|
|
|
Book Review
| Moon-Hu Jung, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2006. pp. xii + 275. US $48.95 cloth.
|
| At the end of the American Civil War in 1865, the emancipation of four million slaves raised major questions about the future labour supply of the America South. When emancipation had occurred in the British West Indies after 1833, sugar planters imported Asian indentured labour. In Cuba, too, planters sought Chinese labourers with the end of slave shipments there, even though slavery continued in Cuba itself after 1866. Though set within this larger transnational picture of the age of emancipation, Moon-Hu Jung's Coolies and Cane: Race, Labour, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation concentrates on the story of indentured Chinese labour in the Louisiana sugar country. This and the surrounding discourse on the 'coolie trade' are treated at length. California's opposition to Chinese labour was connected to fears of a recurrence of slavery – fears that labour agitators played upon. But this study shows that American attitudes towards indentured and particularly Chinese labour were not forged around California's experience alone. |
1
|
|
While some historians would downplay the tangible results of emancipation on African Americans, Jung clearly shows the effects of freedom destabilising labour relations. Emancipation deprived Louisiana, or at least the high labour demand areas, of a plentiful and pliable workforce of African Americans. In the years after 1865, rich planters sought 'coolies' because they regarded African Americans as unreliable, slack and 'saucy' workers, who inconveniently wanted pigs and other privileges, downed tools at will and took other jobs. In Louisiana the drive for the new form of labour came from the machinations of such planters – who could afford to organise schemes to bring workers from far away, and who had the lands, capital and potential for profit making from sugar to make such labour desirable. First from Cuba they obtained supplies, later in 1870 from San Francisco when Cuba's anti-Spanish revolution began to disorganise the economy and labour trade there. The numbers of Chinese brought to Louisiana at any one time appears to have been small both in absolute terms, and as a proportion of the workforce, but the presence was more extensive and significant than the statistics revealed. Great turnover occurred and the mobile work force made counting at census time difficult. |
2
|
|
Such importations raised many hackles nationally and locally. Slavery and the indentured Chinese immigration had already become twinned when, in 1862, the wartime Republican Congress outlawed American participation in the international coolie trade. The law turned out to be an inconvenience to importation, but it did not stop the trade. To these ideological, abolitionist sources of opposition was added class politics and economics. The post-war recruitment in Louisiana earned the resentment of poorer whites and political opportunists; the issue became caught up in the attempts of whites to cement a new form of racial control to replace the (relative degree of) political power that blacks achieved under the Republican Party's Radical Reconstruction governments of the 1868–77 period. Advocates of white supremacy such as the White League joined to promote alternative sources of labour. Attempts were made to recruit European immigrants in Chicago and other places and sometimes sugar plantations were broken up into small farms, but with centralised crushing factories. The stress upon small farms was intended to encourage whites to work the land and redeem it for the race. |
3
|
|
The Chinese themselves did not prove to be the pliant labour force that racial stereotypes suggested. It was difficult to enforce contracts as the 'coolies' defied stereotypes; they fled, demanded more money, and even went on strike. (The hirers also caused friction by violating the terms of the contracts on occasion, for example arbitrarily changing payment agreements.) Over time the Chinese had to be employed in smaller groups, and higher wages than for African-Americans also became necessary. As a result, white planters became disillusioned with the new labour force and they too joined in movements to advance white supremacy in the aftermath of Reconstruction's demise. Even though focused on Louisiana, Coolies and Cane has clear relevance to the larger national American story of race relations and post-Reconstruction politics. |
4
|
|
Told in great detail derived from contemporary newspaper and archival sources, Jung's study draws heavily upon the papers of Edward Gay, one of the major sugar planters and an advocate of Chinese migration. Among the most interesting material is that concerning the life of a Chinese worker and businessman, as he undertook his transnational journeys covering British Guiana, Cuba, California and New Orleans. One would have welcomed more glimpses of such life histories, a clearer chronology, more comparisons with other regions in the American South, and more attention to the effects of the changing business cycle. Jung does not deal with other sugar producing regions using different forms of indentured labour such as Fiji and Australia, but this book is bound to be valuable for comparative purposes and as an exposition of the peculiarities of the 'coolie trade' and its discourse. It is also a welcome addition to transnational approaches to American history. |
5
|
| | | | |
| University of New South Wales |
IAN TYRRELL | |
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|