congressional representatives from the West would insist this was slavery. In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed "An Act to Prohibit the `Coolie Trade,'" and Jung insists that this was "the last of America's slave trade laws, unambiguously framed as such by Republican legislators" (p. 37).	2
The 1862 law did not deter Louisiana planters from "[looking] abroad to cope with their postwar predicament because the world they knew and ruled was no more" (p. 62). Hawaiian and European competitors were benefiting from the recent havoc in Louisiana, and so planters throughout the South sought labor from India, Polynesia, and China. Some planters who had fled Louisiana for Cuba found coolies there. "As the politics of coolieism merged with the politics of Reconstruction in Louisiana and the rest of the South, Asian coolies kindled new dreams, anxieties, and antipathies that defined post-bellum America" (p. 76).	. . .

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