CHAPTER 2:

THE GLOBAL BACKGROUND: GUANO, SUGAR, ABOLITIONISM,

AND THE BIRTH OF A NEW WORLD LABOR MARKET

This chapter investigates the origins, causes and specificities of the Macao coolie trade
within the nineteenth-century global system of labor migrations. The first part examines
the consequences of the abolitionist policies in both the British Empire and the broader
Atlantic world, and their links with the earliest attempts to introduce coolie labor in the
British West Indies and Cuba. The second part addresses, instead, the social, political and
economic conditions of the departure regions in South China. The coolie trade is
interpreted in light of the century-old history of Chinese emigration, and its continuities
and ruptures. Special attention is paid to the development of a labor migration network in
Amoy (Xiamen) from the eighteenth century onward, and the rise of the Guangdong area
as a source of labor migrants in the eve of the California gold rush. We then establish a
connection between these events, the development of the guano industry in Peru, and the
final takeoff of the coolie trade in the late 1840s and early 1850s.

2.1 Global migrations, indenture and the abolition of slavery in the Western
hemisphere

Recent scholarship has identified the long nineteenth century (1830-1940) as the “age
of global migrations;”1 a historical period characterized by the emergence of three major
migratory streams, on a totally unprecedented extension and volume: the Atlantic
migration of 55 million Europeans to the American continent; the internal colonization of
Siberia and Manchuria by 48 million Chinese and Russian settlers in the second half of
the century; and finally, the mass emigration of about 50 million Chinese and Indians to
several destinations in Asia, Africa, Oceania and Northern and Southern America.
Overall, more than 150 million people set in motion across the world’s landmasses and
oceans.2
Part of this larger exodus, a smaller but significant movement of about two million
indentured laborers was mobilized from several locations in Asia, Africa, Oceania and

1
Gabaccia and Hoerder, Connecting Seas and Connected Ocean Rims, 1. Cf. Adam McKeown,
“Periodizing Globalization,” History Workshop Journal 63, no. 1 (2007): 218–30.
2
Adam McKeown, “Global Migration 1846-1940,” Journal of World History 15, no. 2 (2004): 155–89.
Slightly smaller figures are provided by Dirk Hoerder, Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the
Second Millennium (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).

32
Europe in response to the global processes of slave emancipation. As illustrated by David
Northrup’s seminal Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, the revival of indenture
in the nineteenth century was instrumental to the survival and expansion of the global
plantation economy in a context of increasing demand and decreasing prices of tropical
produced commodities.3 The success of indenture did not depend, Northrup continued, on
lower costs of labor or higher productivity, but on the ecological constraint of scarcely
populated production sites in the Western colonial world, and—especially in the case of
sugar production—on plantation owners’ need to exert high degrees of labor control and
coercion in the completion of crucial labor-intensive tasks, for example during the
sugarcane reaping season (zafra).4 In this sense, he concludes, the providential inflow of
contract laborers delayed and prevented the crisis of the plantation economy in the critical
transitional timeframe until advances in technology and the organization of labor—hybrid
forms of sharecropping and the separation of sugar mills from the plantations—radically
transformed its classical configuration at the end of the century.

2.1.1 The British efforts to abolish the slave trade and slavery and their consequences

Traditionally, the historiography on the abolition of the slave trade and slavery in the
Atlantic world has been divided along the lines of the advocates of economic against
cultural interpretations. According to Eric William’s classic Capitalism and Slavery
(1944),5 for instance, it was the rise of a new form of industrial capitalism, fed up by the
profits of the slave trade, which made the British plantation system—and its underpinning
mercantilist policy—outdated and conflicting with the industrial lobbies pushing for
“freedom of trade.” In this view, the final abolition of sugar protectionist tariffs in 1846
(Sugar Duties act) certified the newly dominant circles of cotton-manufacturers’ resolve
to favor the import of cheap sugar from foreign sources (again, the slave importing Cuba
and Brazil) over the survival of the plantation system inside the Empire.6 Other historians,
lead in the seventies by Seymour Drescher, instead, have contested this “decline thesis”

3
Indenture had been, in fact, a crucial legal instrument in the European colonization of the American
continent in the early modern era. For a comparison of the early modern and modern systems of indentured
migrations see David W. Galenson, “The Rise and Fall of Indentured Servitude in the Americas: An
Economic Analysis,” The Journal of Economic History 44, no. 1 (1984): 1–26; and the essays in Pieter C.
Emmer, ed., Colonialism and Migration: Indentured Labour before and after Slavery, Comparative Studies
in Overseas History (Leiden: Leiden Centre for the History of European Expansion, 1986).
4
Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834-1922, 33. An even more extreme example is
the digging of guano beds in the Chincha islands in Peru, which demonstrates how contract labor could
become indispensable to compel workers to unhealthy, destructive and often lethal productions. See below.
5
Eric Williams, Capitalism & Slavery (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1944).
6
Ibid., 137.

33
arguing about the vitality of the British West Indies plantations at the time of abolition,
and stressing the negative repercussion of the abolitionists’ policies calling this process a
genuine “econocide”, the sacrifice of a flourishing economic sector to political and
ideological motives.7
In the introduction of his dissertation on the coolie trade, Arnold Meagher pointed the
attention on the failure of these two historiographical traditions, taken alone, to explain
the substantial replication of slave-like labor relation through the resuscitated indentured
system.8 If slavery had been inexorably surpassed by the rise of industrial capitalism, he
stressed, why did it survive for over a century under the only relatively more socially
acceptable form of indentured labor? And if it was the humanitarian stance of the British
government that fostered abolition, continued, how could that very actor play a
determinant role in the setting up of a “new system of slavery”?9 For obvious reasons of
scope, we cannot undertake here a systematic analysis of this nexus. A persuasive attempt
to answer Meagher’s questions has come from historians in the “world system” school—
Dale Tomich, for instance—who suggested looking at the emancipation processes in a
broader geographical perspective. The British Caribbean abolition can only be
comprehended, Tomich argued, as integral “part of the cyclical expansion and
restructuring of world economy”,10 in other words a global reorganization of the slave-
driven sugar production system that incorporated, on one hand, the continuation of an
illegal slave trade and slavery for most of the nineteenth century in places like Cuba and
Brazil, and, on the other hand, the experimentation of hybrid forms of bonded labor—
including the new Asian indenture in other formerly slave-driven areas of production.11
In fact the British abolition of 1807 did not put an end to the Atlantic slave trade, but
simply shifted its barycenter from the British colonies to Cuba and Brazil. Current
estimates calculate in over three millions the overall figure for the post-abolition

7
Seymour Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 1977). A synthesis of the debate in David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage : The Rise and
Fall of Slavery in the New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 231–250; see also Gabriele
Turi, Schiavi in un mondo libero: storia dell’emancipazione dall'età moderna a oggi (Roma-Bari: Laterza,
2012), 312–319.
8
Meagher, The Coolie Trade, 21–22.
9
The expression “a new system of slavery” is taken from John Gladstone, planter in British Guyana,
commenting the introduction of Indian coolies in the 1840s; Tinker adopted it as the title of his
groundbreaking work on Indian indenture in the British Empire: Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery:
The Export of Indian Labour Overseas 1830-1920 (London: Oxford University Press, 1971).
10
Dale Tomich, Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor, Capital and World Economy (Lanham: Rowman and
Littlefield, 2004), 106.
11
Dale Tomich, “World slavery and Caribbean capitalism: The Cuban sugar industry, 1760-1868,” Theory
and Society 20, no. 3 (1991): 297–319.

34
clandestine slave trade. 12 The British policy of bilateral treaties and naval patrols,
inaugurated after the Congress of Wien,13 did not bring significant results until the 1840s,
and annual imports of slaves remained comparable to the highest averages of the
eighteenth century until this date. As shown by David Eltis, moreover, the reorganization
of the Cuban and Brazilian plantation system in these years relied on a massive inflow of
British and foreign capitals; there was, in other words, a “positive correlation between
exports of British products to Cuba and Brazil and the flow of slaves to those regions”,14
and even after the official abolition “British subjects owned, managed, and manned
slaving adventures; they purchased newly imported Africans in the Americas; they
supplied ships, equipment, insurance, and most important of all, trade goods and credit to
foreign slave trader.”15
It is in this context that the British government extended its anti-slave-trade agenda by
declaring the complete abolition of slavery in the British Empire (1833). Historians
generally agree that the negative impact of the 1807 slave trade abolition on the British
West Indies had been alleviated by the presence of a substantial reserve of slaves that had
saturated their productive capacity, and by the abrupt disappearance of the principal direct
competitor in the region, Saint Domingue, after the Haitian revolution.
The 1833 emancipation, instead, led almost directly, after the buffer of the
apprenticeship system (1834-38), to a dramatic fall in productivity and land value of the
plantations. What happened was that many former slaves, freed from the yoke of
apprenticeship refused to prolong their work for their old masters, turning into self-
employed cultivators on marginal lands (squatters), while those remaining on the
plantations were often able to negotiate improved wages and working conditions, hence
rendering the British plantations non-competitive with its slave-employing direct rivals.16
The Cuban demographer Juan Pérez de la Riva has called this attitude “the

12
Cf. the massive database edited by David Eltis et al., “Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade
Database,” 2008, http://www.slavevoyages.org/. (accessed 05/14). Also, David Eltis, Economic Growth and
the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York-Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 243–245.
13
Turi, Schiavi in un mondo libero, 66; Leslie Bethell, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade: Britain,
Brazil and the Slave Trade Question 1807-1869 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 14. Cf.
also João Pedro Marques, The Sounds of Silence: Nineteenth-century Portugal and the Abolition of the
Slave Trade (New York-Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006).
14
Ibid., 68.
15
David Eltis, “The British Contribution to the Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade,” The
Economic History Review 32, no. 2 (1979): 211.
16
Walton Look Lai, “Sugar Plantations and Indentured Labor : Migrations from China and India to the
British West Indies, 1838-1918” (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1991), 1–15, also
published as Walton Look Lai, Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian Migrants to the
British West Indies, 1838-1918, (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1993).

35
fundamental population law” in plantation colonies: “cuando se produce un cambio social
favorable al proletariado indígena, éste tiende a abandonar no sólo su ocupación anterior,
sino también su lugar de residencia, produciéndose una gran movilidad geográfica.”17
This phenomenon was contained in the smaller islands, where the absence of free
available land forced most of the ex-slaves manpower to remain on the plantations, but its
repercussions were felt much heavily in the larger and most important colonies—Jamaica,
and British Guyana—where sugar production shrunk respectively from an average yearly
output of 54,225 to 33,431 (Jamaica) and from 51,278 to 31,865 (British Guyana) tons
between 1834-38 and 1839-46.18

Tab. 2.1: The rise and fall of some sugar-producing countries, 1780-1880. Estimates in metric tons.,
selected years

B. Guyana Jamaica Mauritius Cuba St. Domingue Brazil

1780 2,400 44,386 12,654 58,928 -

1790 2,997 55,600 15,577 70,313 -
1800 1,210 70,100 28,419 8,929 -
1810 12,214 73,700 477 37,334 - -
1820 30,062 88,456 7,485 43,119 1,211 75,000
1830 59,790 68,962 32,750 73,200 83,000
1840 35,619 26,453 36,559 160,891 82,000
1850 32,695 28,750 55,163 223,145 138,000
1860 54,423 26,040 134,048 447,000 56,927
1870 75,776 24,598 98,742 726,000 101,501
1880 95,370 16,845 108,475 530,000 218,582
Source: Noel Deer, The History of Sugar (London: Chapman and Hall, 1950), 112, 131, 198–199,
203–204, 240.

2.1.2 Alternative sources of labor: West Africa, India, China

In his Dalla Schiavitù al Lavoro Salariato, Yann Moulier Boutang drew insightful
conceptual linkages between slave, contract and wage labor. He identified a common
denominator in a range of economic and extra economic forms of coercion—from the
whip to vagrant and poor laws—shaped to prevent absenteeism and extract from the
laborers what plantation owners called “a continuous and regular output”, averting the
flight/escape from dependent labor. 19 Looking at the response of British plantation

17
Pérez de la Riva, Los culíes chinos en Cuba, 1847-1880, 28.
18
Estimates by Lai, “Sugar plantations and indentured labor : Migrations from China and India to the
British West Indies, 1838-1918,” 522.
19
“Tutta la storia della costruzione giuridica del contratto di lavoro può essere riletta come la difficile
ricerca di garanzie contro la rottura dell'impegno di lavoro da parte del dipendente” Boutang, Dalla

36
owners in the aftermath of emancipation, we observe a similar dynamics. On one hand, a
stricter legislation tried to prevent the flight from the plantations by placing obstacles to
the acquisition of land and self-employment by the freed slaves, and punishing vagrancy
and unemployment. On the other, plantation owners turned to alternative channels of
labor import. The initial attempts were made to substitute the slaves with “free” African
laborers. Five years (or longer) contracts of indenture, paid in “exchange” for the
transportation expenses, were selected as the most convenient legal tool to enforce a
sufficient degree of labor control on the plantations without incurring the wrath of anti-
slavery associations. Results, however, were hardly satisfactory. Along the first forty
years of the nineteenth century only a few thousands African laborers were recruited
through this scheme, mostly from coastal areas of West Africa, in particular those
corresponding to modern Sierra Leone, where the local Kru population had traditionally
furnished wage maritime labor on European oceangoing vessels.20 Projects to recruit free
laborers in the African interior—that is from the same supply areas of the still ongoing
slave trade—posed insurmountable problems, for the competition of the local slave
drivers, which could gain better profit by selling slaves than selling indentured laborers,
and for the predictable resistance of local populations.21
A more easily accessible source of laborers came as the collateral “byproduct” of the
abolitionist crusade: freed slaves, rescued manu militari from the slave ships or coastal
slave depots by the Royal Navy patrols, could be indentured and sent to the British
colonies.22 However, it became soon apparent that this source could not provide a stable
nor sufficient supply of labor. By adding up these two sources, it is estimated that the
British West Indies received no more than 60,000 African contract laborers between 1807
and the 1860s, and only 8,000 between 1842 and 1847, at the peak of the critical post-
emancipation labor scarcity crisis.23 Among plausible substitute labor sources, further
12.000 contract laborers were recruited from the Portuguese islands of Madeira and the

schiavitù al lavoro salariato, 17. A reflection on the flight in a contemporary perspective in Sandro
Mezzadra, Diritto di fuga. Migrazioni, cittadinanza, globalizzazione (Verona: Ombre Corte, 2001).
20
Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834-1922, 46–47. A similar context facilitated,
for instance, the emigration of specific Pacific Islanders: Laurence Brown, “‘A Most Irregular Traffic’: the
Oceanic Passage of the Melanesian Labor Trade,” in Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the
Making of the Modern World, ed. Emma Christopher, Cassandra Pybus, and Marcus Rediker (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 184–203.
21
Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834-1922, 50–51.
22
Monsieur Lawrence C Jennings, “French Reaction to the ‘Disguised British Slave Trade’ : France and
British African Emigration Projects , 1840-1864,” Cahiers d’études africaines 18, no. 69–70 (1978): 201–
13.
23
Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834-1922, 45–49.

37
Azores and sent to Trinidad and British Guyana between the 1830s and the 1850s.24
Although all these means of recruitment reminded in some way the former slave trade,
there is no doubt that the idea of substituting chattel slaves with contract laborers had
taken roots firmly by the 1830s. 25 It was in the heart of the Asian continent, with its
massive population, however, that laid the most appealing source of contract labor. The
first to penetrate this still untapped manpower reserve were the British and French
planters in the Mascarene islands (Mauritius and Reunion). These colonial possessions
had grown as major sugarcane production centers in the first decades of the nineteenth
century, harboring a large and unchecked illegal slave traffic from both Africa and the
Asian continent from about 1810 to the early 1830s.26 Already during the 1820s, building
on existing South Asian networks of coerced labor mobility, the Mascarene’s plantations
started to import, along with the slaves, small numbers of Indian indentured workers.27
After 1834 this flow began to be organized on a massive scale and with the support of the
colonial authorities. Mauritius introduced more than 94,000 Indian coolies between 1834
and 1847, witnessing an increase of 10% in the sugar production that contrasted sharply
with the contemporary decline of the Caribbean sugar colonies.28
The success of the Mauritius experience suggested that Indian laborers could have
been brought with comparable results in the West Indies. Starting from 1838, and more
consistently in 1845, Demerara (Britsh Guyana) became the first recipient of a imperial-
organized Indian labor relocation that will bring until the aftermath of the first world war
no less than 238,000 coolies to British Guyana, and over 438.000 in the whole West
Indies; an overall 1.330.000 is estimated to have been exported to all destinations
(including Mauritius) in the same timespan (Tab. 2.2).29

24
For a general overview Jo-Anne S. Ferreira, “Madeiran Portuguese Migration to Guyana, St. Vincent,
Antigua and Trinidad: A Comparative Overview,” Portuguese Studies Review 14, no. 2 (2007): 63–85.
Also Steve Garner, “Atlantic Crossing: Whiteness as a Transatlantic Experience,” Atlantic Studies 4, no. 1
(2007): 117–32.
25
It became a global trend. Even in the Portuguese debate over abolition of slave trade, for instance,
projects to convey indentured African workers from Angola to Brazil were discussed as a potential
replacement of the clandestine slave traffic. Marques, The Sounds of Silence, 145.
26
Richard B. Allen, “Satisfying the ‘Want for Labouring People’: European Slave Trading in the Indian
Ocean, 1500–1850,” Journal of World History 21, no. 1 (2010): 56; Richard B. Allen, “Licentious and
Unbridled Proceedings : The Illegal Slave Trade to Mauritius and the Seychelles during the Early
Nineteenth Century,” The Journal of African History 42, no. 1 (2001): 91–116.
27
Richard B. Allen, “European Slave Trading , Abolitionism , and ‘ New Systems of Slavery ’ in the Indian
Ocean,” PORTAL, Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies 9, no. 1 (2012): 6–7.
28
Richard B. Allen, “Capital, Illegal Slaves, Indentured Labourers and the Creation of a Sugar Plantation
Economy in Mauritius, 1810–60,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 36, no. 2 (June
2008): 151–70.
29
Scholars have long argued about the extent to which Indian and other sources of indentured labor were to
be assessed as a replication of slavery under disguised colors or as a form of agreement which in some

38
Tab. 2.2: Transcontinental movement of indentured workers, 1831-1920, by area of departure.

Source: Destination years Quantity

Africa All destinations 1831-1870 96,032
British Caribbean 1831-1867 39,332
Reunion (Fr.) 1841-1860 37,200
French Caribbean 1851-1870 19,500
China All destinations 1841-1920 386901
British West Indies 1851-1884 18,587
French Caribbean 1851-1860 2,250
Suriname 1851-1874 2,979
Cuba 1847-1874 138156
Peru 1849-1874 117432
Mauritius 1841-1860 850
Reunion 1841-1850 1,350
Tahiti 1861-1870 1,100
Queensland 1841-1860 5,950
Hawaii 1851-1900 34,309
Traansvaal 1903-1907 63,938
India All destinations 1831-1920 1336030
British West Indies 1831-1920 438231
Mauritius 1831-1910 455187
Reunion 1841-1890 74,854
French Caribbean 1851-1890 79.089
Suriname 1871-1920 34,503
East Africa 1891-1920 39,437
Natal 1861-1920 152932
Fiji 1871-1920 61,015
Japan All destinations 1861-1920 85,202
Peru 1891-1920 20,168
Hawaii 1861-1920 61,015
Pacific Islands All destinations 1861-1920 96,046
Peru 1861-1864 3,470
Queensland 1861-1910 62,795
Fiji 1861-1920 27,334
Hawaii 1861-1890 2,444
Yucatan Cuba 1849-1871 About 2,000
Java Suriname 1851-1920 19,330

Source: David Northrup, Indentured labor in the age of imperialism, 1834-1922, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, New York 1995, p.156-157; Stanley L. Engerman, “Contract Labor, Sugar, and
Technology in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Economic History, 1983, 635–59.

cases benefited the migrants, and involved their agency. Cf. Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of
Imperialism, 1834-1922; Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas 1830-
1920; Verene A. Sheperd, “The ‘Other Middle Passage?’: Nineteenth-century bonded labour migration and
the legacy of the slavery debate in the British-colonised Caribbean,” in Working slavery, pricing freedom:
perspectives from the Caribbean, Africa and the African diaspora, ed. Verene A. Sheperd (Kingston: Ian
Randle Publisher, 2002). It seems safe to assume, maybe with the exception of the early years, the
conditions of Indian indentured laborers were less coercive than those experienced by their Chinese
counterparts, both in the process of recruitment, in the sea voyages and in the labor exploitation at their
destination. The difference may be shown by the comparison of mortality rates, return voyages and
remittances, as defended by Walton Look Lai, “Asian Contract and Free Migrations to the Americas,” in
Coerced and Free Migration: Global Perspectives, ed. David Eltis (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2002), 229–58. Crucial as well, is the absolutely unparalleled number of revolts, suicides, and other acts of
passive and active resistance before, during and after the maritime voyages, documented by overwhelming
sources (see Chapter 4 and 7).

39
 After India, the Chinese Empire was soon identified as a second, arguably
inexhaustible, pool of laborers, thanks to its teeming population, and its well-known
disposition to migrate in the Southeast Asian European settlements. The option to import
Chinese labor in the West Indies, in fact, had already been tested by the British
government even before the end of the slave trade. In 1806, the favorable reports of a
Royal Navy captain, William Layman, in regards to Chinese laborers observed in the
Southeast Asian colonial environment, pushed forward a preliminary scheme of
emigration.30
Under these auspices, in October 1806, 192 (of 200) subject of the Celestial Empire
landed on Trinidad from the East India company ship Fortitude, mostly recruited by
Captain Layman through agents in Macao. The whole operation, however, resolved in
failure, as it did not match the expectations of the labor importer to subdue the emigrants
to a labor regime sufficiently hard to make their investment profitable. Most of them
actually travelled back to their homeland with their guaranteed return tickets rather than
staying on the plantations.31 Replying to Layman’s appeals to repeat his experiment, a
parliamentary commission appointed in 1811 further concluded that enforcing more
coercive means of recruitment on a large scale would endanger the existing commercial
ties with the Qing Empire.32
In the 1840s, however, the state of subjection imposed by the First Opium War on the
Chinese Empire made possible for the Western powers to access more freely to that labor
reserve. In 1843, an experimental plan to convey Chinese coolies to Mauritius was
implemented with success in British controlled Singapore. As we will see in the next
paragraphs, the emigration avenue that since the late seventeenth century had connected

30
“They were inured to hot climate, are frugal, illustrious and peaceful, skilled in tropical produce [...]
excellent cultivators of sugar”, Lai, The Chinese in the West Indies, 1806-1995, 23-27. On the European
admiration for Chinese agriculture cf. Meagher, The Coolie Trade, 48–51. A parallel plot of skilled labor
import was devised by the Portuguese imperial court in Brazil during the Napoleonic wars, with the
ultimate goal of establishing a commercial link with Macao and introducing a large scale production of tea
in the Latin American country. Cf. Ibid., 198–201; Carlos Francisco Moura, “Relations Between Macao and
Brazil in the Nineteenth Century,” Revista de Cultura, no. 22 (1995): 33–54.
31
William Layman further stressed that the cause of that failure relied in the character of the emigrants and
the form and place in which he had obtained them: “By means of a Portuguese agent at Macao, about 200
Chinamen (without a single female) were procured, having nothing of Chinese about them but the name,
and obtained from the diseased and profligate refuse of the indolent and degraded population of a
Portuguese town, unaccustomed to the habits of their industrious countrymen, and total strangers to the
qualifications requisite for their future employments in the West Indies.” Walton Look Lai, The Chinese in
the West Indies: a Documentary History, 1806-1995 (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 1998),
43. Of the few dozen staying after the expiration of their contracts, the majority established urban retail
shops.
32
“Report from the Select Committee appointed to consider the practicality and expediency of supplying
our West Indian colonies with free laborers from the east”, in Ibid., 48–49.

40
China to the Malaysian strait and Singapore played a major role in the early stages of the
coolie trade. However, it was not until the establishment of the Peruvian and Cuban
routes that the coolie trade as we commonly define it, would finally blossom.

2.1.3 Cuba: the nineteenth-century sugar boom

Unlike the heavily state-backed immigration projects pursued across the British
imperial system, Cuba and Peru began importing Chinese laborers in a context of
sustained economic growth—result of the expanding sugar and guano exports—which
gave the local elites the required private capitals to operate the risky but rewarding labor
recruiting endeavor.
Northrup emphasized the privileged connection between the expansion of the global
sugar market and the establishment of a worldwide contract labor system. In fact, world
sugar exports grew from 300,000 metric tons. in 1790 to over 10 million by 1914, 33
driven by the redefinition of the consumerist models of the Euro-Atlantic rising urban
population—the British “tea with sugar” combination34—and a steady tendency to the
decrease of world sugar prices. Sugar was, by all respects, the absolute “king”35 of the
nineteenth-century Cuban economy and the main attractor factor for the clandestine slave
trade and the indentured labor trade.
The rise of the Cuban sugar complex needs to be treated more in depth. By the early
1760s the production of sugar cane in the Spanish colony was almost non-existent. Sugar
was produced more for domestic consumption than export, despite the existence of ideal
climatic conditions and soil fertility. The initial stimulus for the birth of a modern sugar
industry was given by the investments of British entrepreneurs during the short-lived
occupation of the island in 1762, which outlined the first long-term plans of mass
sugarcane cultivation. 36 A second push came from the immigration of wealthy French
planters fleeing the Haitian revolution of 1790. This providential inflow of capitals and
know-how allowed a decisive takeoff, aided by a positive conjuncture created by the
disappearance of the major regional competitor and the increasingly attractive North

33
Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834-1922, 30.
34
Ricardo Rene Laremont and Lisa Yun, “Chinese Coolies and African Slaves in Cuba, 1847-74,” Journal
of Asian American Studies 4, no. 2 (2001): 105. Also fundamental in this transformation the introduction of
other “drugs”, stimulant beverages like coffee or chocolate; see the classic Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and
Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking, 1985).
35
“El rey azúcar y otros monarcas agrícolas”, Eduardo Galeano, Las Venas Abiertas de América Latina
(Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI editores, 1980), chap. 2, 83.
36
Tomich, Through the Prism of Slavery, 64.

41
American demand, freed from British monopoly after independence.37
Compared to the exhausted soils of the British Isles, consumed by decades of intensive
exploitation, Cuba could rely on several competitive advantages: large areas of fertile
land, a rising number of slaves (thanks to the persistence of the clandestine slave trade)
and the technological advantages of a latecomer.38 In the early 1830s Cuba surpassed the
production of the British colonies in the Caribbean, emerging as the world leading
producer of sugar with a gross output of more than 100,000 tons per year, which will
more than double in the following decade.
This extraordinary expansion of the Cuban plantation complex had been made possible
by a huge and continuous influx of slaves on the island. Notwithstanding the official
abolition proclaimed by the Spanish government in 1818, Cuba imported over 430,000
slaves in the first forty years of the nineteenth century; accounting for over the 43% of the
Cuban population in 1841.39 The clandestine slave trade itself, managed by some of the
major local planters, stimulated the inflow of capital and reinvestment in productive
innovations. The deployment of the most advanced technologies of the time in both the
production and the transportation of sugar, through the organization of an extended
network of plantation-serving railroads, accelerated the concentration of extraction and
refining operations into huge and efficiently managed industrial-scale factories.40
This virtuous circle depended entirely on the availability of continuous replacements
for the naturally decreasing plantation’s manpower, in a demographic regime
characterized by high mortality (5% per year) and an unbalanced male to female ratio
(circa 5:1) that obstructed a natural replication of the slaves population.41
In the mid-1840s a temporary inability to attain a sufficient slave supply menaced to
bring the Cuban sugar industry on the verge of collapse. A renewed diplomatic and
37
David Murray, Odious Commerce: Britain, Spain and the Abolition of the Cuban Slave Trade
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
38
Tomich, “World slavery and Caribbean capitalism,” 307.
39
Tomich, Through the Prism of Slavery, 61.
40
The industrial transformation of the Cuban sugar production is well represented in the classic work by
Manuel Moreno Fraginals, El ingenio : complejo económico social cubano del azúcar (La Habana:
Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1978). As we mentioned, Fraginals suggested this compelled a transition to
wage labor, as slaves were unable to adapt to these new conditions; this view has encountered several
convincing critiques: cf. Tomich, “World slavery and Caribbean capitalism,” op. 310–316; and, more
broadly, Rebecca Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860-1899 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1985).
41
Architraves of this new policy were Lord Palmerston’s Bill of 1839, which allowed the search and
seizure of Portuguese ships; the ensuing Portuguese abolitionist treaty of 3 July 1842, the 1845 Act of
Aberdeen, which allowed the capture of Brazilian vessels, and the Spanish Ley penal de abolición y
represión del tráfico negrero passed in the same year, but generally deemed a failure: Murray, Odious
Commerce: Britain, Spain and the Abolition of the Cuban Slave Trade, 241; Turi, Schiavi in un mondo
libero, 214; Marques, The Sounds of Silence, 123–126.

42
military effort of the British government to suppress the slave trade, in fact, started to
produce its first appreciable successes, at least towards the Spanish colony, whose annual
imports of slaves dropped by 90% to an average little above 1,000 slaves per year
between 1845 and 1848, to rise again only after 1849.42 Increased shipping risks had also
impacted on the price of slaves, which grew by about 25% between the 1830s and
1840s.43
These factors of crisis presented the Cuban elite with the imperative to find alternative
sources of manpower. The issue was taken in the hands of the Real Junta de Fomento y de
Colonización an institution that represented the interests of the largest Cuban landowners
and sugar barons. Initially, they discussed the immigration of free white settlers from
Europe, but the predictable failure in that direction of the designated Comisión de
Población Blanca, after the arrival of around 2,500-3,000 “unruly” galizian braceros,44
soon turned the Cuban planters towards different markets. As De La Riva explains, in
fact,

lo que la industria azucarera pedía insistentemente entonces no eran colonos, sino

braceros, y en un país de esclavos aterrorizados, resultaba absurdo pensar en
introducir jornaleros libres […] Mas, lo cierto fue que ni la Junta de Fomento ni el
Gobierno parecen haber nunca tomado muy en serio ninguno de estos pueriles planes
de colonización blanca.45

The first schemes for the import of Chinese coolies in Cuba were devised in 1844 by
the brothers Julián and Pedro Zulueta of the Zulueta & Co. (London), businessmen of
international stature, with strong interests in both the slave trade and in the sugar
production. In 1846 they organized in collaboration with a prominent British merchant in
Amoy, James Tait (appointed Spanish Consul in the city) the expedition of an initial
contingent of 600 coolies to the island. The project was approved by the Comisión de
Población Blanca, of which Zulueta had taken the direction that year. The two ships
contracted for the first load, the Oquendo and the Duke of Argyle reached Havana on 3
and 12 June 1847, landing in total 571 coolies, contracted for 8 year terms for a salary of
3 pesos per month. Upon arrival they were detained in quarantine in a former warehouse
for fugitive slaves, 46 transferred to the Junta for 170 pesos each (per contract), and

42
Ibid., 164. Brazilian traffic survived relatively unscathed until the early 1850s, but would then meet its
end earlier than their Caribbean counterpart: Bethell, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade.
43
Pérez de la Riva, Los culíes chinos en Cuba, 1847-1880, 39.
44
“Un caso de trata de blancos: los gallegos de Feyjoo Sotomayor” in Ibid., 47–50.
45
Ibid., 50.
46
“El depósito de cimarrones, como se llamaba oficialmente,” Ibid., 77.

43
auctioned in batches of 10 at a subsidized price of 70 pesos. Most of them ended on the
plantations, but small groups were destined to public works, railway construction. Two
Chinese were given to the island’s governor, Leopoldo O’Donnell, for his private
service.47
However, after this first experiment, the traffic was suspended and until late 1852 there
were no further shipments. The reasons for this interruption are not entirely clear:
according to Pérez de la Riva, “Varias causas contribuyeron, en primer lugar, la hostilidad
de los negreros que temían que la competencia hiciese bajar el precio de su mercancía.”48
Some owners complained about the difficulties of communication (in the absence of
interpreters), emphasizing the unruliness and lack of discipline of their coolies, who were
a bad example for the slaves of their plantations. To manage the newcomers and ensure
“la subordinación y disciplina, sin los cuales podrán dañar en vez de producir beneficios a
la agricultura”, 49 the Cuban government issued a specific regulation in 1849, which
advised the planters to assign a corporal (mayoral) every ten Chinese, “to guide, assist
and watch over the laborers in their work” (art.10), and authorizing the use of physical
punishment comparable, if not identical, to those enforced towards the slaves, including
runaways (art. 11 and 14).50
In December 1851 a new commission appointed by the Junta de Fomento reopened the
traffic allowing private enterprises into the affair. In 1853 as many as 15 new shipments
arrived in Havana landing 4,307 coolies. 51 From this point on the traffic would grow
steadily, expanding and moving from Amoy to other points on the China coast.

2.2 The Chinese “migratory tradition”

De La Riva’s explanation of the 1847-1853 gap does not assess satisfactorily the
dynamics of the supply in Amoy and its hinterland. In fact, it is impossible to understand
the birth of the coolie trade without addressing the historical conditions of the Chinese
47
Ibid., 78; cf. also Urko Apaolaza Avila, “Un análisis sobre la historiografía en torno al alavés Julián de
Zulueta y Amondo,” Sancho el Sabio, no. 18 (2003): 121–40.
48
Pérez de la Riva, Los culíes chinos en Cuba, 1847-1880, 78.
49
Ibid., 211.
50
“Art. 10: Ten Asiatics on the same estate require the direction of a white mayoral, who will take care of
and watch them, and attend with them at their work; Art.11: The colonist disobeying the voice of the
superior, whether it be refusing to work, or any other obligation, may be corrected with 12 lashes; if he
persists, with 18 more, and if even thus he should not enter on his course of duty, he may be put in irons,
and made to sleep in the stocks […] Art.14: the colonist that runs away, besides being subject to Article 6,
shall be placed in irons for 2 months; for 4 in case of repeating it; and for 6 in the second.” “Reglamento
April 10, 1849”, in Meagher, The Coolie Trade, 301–303.
51
As we shall see in Chapter 4.2, the maritime expeditions were concentrated in two stages of the year,
following the trend of the monsoon in the China seas. In fact, this number includes 8 shipments departed at
the end of 1852.

44
southern and eastern provinces and the evolution of its centuries-old migratory links with
Southeast Asia and the Pacific world.

2.2.1 Migrations and the State in Imperial China

Interactions between China and the Nanyang (南洋), its southeastern maritime frontier
date back to the very beginning of Chinese civilization, but rose consistently during the
Song (960-1279) and Yuan (1277-1368) dynasties. The Mongol invasions of the late
thirteen century, in particular, are conventionally assumed to have set in motion the first
mass migration of Chinese refugees into Southeast Asia.52
It is during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) however that a general pattern of State
policy towards emigration and overseas commerce took shape, aimed at regulating
commerce through the channel of official “tributary trade” and to contain the political
implications of a Chinese presence in the area. 53 The management, control and
submission of Chinese settlements overseas, along with the establishment of tributary
relations was one of the objectives of Zheng He’s great expeditions to Southeastern and
South Asia in the early fifteenth century (1405-1431).54 In this context, a ban on private
overseas trade was in place discontinuously for almost all the duration of the Ming
dynasty (1371 to 1405, and 1424 to 1567), 55 but it did not curtail the flourishing of
unlawful private run maritime enterprises in the shape of smuggling or piracy (enlarging
the ranks of the so-called Japanese pirates, wokou).56
Since these times, the discrepancy between the official policies and the actual local
practices became a constant in the history of Chinese maritime frontier.57 The background
of the imperial policies lied in the Confucian ideological order of Chinese society, where
merchants occupied the lowest rung of the social ladder and permanent emigration from
one’s native place was considered a betrayal of the Emperor, as well as of the cardinal
value of “filial piety” towards the ancestors.58
The rise of the Manchu Qing dynasty (1644) reproduced and toughened these policies

52
Yen, Coolies and Mandarins, 6–7.
53
Takeshi Hamashita, China , East Asia and the Global Economy Regional and historical perspectives
(London-New York: Routledge, 2008), 12–38.
54
Pan, Sons of the Yellow Emperor, 4–5.
55
Yen, Coolies and Mandarins, 12–13.
56
Kuhn, Chinese Among Others, 9.
57
Overestimating the impact and effectiveness of imperial measures against emigration, past studies of
Chinese emigration have contributed to convey an inappropriate image of China as a closed and isolationist
country—and interpreted subsequently both early modern and modern Chinese migratory movements as the
product of a modernizing impact of the West, whether in its Early Colonial or Imperialist configuration.
58
Pan, Sons of the Yellow Emperor, 8–10; Kuhn, Chinese Among Others, 17–25.

45
under a major security concern, as the Qing armies engaged in a long and exhausting
campaign of repression of Ming loyalist resistance organized by powerful merchant/pirate
warlords like the notorious Zheng Chenggong (Koxinga). In 1661, a draconian measure
of “scorched earth” (the Haijin, 海 禁) ordered the forced relocation of the coastal
settlements of Guangdong and Fujian under 50 li (miles) from the seaside.59 However,
most of the restrictions to maritime commerce were lifted soon after the defeat of the
Zheng family’s domain in Taiwan (1683), leading to a general recovery of legal maritime
commerce in the eighteenth century. 60 This corresponded to a new wave of Chinese
settlement abroad, although a harsh policy against emigration—the punishment for
61
returning emigrants was beheading—remained nominally in place. Emigrant
communities took the role of cultural and economic mediators in the crucial nodes of the
European commercial empires in Asia (i.e. Batavia, Manila, Malacca) and the
consolidating indigenous states of Southeast Asia, contributing in the processes of early
modern globalization and intercontinental trade.62
Conventional periodizations of Chinese migration have indicated in the first Opium
War and the “opening” of China the watershed between a limited regional pre-modern
migratory pattern of merchants (huashang), and a foreign driven global mass migration of
indentured proletarians (huagong), whose “demographic and spatial scale abrupt[ly]
depart[ed] from the past.” 63 This vision however has been questioned by historical
evidence pointing the dynamism, scale and the scope of the seventeenth and eighteenth-
century movements, and by a reassessment of the continuities between these two periods.
In fact, consistent numbers of Chinese migrants had started to settle outside the
traditional Nanyang area already during the early modern era. Recent studies have shown,

59
Pan, Sons of the Yellow Emperor, 7–8.
60
Anthony Reid, “Le oscillazioni dell’interazione cinese con il Sud-Est asiatico sul lungo periodo,” in
Cinesi d’oltremare: L'insediamento nel Sud-Est asiatico, ed. Anthony Reid (Torino: Fondazione Giovanni
Agnelli, 2000), 41–78.
61
Under Qing legislation of 1712 and the partial amnesty of 1717 Chinese residing abroad were subjected
to capital punishment as suspects of conspiracy and treason. However, more specific regulations and
decrees issued between the eighteenth and mid-nineteenth century adopted less draconian punishment for
the emigrants. Harsh treatment was also reserved to migration brokers. According to Wang Sing-wu,
specific rules were set up by emperor Yongzheng and Qianlong towards passage brokers and headmen
(ketou), normally subjected to the cangue, flogging or deportation. A 1734 decree by Yongzheng held
shipmaster responsible of the death of illegal passenger by beheading. Wang, The Organization of Chinese
Emigration, 18–20.
62
Meagher, The Coolie Trade, 63; Geoffrey C. Gunn, First Globalization: The Eurasian Exchange, 1500-
1800 (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003); Eric Tagliacozzo and Wen-Chin Chang, Chinese
Circulations: Capital, Commodities, and Networks in Southeast Asia (Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 2011); Leonard Blussé, “Chinese Century. The Eighteenth Century in the China Sea
Region,” Archipel 58 (1999): 107–29.
63
Kuhn, Chinese Among Others, 108.

46
for example, how the establishment of the Galeon de Manila brought to the settlement of
60,000 to 100,000 Chinese in the American continent either as free men, or as servant or
slaves. 64 Moreover, it has been demonstrated, substantial labor migration links were
established through Southeast Asia as early as the mid-eighteenth century, through
various formal or informal debts or contracts with individuals or organizations. The major
change in the nineteenth century was a progressive (but not complete) substitution of
native junks with Western vessels65—and later steamers—which enabled a quantitative
shift after the 1870s.

2.2.2 Social and geographical background of the nineteenth-century Chinese

emigrants

Common explanations of the origins of the nineteenth-century Chinese mass migration

generally refer to a number of internal pushing factors that coincidentally summed up
after the 1850s. The first was overpopulation. Supported by increasing agricultural
outputs and new intensive cultivations, in effect, Chinese population experienced a
dramatic rise after the end of the Ming-Qing transition, growing from 150 to 300 million
between 1700 and 1800, to reach a peak of 380 to 450 million at the middle of the
nineteenth century.66 Other regularly accepted explications include the impact of revolts,
famine, natural disasters and mass poverty, exacerbated by the progressive economic and
military penetration of Western imperialism.67 These arguments however are twofold: in a
sense, the first Opium War set the preconditions for the direct ingress of Western interests
in the issue of emigration. In 1842 the Treaty of Nanjing ended the hostilities imposing
the opening of five Chinese ports (Canton, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Ningbo, and Shanghai) to

64
Edward R. Slack Jr., “The Chinos in New Spain: A Corrective Lens for a Distorted Image,” Journal of
World History 20, no. 1 (2009): 35–67. See also Tatiana Seijas, “Transpacific Servitude: The Asian Slaves
of Mexico, 1580— 1700”, (Unpublished Ph.D dissertation, Yale University, 2008).
65
It seems clear from such scattered evidence that for all the 1840s and earlier Chinese laborers were being
engaged on Western ships in an unsystematic way. These shipments did never brought however to the
setting up of a stable emigration system. We may include under this category, for example, the shipment of
coolies from Amoy to French Reunion in 1845, sometimes regarded, but without sufficient reason as the
starting date of the coolie trade. Meagher, The Coolie Trade, 135.
66
William T. Rowe, China’s Last Empire: The Great Qing (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
2009), 291. Official censuses analyzed by the classic work of Ho Ping-ti return an estimate of 430 million:
Ho Ping-ti, Studies on the Population of China, 1368–1953 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1959). These numbers were criticized as huge overestimations by William Skinner, who proposed the lower
figure of 380 million based on its analysis of Sichuan province local records: G. William Skinner,
“Sichuan’s Population in the Nineteenth Century: Lessons from Disaggregated Data,” Late Imperial China
8, no. 1 (1987): 75. There is no clear evidence, however, that migrants originated from particularly
overpopulated districts, and the major outflow of migrants of the last part of the century, unfolded in
conditions of demographic stagnation.
67
This traditional view is well represented by June Mei, “Socioeconomic Origins of Emigration: Guandong
to California, 1850-1882,” Modern China 5, no. 4 (1979): 463–501.

47
Western merchants. The British acquired a further foothold with the occupation of Hong
Kong, which would rapidly growth into a major commercial entrepôt and later the major
center for the free Chinese emigration. Moreover, several unlawful opium stations were
also organized on the Chinese coast in non-treaty areas, some of which will later
become—like Cumsingmoon (Jinxingmen) and Swatow (Shantou)—major centers of
coolie export. Extraterritorial jurisdiction in these places allowed Western subject and
their employees to circumvent with impunity existing Chinese norms on opium
smuggling and the recruitment of emigrants.68
On the other hand, as stated by Kuhn, “the ‘opening of China’ not only produced the
mechanisms for recruiting labor but also uprooted that labor socially and economically.”69
The illegal opium trade and its effects on the Qing Empire’s balance of payments and its
silver-copper monetary system profoundly disrupted Chinese society in the coastal
provinces, deepening a cyclical economic depression; military defeat and natural
calamities accelerated the loss of prestige of the ruling dynasty and its mandate of heaven
(Tianming, 天命), paving the way to two decades of major insurrections in several core
and peripheral provinces, including the large-scale Taiping revolt (1850-1864),
responsible of an estimated 20 million deaths.70 Related more closely with the emergence
of the coolie traffic in Southern China, the loss of employment of around 100,000
boatmen and porters in the Guangdong-Jianxi route after the relocation of the bulk of
Western trade from Canton to the tea producing areas of Fujian and Zhejiang, propelled
the Red Turban revolt which ravaged the Pearl River Delta between 1853 and 1855.71
From all these events, according to this line of interpretation, derived a strong natural
push to migrate abroad: “thousands were torn from their livelihoods, impoverished, and
driven to desperate measures (including emigration) merely to survive.”72 Push factors
alone, however, seem inadequate to provide explanations for the actual configuration of
migration routes and practices.
In general terms, traditional “push-pull” models in migration history have been
criticized and discarded in favor of explanations based on chain networks, agency and

68
Ibid.
69
Kuhn, Chinese Among Others, 111.
70
Jonathan D. Spence, God’s Chinese Son: The Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan (London:
HarperCollins, 1996); John King Fairbank, ed., The Cambridge History of China, Vol.10: Late Ch’ing
1800-1911, Part 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 264–318.
71
Kuhn, Chinese Among Others, 111; Frederic E. Wakeman Jr., Strangers at the Gate: Social Disorder in
South China, 1839-1861 (Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966).
72
Kuhn, Chinese Among Others, 111.

48
intermediary structures. 73 Studies of the European Atlantic migration have completely
dismissed the so-called “uprooted” paradigm, 74 while similar explanations are still
employed to describe the causes of Asiatic migrations. Depicting the nineteenth century
Chinese migration as a desperate flight from poverty of displaced people, McKeown
argues, means “to understand it as having existed in isolation from the forces that shaped
European emigration and Chinese people as having behaved according to categorically
different impulses than Europeans.”75 Revisionist interpretations are revaluating instead
the role of agency, chain migrations and cultural traditions of mobility.76 According to
Haiming Liu, for instance,

For most Chinese, immigration, instead of being an exotic adventure, was a rational
choice based on aspirations for social advancement. Coming from such an
environment, Chinese immigrants were by no means land-bound, conservative, and
inward-looking people with no potential to settle down overseas. Many of them were
not the impoverished and needy peasants who would take whatever jobs were
available, but they were highly motivated people aspiring to upward mobility.77

Moreover, overpopulation, famine and revolts do not explain convincingly the cluster-
regional78 distribution of the active Chinese migration areas in Guangdong and Fujian,
rather than in provinces like Jiangsu and Zhejiang, more severely affected by natural
disasters and revolts with equal if not superior, on paper, infrastructure for the shipment
of migrants overseas in the ocean-bound ports of Shanghai and Ningbo.79 They also fail
to grasp the role of internal inequalities and social stratification of Southern Chinese
society, nor to the proactive activity of local crime, bandits and pirates involved in the
coolie “migration industry” at large.80
A consolidated migratory tradition and the drawing of structural chains-links, or
corridors, 81 between the emigration destinations and the place of departures seems to

73
Harzig and Hoerder, What is Migration History ?, 62–64.
74
Gabaccia, “Is Everywhere Nowhere?,” 1129.
75
McKeown, “Chinese Emigration in Global Context, 1850–1940,” 96.
76
Chen Yong, “The Internal Origins of Chinese Emigration to California Reconsidered,” The Western
Historical Quarterly1 28, no. 4 (1997): 520–46; Haiming Liu, “The Social Origins of Early Chinese
Immigrants : A Revisionist Perspective,” in The Chinese in America: a History from the Gold Mountain to
the New Millennium, ed. Susie Lan Cassel (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002).
77
Ibid., 26.
78
Gozzini, Le migrazioni di ieri e di oggi: Una storia comparata, 86; Giovanni Gozzini, “The Global
System of International Migrations, 1900 and 2000 : a Comparative Approach,” Journal of Global History
1, no. 3 (2006): 321–41.
79
McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks..., 66–67.
80
As argued in the previous chapter, the concept of migration industry is borrowed from a growing spate of
studies in historical and contemporary migrations; cf. Hernández-León, “Conceptualizing the Migration
Industry”; Ivan Light, “The Migration Industry in the United States,” Migration Studies, 2013, 1–18.
81
Kuhn, Chinese Among Others, 44–51 and passim.

49
have provided the former with a major advancement in establishing a durable pattern of
migration, both in the form of free migration and the coolie trade. Also essential was the
continuity of the structures of emigration with patterns and practices of the Chinese
internal labor market and household economy. The fundaments of migration in China, as
shown by Kuhn’s seminal study, rested in a prolongation of the “adaptive strategy of
family labor export”, which allowed household unities to rely on the remittances of their
able-bodied young males working in urban or manufacturing centers or abroad. 82 As
McKeown notes:

A Cantonese villager was just as likely to migrate to the local county town, Canton,
Shanghai, or some other urban center as to go abroad. Similarly, as villagers from
relatively poor counties like Kaiping in Guangdong province migrated abroad in
search of profit, so even more impoverished villagers from further inland would
migrate to Kaiping to work as wage laborers on the lands left behind.83

Migrant’s management became an extension of labor agency. Chinese wage laborers

were commonly hired, even across considerable distances, by middlemen “labour agents”
(baogong or gongtou), linked to them by a common regional background, that earned a
share of their salary and administered food and lodging in behold of the employer.84 This
way, Kuhn suggests a link between internal migration patterns of wage laborers inside the
Pearl River Delta region and the development of the transoceanic Cantonese emigration.
Seasonal labor was regularly mobilized from the rural or cash-cropping (silk, tobacco and
sugar) areas of the four counties (sze yup) to the more urbanized and commercially active
centers in the three sam yup districts, like the iron and porcelain producing Foshan, or the
manufactory center of Shunde. 85 The port cities of Canton and Macao also offered
opportunities for wage earning, and small numbers of migrants are reported buying
tickets or contracting with Chinese, but also foreign ship captains in these ports to find
employment in Southeast Asia for the winter seasons.86

82
Ibid., 36.. On the extended family’s structure of Taishan county’s emigrants see Hsu, Dreaming of Gold.
Male-dominated migration was the gender repercussion of this relation; cf. Adam McKeown,
“Transnational Chinese Families and Chinese Exclusion, 1875-1943,” Journal of American Ethnic History,
1999.
83
McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks..., 65.
84
Kuhn, Chinese Among Others, 125. In fact, as emphasized by Elizabeth Hu De-Hart, coolie contracts
were regularly termed labor contracts, gugong hetong (雇工合同) in their Chinese versions; Evelyn Hu-
DeHart, “Huagong and Huashang: The Chinese as Laborers and Merchants in Latin America and the
Caribbean,” Amerasia journal 28, no. 2 (2002): 70.
85
Kuhn, Chinese Among Others, 36.
86
The earliest reference to Chinese contracting employment overseas with foreigners is mentioned,
according to McKeown, in the 1827 Registrar for the Straits Settlements, where the Governor Stanford
Raffles complained about “the great profits that Portuguese from Macao made in transporting debtor
servants to the Straits […] evading inspection and ignoring regulations requiring such servants to be

50
 Some of the observations made above are also valid when we shift our attention from
the general context of Chinese migration to the specific case we defined as “coolie trade.”
We must premise that what we are assessing was a minor fraction of the total Chinese
migration of the time. McKeown estimates that only about 750,000 people, about the 4%
of the total migration of Chinese between 1840-1930, was engaged through formal
indenture to European contractors; including along with the proper “coolie trade”,
different systems of labor employed in Sumatra and Bangka under the control of Dutch
colonial authorities (300.000 people between 1870-1920), the early twentieth century
state-organized migration to South Africa (ca. 60.000) and minor streams to Malaya,
Australia and islands in the Pacific and Indian oceans (around 200.000).87 The percentage
rises significantly, however, if we limit the timeframe to the middle nineteenth century.
According to Zhu Guohong’s gross estimates, adjusted by Yu,88 between 1800 and 1850
more than 200,000 out of 320,000 migrants from China went to the Nanyang, and only a
few hundreds as coolies to Latin America;89 in the third quarter (1850-1885) however, the
coolie trade had risen to a number of over 280,000 (21%) out of a total migration of 1.28
million people including 350,000 to the Malay Peninsula and the Strait Settlements,
45,000 to Philippines, 250,000 to the East Indies, 25,000 to Hawaii, 55,000 to Australia,
30,000 to Canada, 160,000 to the US.
In this last case then, as recognized even by McKeown, 90 proactive recruitment
practices (including kidnapping), and individual circumstances (gambling losses, opium
addiction, escaping criminal sentences or debts) seems to have played a role at least as
important as the general “push of misery” in providing potential migrants for the Western

registered with the police. He concluded that, ‘A profit derivable from the importation of human beings
seems nearly allied to slave dealing and very likely to give cause to degenerate into such abominable
practice,’ and recommended more stringent interventions.” McKeown, “How the Box Became Black,” 28.
A second classic reference in the literature is the account of migrant brokers boarding ships at Macao made
by Commissioner Lin Zexu in 1839: McKeown, “How the Box Became Black”; Mei, “Socioeconomic
Origins of Emigration: Guandong to California, 1850-1882”; Wang, The Organization of Chinese
Emigration.
87
McKeown, “Chinese Emigration in Global Context, 1850–1940,” 102.
88
Zhu Guohong 朱國宏, Zhongguo de haiwai yimin: yixiang guoji qianyi de lishi yanjiu 中国的海外移民:
一项国际迁移的 历史研究 [Chinese Emigration: A Historical Study of the International Migration]
(Shanghai: Fudan Daxue Chubanshe, 1994), quoted in Henry Yu, “The Intermittent Rhythms of the
Cantonese Pacific,” in Connecting Seas and Connected Ocean Rims, Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans
And China Seas Migrations from the 1830s to the 1930s, ed. Donna Gabaccia and Dirk Hoerder (Leiden:
BRILL, 2011), 393–394.
89
Zhu’s original estimates of 10,000 to Cuba and 10,000 to Peru before 1850 appears greatly exaggerated.
90
McKeown, “Transnational Chinese Families and Chinese Exclusion, 1875-1943,” 315–316.

51
labor recruiters.91 In addition, preexisting labor mobility patterns in Guangdong province
shaped the practice of coolie recruiting, as displayed by the innumerable reports—which
we will discuss more in detail later in this text92—of people deceived to depart for Macao
under false offers of labor in that city, and hence forced to embark for Cuba or Peru under
threat and violence. In fact, contrasting with the practices of the Credit-ticket system, the
coolie trade was organized as a sale of people in which the potential emigrants did not
need to pay any service to the coolie brokers, whose remuneration derived directly from
the Western led shipping companies and ultimately from the Latin American landowner’s
need to import and purchase manpower.
Similarities and connections may be drawn, instead, between this system and the
practice of selling child, often women (mui tsai; pinyin: mei zai, 妹仔) in a hybrid form
between slavery, adoption and apprenticeship. Of the very small number (a few hundred)
of women and children departing from Macao for Latin America, most had been recruited
in this form, with a high probability to be employed as domestic servants or prostitutes in
their destinations. According to Sucheta Mazumdar, the shadow of slavery in Chinese
society reemerged in the coolie recruitment practices. China possessed ‘‘one of the largest
and most comprehensive markets for the exchange of human beings in the world’’, and in
many parts of China ‘‘nearly every peasant household was directly or indirectly affected
by the sale of people’’ .93 We may add to this picture, as we will expose in Chapter 7, the
custom of kidnapping people for ransom (or sexual exploitation) commonly exercised by
Cantonese pirates in South China.94

2.2.3 Rise and fall of the Amoy coolie network, 1847-1852

Some historians have tried to identify the exact point in time when the coolie traffic

91
Nor is the case to trust the opinion of contemporary Sinophobes and supporters of the traffic, according to
which the emigrants were the worst and poorest outcaste of the Chinese society, “men who have probably
lived all their days in poverty, the most abject, outcasts, from all communion with a better class, and too
deficient in common intelligence to better their lot; who, perhaps, until within the walls of a barracoon,
have never tasted one decent meal, and have neither the industry nor ability to secure one. Beggar in purse,
energy and intellect”; Mr. Cleverly to Acting Consul Winchester, Macao, 24 December 1859, BPP,
Correspondence respecting emigration from Canton, 1860, 61.
92
See Chapter 4.1.
93
Sucheta Mazumdar, “Localities of the Global: Asian Migrations between Slavery and Citizenship,”
International Review of Social History 52, no. 1 (2007): 130. See also Pamela Kyle Crossley, “Slavery in
Early Modern China,” in The Cambridge World History of Slavery. Vol. 3, AD 1420-AD 1804, ed. David
Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 190; David M. Pomfret,
“‘Child Slavery’ in British and French Far-Eastern Colonies 1880-1945,” Past & Present 175–213, no. 201
(2008).
94
We will discuss the links between the coolie trade and piracy more in detail in Chapter 4.1 and especially
7.3.

52
diverged from other systems of migration by observing its local dynamics in its earlier
years. In fact, the initial exports of coolies during the 1840s were organized in the
Hokkien (southern Min) speaking area of Amoy, Fujian province, in continuity with a
tradition of departures for Southeast Asia. In less than a decade, however, the monopoly
of both free and coolie migration to the American continent completely shifted to
Guangdong, thus justifying historian’s claim of a nineteenth-century “Cantonese Pacific”
expansion.95
The Amoy migration network had taken shape in the late seventeenth century. In this
period, after the defeat of the Zheng regime, the port city emerged as the main center of
migration and colonization of the newly annexed island of Taiwan.96 Commercial links
with Southeast Asia provided the occasion to expand this channel. According to Trocki
and Ng Chin Keong large numbers of unskilled laborers, between 200 and 300 per
expedition, were regularly boarding trade junks to Southeast Asia,97 pawning themselves
to passage brokers under arrangements similar to the credit-ticket system. By the 1780s
Chinese settlements had been established all around the Gulf of Siam, the Malay
peninsula, Sumatra, Borneo. Organized in labor guilds/brotherhoods, better known as
kongsis, (pinyin: gongsi, 公司) , they started to exploit and work the tin mines of Bangka,
gold fields in Pontianak and Sambas, sugar in Kedah, pepper in Brunei and so forth,
developing an economic system called by some historians the “water frontier”,98 fuelled
by the Chinese demand for South Asian commodities .99
The foundation of the British colony of Singapore in 1819 was a major event for the
economy of Southeast Asia, bringing to a general reconfiguration of the Chinese interests
in the area.100 The British port became a major migration destination attracting an annual

95
Yu, “The Intermittent Rhythms of the Cantonese Pacific.”
96
Kuhn, Chinese Among Others, 25; Wang, The Organization of Chinese Emigration, 119.
97
Chin-Keong Ng, Trade and Society, the Amoy Network on the China Coast, 1683-1735 (Singapore:
National University of Singapore Press, 1983), 56–57; quoted in Carl A. Trocki, “A Drug on the Market:
Opium and the Chinese in Southeast Asia, 1750-1880,” Journal of Chinese Overseas 1, no. 2 (2005): 149.
According to James Chin, unskilled laborers from the rural districts of southern Fujian rather than
merchants and commodities formed the bulk of the cargoes in the eighteenth1 century Hokkien junk trade
to Batavia: James K. Chin, “Merchants and Other Sojourners: The Hokkiens Overseas, 1570-1760”
(Unpublished Ph.D Dissertation, University of Hong Kong, 1998), 91.
98
Nola Cooke and Tana Li, Water Frontier: Commerce and the Chinese in the Lower Mekong Region,
1750-1880 (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2004).
99
Trocki, “A Drug on the Market,” 150.
100
Including the opium trade: Carl A. Trocki, “Singapore as a Nineteenth Century Migration Node,” in
Connecting Seas and Connected Ocean Rims, Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans And China Seas
Migrations from the 1830s to the 1930s, ed. Donna Gabaccia and Dirk Hoerder (Leiden: BRILL, 2011),
200.

53
flow of 6,000 to 7,000 migrants in the 1830s and 1840s, 101 and a transshipment
distribution center for emigration to Southeast Asian mines and plantations.102
As we mentioned above, there is some evidence that the first shipments of coolies
from Amoy to the British West Indies and Cuba were organized by people associated to
this existing Amoy-Singapore link. 103 A major difference between the recruitment of
laborers to Southeast Asia through the “credit-ticket system” and coolies to Latin
America, however, rested on the much higher costs of transportation—a passage from
Hong Kong to Singapore could cost about $4 to $10 in mid-century, while one to the
Americas about $50—costs which were ultimately discharged on harsher terms and
longer durations of the labor engagements. Consequently the price paid for a coolie by
Cuban or Peruvian landowners in the 1850s or 1860s could be easily ten times higher
than paid by Chinese employers in Southeast Asia ($300-400 v. $30-40). This justifies,
then, De La Riva and others’ assumption that the coolie migration had been
“artificialmente fomentada por las necesidades de mano de obra de las plantaciones
capitalistas occidentales.”104
This disproportion, Arensmayer and Murakami have argued, produced in 1851 and
1852 a “demand-supply gap” in the Amoy area. The expanding demand by Western
capital exceeded the spontaneous supply,105 encouraging local brokers to resort to extreme
practices as abduction and kidnapping on a mass scale.106 This activated a self-sustaining
“machinery”–using the words of Arensmeyer or Trentin107—specialized in the forceful
extraction of laborers from the Chinese coast.
The sudden spread of abuse and kidnapping revolved in a strong aversion of the local
population and its literate elites. The city’s authorities issued placards condemning the
acts of kidnapping. This explosive mixture originated the November 1852 Amoy Riots, a
popular uprising incited by the forceful release from jail of a Chinese-Singaporean coolie
recruiter named Hwan (Huan) Lin, obtained by his British employer Francis Syme, the

101
Ibid., 211.
102
Ibid., 213.
103
In fact, one of the major coolie shipping firms in Amoy, Syme Muir & Co., had been founded in
Singapore. Arensmeyer, “British Merchant Enterprise...,” 98–102.
104
Pérez de la Riva, Los culíes chinos en Cuba, 1847-1880, 67.
105
The population of Amoy in the early 1850s was about 250,000, not counting the surrounding districts.
As we have already seen, in 1847 an anonymous correspondent of the Chinese Repository was considered
possible only recruit in this area an average of 50,000 immigrants a year: “Journal of Occurrences”, Chinese
Repository, vol. 16, 4 April 1847.
106
Arensmeyer, “British Merchant Enterprise...,” 80.
107
Giorgio Trentin, “La Comunità Cinese Nel Sud-Est Asiatico E Il Problema Dei Coolies in America Nei
Secoli XVII-XIX” (Unpublished Ph.D Dissertation, Università di Cagliari, 1998); Arensmeyer, “British
Merchant Enterprise and the Chinese Coolie Labour Trade, 1850-1874,” 32.

54
powerful owner of the coolie agency Syme Muir & Co. The Chinese population of Amoy,
exasperated by such a blatant act of arrogance, gathered and raided Syme’s estate,
protected by British infantrymen. The ensuing fight resulted in the injury of two British
nationals and the death of eleven Chinese.108 In investigations following these facts the
British consular authorities recognized Syme guilty, and sentenced him to pay the paltry
fine of $200—less than the price of a single coolie—while the prisoner was returned to
the Chinese authorities and executed109.
After these events, the possibility of an escalation of tensions in the area was seriously
considered by the local British authorities. A threat of disorder could “endanger the public
peace and the legitimate trade” ,110 many source said, or other vital interest of the British
in China—including the still illegal opium trade, and the same passenger trade to
Singapore. This led to the first serious attempts of regulating the traffic by the British
authorities. In 1855 the British government of Hong Kong issued the “Chinese passengers
act”, a special regulation which forced British ships carrying Chinese passengers (and
foreign ships from Hong Kong) to obtain a “certificate of competency” verifying the
respect of basic conditions of ventilation, the amount of supplies, the presence of a doctor,
and other measures aimed at preventing excessive mortality or revolts. The passenger act
also fixed a maximum limit of 2 passengers per ton. of register, in order to avoid cases of
extreme overcrowding.111.
At the same time, coolie recruiters were relocating their business to the non-treaty
opium-smuggling center of Swatow and the neighboring island of Namoa (Nanao). 112
First to move was James Tait’s floating depot-ship Emigrant (a model borrowed from the
Lintin opium smuggling business), which set off for Namoa soon after the Amoy riots.
Reportedly, Tait was also allowed to open a barracoon in Swatow, by paying the local
authorities a reward of one tael per coolie shipped.113 At the same time, another opium
station in the Pearl River Delta (Cumsingmoon) had reached the peak of its involvement
in the competing coolie trade to Peru, as we will illustrate in the next paragraphs. The

108
Yen, Coolies and Mandarins, 48–52.
109
Meagher, The Coolie Trade, 99.
110
A “standard formula” repeated in several British reports of the time; e.g., Gov. Bowring to Vice-Consul
Hale, Hong Kong, 12 March 1857, CO 129/65.
111
Ibid., 144–145.Further restrictions were put in place before the end of the 50s. A recent comprehensive
account of the content and applications of the passenger acts can be found in Sinn, Pacific Crossing, 73–80.
We will discuss the British, Chinese and Portuguese regulations of the coolie trade further in the next
chapter.
112
Arensmeyer, “British Merchant Enterprise...,” 166–173.
113
Yen, Coolies and Mandarins, 54.

55
absence in such places, not officially open to foreign trade, of Western diplomats and
consuls (especially British) became a guarantee for carrying on unlawful practices
without incurring in hassles, controls and limitations.114 On the other hand, the lack of
formal political authorities continuously exposed traffickers to the consequences of
popular hostility and coolie mutinies.

2.3 A second push? The rise of the global guano market and the takeoff of the
Peruvian coolie trade

The introduction of Chinese laborers in Peru, which began almost in parallel with the
Cuban branch of the coolie trade, was profoundly linked with the development of the
country’s main economic resource: the guano industry. It was the extraction and
exportation of this fertilizer, produced by the accumulation of seabird droppings on the
dry deserted islands of the Peruvian coast that created, like sugar in Cuba, both the
demand and the wealth indispensable for the introduction of Chinese colonos in the
country.

2.3.1 The Peruvian Republic from independence to the guano boom

Peru was the last South American Republic to become independent from the Spanish
colonial rule. A major political and administrative center of the Spanish colonial empire,
seat of a Viceroyalty, Peru harbored the last loyalist resistance against the revolutionary
armies of San Martín (1821-23) and Bolivar, until the final defeat in the battle of
Ayacucho in December 1824. 115 After the independence from Spain (1825) and the
secession of the Peruvian provinces from the Bolivian-Peruvian confederation (1836), the
newborn country went through a period of continuous turmoil and both internecine and
external wars, which will find a temporary phase of stability only after the seizure of
power of Marshal Ramon Castilla in 1845. A major political actor, Castilla will determine
for over a decade, with interruptions, the political scene of the Andean country, from 1845
to 1851 and 1855 to 1862.
From an economic perspective, independence posed to the country a series of major
challenges. The State treasury was empty, and the nation was unable to repay its severe
external debts, contracted particularly with Britain during the wars against the Spanish

114
Ibid., 42.
115
Marcello Carmagnani, L’altro Occidente: L'america Latina dall'invasione europea al nuovo millennio
(Torino: Einaudi, 2003), 160.

56
domination.116 A major resource of the country was its traditional export of silver. The
progressive exhaustion of its oldest sites of extraction 117 (Puno), in this sense, was
relieved by the late 1820s by the emergence of a new production site in the area of Cerro
de Pasco, which would continue to yield significant outputs until the last third of the
century.118 Commerce, conversely, stagnated. The political reconfiguration of the South
American continent, had cut off the vital links of the Peruvian creole societies with the
Spanish metropolis, and underpinned the traditional fluvial route between the Andean
region and the Plata basin, in favor of an increase in foreign-manned maritime commerce.
Peruvian ports, situated in the northern half of the South American Pacific coast,
moreover, suffered a major geographical disadvantage against their direct Chilean
competitor (Valparaiso), which intercepted the major streams of trade and emigration of
the Atlantic-Cape Horn route.119
The market-oriented agriculture of the coastal regions, arguably the most vital sector in
the country’s economy, was undergoing a process of relative expansion in selected export
crops (sugar, cotton, cochineal), but these conquests were constantly endangered by a
chronic lack of capital, and a perceived and deplored labor shortage—the so called falta
de brazos.
Analyzing a partial official census held in 1827 Paul Gootemberg has estimated in 1.5
million the Peruvian population at the eve of independence; 66% of which was recorded
as “Indian”, settled in the mountainous interior of the country (the Sierra). The censuses
of 1850 and 1862, also both incomplete, show a steady population increase to 2.0-2.4
million inhabitants, but an unchanging proportion of the native population.120 It has been
argued that the first half century of the Republican regime increased the reciprocal
seclusion of the creoles and the Indian community, subjected to a special tribute
(contribucíon de indígenas, the largest income source for the Peruvian State until the

116
Hollett, More Precious than Gold, 76; William M. Mathew, “The First Anglo-Peruvian Debt and Its
Settlement, 1822-49,” Journal of Latin American Studies 2, no. 1 (May 1970): 81–98.
117
Silver, as it is well known, had for a long time been the major export of the colonial regime, foraging an
important part of the global trade in the early modern age. In the words of the Uruguayan writer Eduardo
Galeano, the product of its silver deposits of Potosì extracted during three centuries of colonial domination
had been sufficient “para tender un puente de plata desde la cumber del cerro hasta la puerta del palacio real
al otro lado del océano.” Galeano, Las Venas Abiertas de América Latina, 40.
118
Ulrich Muecke, Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century Peru: The Rise of the Partido Civil (Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004), 19–20.
119
Antonello Gerbi, Il Perù: una storia sociale (Milano: Franco Angeli, 1994), 195–207. On the contrary,
the opening of a Pacific circuit of trade with the Californian ports after the gold rush revertsed this
geographical disadvantage.
120
Paul Gootenberg, “Population and Ethnicity in Early Republican Peru: Some Revisions,” Latin
American Research Review 26, no. 3 (1991): 109–57.

57
1850s), as shown by a particularly low rate of mestizaje.121 Although thousands of Indios
were reportedly migrating seasonally in the urban settlements of the coast,122 they were
perceived as unfit and unreliable for work in the agriculture. 123 The powerful planter
class, the hacendados, had traditionally clung on slave labor, but after independence the
country slave reserve had started inexorably to decline, as effect of the libertad de
vientres (the non-transmissibility of the slave condition) proclaimed by San Martín in
1821 and a de-facto prohibition of the slave trade imposed by the British influence
already from the 1810s. The 1828 constitution had incorporated an abolitionist stance
stating that “nadie nasce esclavo en la Republica, tampoco entra de fuera ninguno que no
quede libre.” 124 In the absence of replacements, the slave population in Peru dropped
from at least 41,228 at the date of independence125 to only 25,000 in 1850 and 17,000 in
1854.126
Under the pressure of the planters, a law allowing the importation of slaves from other
American countries was passed in 1846,127 followed by the arrival of a handful of slaves
from New Grenada (Colombia), but obtrusive British interferences led to the failure of
this option certified by the restrictive Anglo-Peruvian treaty of 1850.128
In this context, the start of mass guano exports from the Chincha islands after the
1840s turned the labor question an absolute priority for the Peruvian government. The
influence of guano on nineteenth-century Peru can rightly be synthetized by the
expression “guano age” that has been deployed by its very contemporaries to describe
that phase of the Andean country’s history.129
The Chincha islands were a group of three small islands lying twenty kilometers off
the port of Pisco, and about two hundred south of Lima. The largest of the three was the
northernmost, measuring just over a mile in length and half in width.

121
Larson, Trials of Nation Making: Liberalism, Race and Ethnicity in the Andes, 1810-1910.
122
Notwithstanding a deteriorating transportation system, that made quicker a travel from Lima to Paris
than from Lima to Cuzco. Gerbi, Il Perù: una storia sociale, 196; Stewart, Chinese Bondage in Peru, 4–5.
123
There was a wide belief among the hacendados that “la acción del clima, su antigüedad y aislamiento en
el territorio habían traído como consecuencia la degeneración de la raza indígena. El "indio de pura raza"
era un ser parásito, tímido e indolente, incapaz de unirse al desarrollo histórico nacional por su falta de
aspiraciones y facultades intelectuales.” Mario Marcone, “Indigenas e inmigrantes durante la Republica
Aristocratica: Poblacion e ideologia civilista,” Historica XIX, no. 1 (1995): 73–94.
124
Rodríguez Pastor, Hijos del celeste imperio, 20.
125
Edward D. Melillo, “The First Green Revolution: Debt Peonage and the Making of the Nitrogen
Fertilizer Trade, 1840 – 1930,” American Historical Review 117, no. 4 (2012): 1030.
126
Hu-DeHart, “Coolies, Shopkeepers, Pioneers,” 335.
127
Rodríguez Pastor, Hijos del celeste imperio, 21.
128
Mario Castro de Mendoza, El transporte marítimo en la inmigración china, 1849-1874 (Lima: Consejo
Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología, 1989), 23.
129
Alexander J. Duffield, Peru in the Guano Age (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1877).

58
 These barren rocky formations, uninhabited and almost completely free of vegetation,
had become the preferred nesting site for the abundant population of seabirds of the area,
particularly favorable to their settlement for the presence of rich fishing resources.130
The enormous wealth of these islands was hidden in the huge deposits of dried
excrements produced by these species of seabirds—in particular the Guanay cormorant
(Phalacrocorax bougainvillii), the Peruvian booby (Sula variegate), and the Peruvian
brown pelican (Pelicanus occidentalis thagus) 131 —accumulated for centuries to form
layers of over 60 meters thanks to a total absence of precipitations. The climatic
conditions of the Peruvian coast are unique in the world: the flow on the surface of the
Pacific Ocean of the cold “Humboldt current” (more correctly the “eastern boundary
current”132) from the coast of Chile, which lowers the surficial temperature of about 8
degrees below the latitudinal average (15 to 22 °C), 133 combined with the patterns of
winds produces an extremely arid microclimate, that preserved the nitrogen components
of bird manure, preventing the breakdown of uric acid (C5H4N4O3) and the evaporation of
water-soluble ammonia (NH3).134
According to Gregory Cushman’s recent contribution on this topic, “Peru had a
significant local guano industry, even a local guano science, long before its discovery by
northerners” 135 in the nineteenth century. Huanu, the original Quechua name for this
product, had been employed by local populations since the Incas, who according to a
frequently quoted passage by Garcilaso de La Vega Comentarios Reales de los Incas
(1609) had a clear knowledge and understanding of that manure’s origins, which made
them emanate laws to protect seabirds.136 Moreover, Cushman added, Guano exploitation
in the Peruvian agriculture was never totally discontinued under the Spanish domination.
In the 1760s it is reported the employ of at least 5,000 tons of guano per year in the sole
Chancay province on the Peruvian coast.137
The first scientific studies on the chemical quality of the Peruvian guano in Europe
were carried out in France in 1806 on the samples taken by the geographer Alexander von

130
Hollett, More Precious than Gold, 76; Emilio Romero, Historia Económica del Perú, vol. II (Lima:
Universo, 1967), 96.
131
Melillo, “The First Green Revolution,” 1037.
132
Gregory Todd Cushman, “The Lords of Guano: Science and the Management of Peru’s Marine
Environment, 1800-1973” (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas, Austin, 2003), 56–58.
133
Ibid., 57.
134
Ibid., 59.
135
Ibid., 54.
136
Hollett, More Precious than Gold, 79–80.
137
Cushman, “The Lords of Guano,” 59; Hollett, More Precious than Gold, 73.

59
Humboldt during its explorations of the region (1804) and analyzed by chemists Vaquelin
and Foucroy. In 1813 this material was analyzed by English chemist Sir Humphry Davy,
who was immediately enthusiastic about fertilizer product capabilities, which had not
been established with certainty the origin and nature. Other samples were analyzed in the
following years, but only in 1840 the German chemist Justus Von Liebig found a
sufficiently receptive environment to bring that discovery from the laboratories to the
agricultural estates, advocating the use of guano for wheat and cereals cropping in his
enthusiastically received Organic Chemistry in Its Application to Agriculture and
Physiology (1840).138
Cushman suggests, however, that “clever marketing” 139 by Peruvian extractors and
government was more determinant than the popularization of Liebig’s work in organizing
the first guano exports to Europe. In 1830 the Peruvian government had already started to
recognize the strategic value of this manure, liberalizing its adoption and
commercialization through the country.
In 1841 the firm Quirós Allier & Co., who had been authorized to exploit the guano
deposit for a measly royalty of 5%, orchestrated the shipment of 8.000 tons of guano to
England, in partnership with the Liverpool merchant house William Joseph Myers &
Co.140. In November of the same year Lima’s streets resounded with the news that the
first loads of guano had been sold in London at an incredibly high price (24-28£ per tons),
convincing the Peruvian Government to revise the terms of the contract with Quiros to
ensure a larger share (from 5 to 64%) of the net profits. By 1844, with prices falling to
averages of 10-11£ per ton, guano was being shipped to the United States via the UK, and
to the sugar cane plantations of Barbados and Mauritius, inaugurating what would
became soon a truly global commerce on a massive scale (Tab. 2.3).141
Starting from 1847 the Castilla government introduced the system to sell exclusive
consignation rights for each importing country to mostly foreign agents. The British firm
Antony Gibbs & Sons, one of the most important European merchant businesses in South
America, took the lion share, acquiring the contract for Great Britain from 1847 to

138
Justus Freiherr von Liebig, Organic Chemistry in Its Application to Agriculture and Physiology, trans.
Lyon Playfair (London: Taylor & Walton, 1840), originally published as Die organische Chemie in ihrer
Anwendung auf Agricultur und Physiologie (Braunschweig: F. Vieweg und Sohn, 1840); Cushman, “The
Lords of Guano,” 61.
139
Cushman, “The Lords of Guano,” 61.
140
Hollett, More Precious than Gold, 87–88.
141
Cushman, “The Lords of Guano,” 61.

60
1861.142 This way he ensured the Peruvian Government a reliable source of advanced
income and managed to maintain the market price for what was mostly deemed a non-
reproducible resource.143

Tab. 2.3: Peruvian Guano and nitrate exports, 1841-1882

Nitrate Guano Nitrate Guano

1841 12,810 8,085 1861 62,331 246,893
1842 16,418 23,441 1862 77,833 365,973
1843 16,989 2,617 1863 70,870 419,789
1844 17,489 27,189 1864 50,167 373,157
1845 17,307 24,701 1865 112,353 439,049
1846 18,361 36,914 1866 100,634 463,383
1847 17,622 96,724 1867 117,315 493,335
1848 22,314 107,356 1868 87,699 441,754
1849 19,785 151,621 1869 69,324 526,726
1850 23,545 185,724 1870 135,397 728,703
1851 31,713 262,739 1871 165,872 614,668
1852 27,277 145,968 1872 220,198 326,960
1853 40,767 316,116 1873 288,133 233,021
1854 33,141 533,280 1874 257,384 701,820
1855 43,097 514,957 1875 332,557 245,693
1856 37,334 280,928 1876 326,000 575,476
1857 50,408 626,584 1877 216,507 541,222
1858 56,131 343,055 1878 270,249 504,134
1859 72,413 190,586 1879 72,558 87,987
1860 63,518 460,862 1880- 0 0
1882
Source: Cushman, “The Lords of Guano”, 640-641.

In these years the State’s finances were becoming progressively more dependent on
guano duties, increasingly committed by its subsequent governments to guarantee the
contraction of ulterior foreign debts. The revenue from the guano trade represented 28,3%
of the total treasury income in 1851, 37,6% in 1852, and a stunning 82% in 1857.
To circumvent the Peruvian guano monopoly the major powers started the exploration
of alternative sources of this fertilizer. In the early 1850 the US Navy attempted without

142
Hollett, More Precious than Gold, 87–88.William M. Mathew, “Peru and the British guano market,
1840-1870,” The Economic History Review 23, no. 1 (1970): 112–28; William M. Mathew, “The
Imperialism of Free Trade: Peru, 1820-70,” The Economic History Review, 1968, 562–79.
143
According to Cushman, this was the consequence of the false Humboldtian assumption that guano had a
prehistoric origin and local seabirds were unable to reproduce its supply in historical times. Attempts to
recover the guano industry by preserving the local fauna only started in the early twentieth century, after the
original Chincha’s deposits had been completely exhausted. Cushman, “The Lords of Guano,” 60 and
passim.

61
success the occupation of the inhabited Lobos Island on the northern coast of Peru.144 In
1856 the US congress issued the “Guano act”, allowing its citizens to seize unclaimed
guano islands145 thus triggering an actual “guano treasure hunt”146 in the Pacific Ocean.
However, guano sources discovered in the Caribbean (Navassa), Namibia (Ichaboe), and
the Pacific (Baker, Jarvis, Nauru, Banaba, Makatea) by American and British explorers
never attained the same relevancy of the Chinchas, and were generally of inferior quality,
with an lower percentage of nitrogen.147
The reasons for guano’s extraordinary success and popularity lied in the severe
conditions of soil exhaustion of most European nations’ agricultures, notably the British,
which needed growing amounts of fertilizers to maintain and increase their productivity
in the age of industrial revolution and demographic transition.
As early as 1968 Francis M. Thompson maintained that the introduction of chemical
based – externally acquired fertilizers (guano, nitrates, phosphates, potash but also a new
employ of bones and oilseeds) 148 in nineteenth-century Europe had marked a “second
agricultural revolution.”149 In more recent times the specificities of the nineteenth-century
nitrogen trade (including guano and, increasingly after the 1870, saltpetre) have called the
attention of a number of scholars in the emerging field of environmental history.
Cushman linked the significance of guano in the European agriculture with the
consumption of meat in post-industrial revolution Europe, arguing guano imports raised
the productivity of particular land usages, enabling a general shift from cereals to fodder
for cattle raising.150 He also reported the importance of Peruvian nitrates for the take-off
of the German and central European sugar beet production in the middle of the century.151
Crossing the boundaries between economic, environmental and labor history Edward
Melillo instead has stressed the global character of these processes, which he termed
provocatively “the first green revolution”; the first human driven alteration of the global
nitrogen cycle ushered by the transportation “of millions of metric tons of nitrogen
fertilizer and more than 100,000 workers across the globe, producing significant shifts in

144
Hollett, More Precious than Gold, 173–189; Cushman, “The Lords of Guano,” 68.
145
Melillo, “The First Green Revolution,” 1045.
146
Hollett, More Precious than Gold, 74.
147
Cushman, “The Lords of Guano,” 68. Cf. the analysis printed on the British Parliamentary papers:
Papers by J.Thomas Way Esq., consulting chemist to the Royal Agricultural Society, BPP, Correspondence
with the Peruvian Government respecting the importation of Guano, 1852-1853, 1854, 3-4.
148
Ibid.
149
Francis Michael Thompson, “The second Agricultural Revolution, 1815-1880,” The Economic History
Review 21, no. 1 (1968): 62–77.
150
Cushman, “The Lords of Guano,” 64.
151
Ibid., 89; Melillo, “The First Green Revolution,” 1044.

62
environments and labor conditions throughout the world.”152

2.3.2 The Ley China of 1849

In the second part of his article Melillo discussed the impact of the nitrogen revolution
on the nineteenth century transnational labor history. As we have argued, the link between
guano and the introduction of Chinese coolies was twofold: on the one hand, Chinese
labor was required in the extraction sites as a source for replaceable and sufficiently
coerced work; on the other, it were the guano revenues showering the Peruvian state and
private enterprise that sustained the expenses for importing contract laborers from all
across the Pacific.
In fact, were the very natural conditions on the Chincha islands, in first place, that
made it extremely difficult to recruit free workers. The island were almost deprived of
vegetation, exposed to cold wind and tropical sun without repairs; as one accounts refers,
only mosquitos, scorpions and lizards were able to survive in that environment, due to the
absence of freshwater sources.153 The ancient deposits of guano of the three islands were
compact and hard to dig, and often had to be mined with dynamite; the guano dust
procured irreversible damage to the eye and the ammonium fumes were poisonous over
long exposures; the guano had to be dug with bare arms, transported for hundreds of
meters uphill on overloaded handrails, and then toppled into huge tubes (mangueras)
descending steeply from the cliffs to load the ships at anchor. 154
Due to these circumstances, until 1850, most of the guano mining work had been
conducted by prisoners and army deserters sent to forced labor by the Peruvian
Government, and by a small group of black slaves. 155 According to a governmental
survey held in 1853 (Informes sobre la existencia de huano en las islas de Chincha,
presentados por la comision nombrada por el gobierno peruano) bringing other groups of
laborers on the guano islands had raised insurmountable difficulties. The Indians of the
Sierra, genetically adapted to the altitude and rarefied atmosphere of the Andes, were
difficult to recruit for stable jobs on the coast, while the urban proletariat of Spanish

152
Ibid., 1028. In the same respect, see the conception of ecological imperialism declined in a neo-marxist
approach by Brett Clark and Bellamy Foster, “Ecological Imperialism and the Global Metabolic Rift:
Unequal Exchange and the Guano/Nitrates Trade,” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 50
(2009): 311–34.
153
Augustus Lindley, “About the Chincha Islands,” in Illustrated Travels. A Record of Discovery,
Geography and Adventure, ed. Henry W. Bates, vol. 2 (London: Cassell Petter & Galpin, 1869), 154–160
and 174–179.
154
Ibid.
155
Meagher, The Coolie Trade, 233.

63
origin was extremely reluctant to work under such degrading and unhealthy conditions as
those of digging the guano beds, if not in exchange for high salaries and short periods of
time:

los libres son muy eventuales: no quieren trabajar como constantemente se

experimenta en la isla, pues de los 200 indicados, el día que más trabajan son 30,
excusándose los restantes, ya con pretexto de enfermedad, ya de mucho cansancio, y
entre tanto abandonándose al juego y a la inacción más vergonzosa se contentan con
comer solamente, pues a todos se les suministra para ello dos reales diarios, sin haber
medio, ni aun tentándose el de negarles este socorro para estimularlos al trabajo: otro
ejemplo del más lamentable estado de indolencia de las masas trabajadoras de la
Nación.156

On these premises, the informe drew the conclusion that free labor was not a viable
option for guano extraction:

Con libres, pues, no cuente el Gobierno para cumplir sus compromisos, a no ser que
dicte medidas duras y severas para que cumplan con su destino en las islas, bien que
puede pronosticarse que no producirán otro efecto que el de que nadie quiera
contratarse para tal ocupación.157

The solution to these problems would come only with the introduction of Chinese
contract laborers. It is no coincidence that the first promoter of the Chinese immigration
to Peru was also the governmental contractor for the management of the Chincha islands’
guano mines Domingo Elías, ambitious and wealthy hacendado, also owner of vast
vineyards and cotton plantations in the Pisco region.158
In 1849 Elías added to its business empire the state concession for the extractive
operations on the Chinchas (which he will keep until 1853), 159 ousting a coalition of
subagents that had co-managed the mines since the early 1840s.160
According to Arnold Meagher, Elías had been informed of the availability of the
Chinese labor market through his contacts with the ambient of British entrepreneurs in
Peru.161 The connection seems to have been stronger than what Meagher hypothized; his

156
Nícolas de Pierola, Informes sobre la Existencia de Huano en las Islas de Chincha: presentados por la
Comision nombrada por el Gobierno Peruano con los planos levantados por la misma Comision (Lima:
Edicion Oficial, 1854), 11.
157
Ibid.
158
Hollett, More Precious than Gold, 120.
159
Estimated to yield around 30.000 pesos per year. Ibid., 129.
160
Whose major figure was the Chilean adventurer Cipriano Roman. William M. Mathew, “A Primitive
Export Sector: Guano Production in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Peru,” Journal of Latin American Studies 9,
no. 1 (1977): 35–57.
161
Meagher, The Coolie Trade, 233.

64
two agents in China Juan Sevilla162 and William M. Robinet,163 in fact, were both linked
to the Californian commercial environment, had been dispatched to China from San
Francisco, and in the case of Robinet, would be contemporarily involved in the shipping
of Chinese “free” emigrants to California and coolies to Peru. In the autumn of 1849 Elías
orchestrated the first experimental expedition of 75 coolies 164 on the Danish ship
Frederick Wilhelm, which took its human cargo in the smuggling anchorage of
Cumsingmoon, about twenty kilometers north of Macao.
After the arrival of this first contingent of Chinese coolies on 15 October 1849, Elías
started a campaign to pressure the Peruvian parliament to subsidize the immigration of
laborers under contract. A law conceding a prize of 30 pesos—covered by the guano
revenues—for any immigrant landed in Peru was enacted on 17 November of the same
year165. Under Elías suggestion, it extended retroactively to the Chinese imported on the
Frederick Williams; a move which earned its popular label of “ley china.” Before the
law’s abrogation in 1853, however, several hundred Irish (320) and German (1,096)

162
As reported by a recent study, José Sevilla (1813-1866) started his career travelling the Pacific as sailor
on North American whalers in the 1830s, had become a maritime entrepreneur in Peru during the 1840s,
associating with Elias, and had travelled to San Francisco after the discovery of gold in 1848 to speculate in
various businesses. He reached China in 1849 or 1850, and in the following decade his agency exported
coolies from Cumsingmoon, Macao and Canton. Juan Luis Orrego Penagos, “Un proyecto liberal en el Perú
del siglo XIX: el Club Progresista,” Processos Históricos IV, no. 7 (2005).
163
Elizabeth Sinn has dedicated several pages of his recent book on the figure of Robinet as California-
Hong Kong trader, basing on several letters he left in the Heard family business records 1734-1901, Baker
Library, Harvard Business School, Boston (the Heard & Co. was a prominent American opium firm based
in Cumsingmoon). Son of an Englishman, born in Peru and American citizen, it seems Robinet was able to
cast a large net of connections and interests across the whole Pacific Rim; his arrival in China was
originally related to the possibility to export white sugar from the Philippines to California and the Pacific
Republics, but became increasingly more related to the emigration business afterwards; Sinn, Pacific
Crossing, 56–57, 70–71, 150–153. Sinn’s description of Robinet as a conscientious agent, attentive to the
welfare of his passengers, starkly contrast with the fate of the emigrants he sent to Callao; surprisingly she
only mention this point in a footnote: Ibid., 366, n.58. Robinet will end his career by staging his death after
shipping a false cargo of silk from China to Chile in 1858; according to Sinn, he will be later recognized in
Lima and convicted for this fraud. For details of this episode see Friend of China, 6 November 1858.
164
Considering the Frederick Williams tonnage (430 t.r.), the expedition had been substantially
undercharged.
165
“Art. 1 todo introductor de colonos extranjeros, de cualquier sexo, cuyo número no baje de cincuenta, y
cuyas edades sean de diez a cuarenta años, disfrutará una prima de treinta pesos por individuo que pagará el
Tesoro Nacional al momento de la internación, teniendo a la vista las contratas respectivas autorizadas por
los Cónsules de la República. Art. 2 Se concede a los primeros introductores de colonos, don Domingo
Elías y Juan Rodríguez, privilegio exclusivo por el término de cuatro años, con la misma prima de treinta
pesos señalada en esta ley, por cada colono de la China que introduzcan en los departamentos de Lima y La
Libertad, conforme al artículo anterior, comprendiéndose en esta gracia, los Chinos que dé cuenta los
interesados llegaron al puerto del Callao en el buque ‘Federico Guillermo’ […]Art. 6 Se autoriza el Poder
Ejecutivo para que pueda tomar lo necesario de los productos del huano, a fin de cubrir las primas que
deban darse por las tesorerías á los introductores de colonos, en razón de esta ley.” The full text of the law
is reported in Ernesto Fernández Montagne and German Granda Alva, Apuntes socio económicos de la
emigración china en el Perú, 1848-1874 (Lima: Universidad del Pacifico, Centro de Investigacion, 1977),
120.

65
immigrants came to the Andean country.166

2.3.3 The earliest years of the Peruvian coolie traffic: the rise of the Cumsingmoon
emigration station

By the terms of the ley china, moreover, Elías secured a monopoly on the introduction
of Chinese in the Department of Lima y La Liberdad, which allowed him to expand its
business in Cumsingmoon sending at least another five vessels already in the coming
year, two of which (Albert and Chili) incurred in revolts and were forced back on the
Chinese coast. 167 The remaining three reached their destination landing 669 of 920
Chinese on board, showing a frightful mortality rate of 27 percent, destined to be
replicated often in the coming years.
The Peruvian strand of the coolie trade has conventionally been divided into two
stages: the first from 1849 to 1856, and the second from 1861 to 1874. Between the two a
brief period of suspension 1856-1861, was motivated by a series of scandals that had
uncovered to the world public opinion the astonishing conditions of the coolies working
in the Chincha islands.
In the first stage , Peruvian coolie recruiting agents operated primarily in the Pearl
River Delta area, especially in the opium smuggling haven of Cumsingmoon—but also,
through the same agents, in Macao and Canton. We may argue whether its overall
success, notwithstanding the huge human losses, would eventually have an impact on the
resumption of the coolie traffic from Amoy and its extension to Swatow and Hong Kong
in 1853. This point has never been clearly unraveled by historians, and would merit a
proper investigation. In fact, due to the scarcity of references, the Cumsingmoon stage of
the coolie traffic has never caught much attention in any of the general studies that are
available on the coolie trade.168

166
“Colonos que se han introducido en la Republica desde Junio 26 de 1850 hasta Julio de 1853”, Memoria
que presenta a las Cámaras de 1853 el Ministro de Gobierno y Relaciones Exteriores (Imprenta del
Gobierno: Lima, 1853), reported by Cowie, “Contro la tesi di ‘Garibaldi negriero,’” 397..See also Narvaez,
“Chinese Coolies in Cuba and Peru,” 74. The broker of the German immigration was the son of a Genoese
merchant, José Antolín Rodulfo (Rodolfo); See Eduardo Salazar, “La primera inmigración alemana y José
Antolín Rodulfo”, Inmigración en el siglo XIX, http://inmigracionsigloxix.blogspot.it/2008/11/inmigracin-
alemana-en-el-per-ii.html, (accessed 05/14); also Diego Lévano Medina, “La inserción comercial de
genoveses en las postrimerías del período colonial: Lima, 1750-1825,” in Historia de Lima. XVII Coloquio
de Historia de Lima, ed. Miguel Marticorena (Lima: UNMSM, 2010), 167–85. I thank Eduardo Salazar for
this precious information.
167
According to the data of Castro de Mendoza; on the basis of contemporary Southern China newspapers,.
Meagher lists instead 7 ships. We do not know the fate of the two missing ships.
168
An important exception is the recent Master thesis of Thomas McTernan Statsko, “Moving Through the
Gate of Venus: The History of Cumsingmoon and the Coolie Trade 1849-54” (Unpublished MA Thesis,

66
 The reason for Cumsingmoon and its surroundings’ advantage was most likely
connected to the concomitant euphoria brought in the Pearl River Delta by the reports of
the discovery of the Californian gold fields in 1848. As well synthetized by Kuhn, at the
news of the opportunity of enrichment in the famed gum saam (pinyin: jinshan, 金山),
the gold mountain, thousands of locals lined up in Hong Kong or Macao to catch a
passage on a Western ship:

Some 1,000 had reached San Francisco by 1850, another 6,000 the following year
and 20,000 the next. Some 10 percent (25,000) of California’s population were
Chinese by the time of the census of 1852. Nearby Hong Kong quickly became the
main embarkation port for South China emigrants headed for North America. Early
reports of the 1848 discovery probably had reached South China before the end of
1849, transmitted by Cantonese merchants who had set up shops in San Francisco
that year169

This was especially true for the emigrants capable of paying their own passages,
artisans, shopkeepers and more broadly people possessing some little property to invest.
The migratory push alimented itself through the chain mechanism. Wrote a contemporary,

he people who go to California pay for their own passage, and hitherto this
emigration has been confined to the better class of artisans, and of shopkeepers
possessed of some little property. In the districts round Cumsingmoon I found that all
the carpenters had left for this new El Dorado, and the reports they had sent home of
the facility of finding gold seemed to have created quite a ferment, and to have given
a new impulse to the desire170

This genuine push factor, we believe, greatly facilitated the successful implantation of
a Western-led coolie passenger trade to Peru and Cuba in the early 1850s Pearl River
Delta. Accounts of revolts happening on several coolie ships in these years shows clearly
that, at least in this first stage, many of the coolies diverted to the Peruvian guano islands
and plantation had been deceived about their destination. The coolies of the Lady
Montague in 1850, for instance, who for the most part were “shoemakers and tailors, and
others, and thought they were going to their trades”,171 according to a testimony, revolted
during their quarantine at the island of Lorenzo, at Callao, after being told they were

University of Macau, 2013). We will discuss some of Statsko’s arguments, whose interest is more devoted
to the end of the Cumsingmoon trade than to its start, in the next chapter.
169
“Kuhn, Chinese Among Others, 141.Along those departing from Hong Kong, at least 1,335 Chinese
immigrants on seven ships reached California from Macao in 1852, and 944 from Whampoa; Sinn, Pacific
Crossing, 95.
170
White to Barkly (Gov. of British Guyana) Hong Kong, 21 August 1851, BPP, Papers Relating to
Chinese Immigrants Recently Introduced into British Guyana and Trinidad, 1854, 86-88
171
“Examination of John Parfitt, late chief mate of the ‘Lady Montague’,” CO 885/1/20 Correspondence
Relative to the Emigration of Chinese Coolies, 1853, 6-7.

67
going to be employed on the Chincha Islands instead of California. As recounts the ship’s
mate, not very much acquainted with the conditions of his ship’s passengers, “they made
some objections to go to Chincha Islands, but I do not know for why […] several of them
committed suicide after being put on shore.”172 On the Eliza Morrison in 1853, reports
Arensmeyer, even part of the crew had been deceived, to not let them slip the truth to the
coolies during the journey:

A sailor, noting their southerly course, remarked that the ship was too far south for
San Francisco. He was told to hold his tongue as the Chinese would mutiny. The
captain even went so far as to tell the coolies when they sighted Peru that it was
California.173

2.3.4 The Chincha scandal of the early 1850s and the temporary suspension of the
Peruvian coolie trade

In appears from these source that as early as this stage, accounts of the harrowing labor
conditions in Peru and the Chincha islands had started to circulate in China, probably
through correspondence, the international press, or directly from the lips of the sailors
engaged in the China and guano trade. 174 Particularly sensational were the reports
published on the New York Enquirer by the North American journalist George
Washington Peck, 175 who had visited the infamous islands in September of 1853. His
travel accounts, collected and published in the following year under the name Melbourne
and the Chincha Islands, contained a stern indictment of the Peruvian authorities and,
above all, the British government, for the state of coercion and violence in which the
Chinese laborers were subjected. They indulged on the cruelty of figures like the
“commander” of the “Middle island”, the Hungarian Carlos Kossuth,176 chief supervisor
for the extraction and loading of guano. Under the heels of Kossuth’s despotic direction,
hundreds of coolies were obliged to comply with a grueling extraction quota of five tons
of guano per day, seven days a week:
172
Ibid.
173
Arensmeyer, “British Merchant Enterprise...,” 126.
174
The same can be said for the Cuba trade. According to a letter by James White in 1851, for instance, the
Chinese in the Pearl River Delta “expressed a great dislike to go to any country which belonged to the
Spanish, as the accounts which they had received from their countrymen who went to Cuba had been very
unsatisfactory for emigration.” White to Barkly (Gov. of British Guyana) Hong Kong, 21 August 1851,
BPP, Papers Relating to Chinese Immigrants Recently Introduced into British Guyana and Trinidad, 1854,
86-88
175
George Washington Peck was born in Rehoboth, Massachusetts. Founder of the magazine Boston
Musical Review, he was also a correspondent of the Morning Courier and New York Enquirer since 1847.
Hollett, More Precious than Gold, 121.
176
Kossuth also brazenly sold himself off as the brother of the leader of the Hungarian revolution of 1848;
George W. Peck, Melbourne and the Chincha Islands, with sketches of Lima and a voyage round the World
(New York: C. Scribner, 1854), 167.

68
 Whatever their contracts may be, if there are any, the coolies, who are one of the
contracting parties, become, in effect, absolutely slaves. They are condemned to be
diggers of guano; their labor is much more severe and injurious than railroad
digging; they have no liberty days, no protecting laws, no power to obtain even the
pittance said to be paid the, no proper seasons of rest. Most of them go nearly naked;
none have more than enough clothing just to cover themselves; they live and feed
like dogs; they are constantly within reach of the thongs of hideous black drivers –
the link between men and devils; there are no women among them, nothing to
mitigate their hopeless toil177

Those who resisted to such treatment were subjected to the most ruthless punishments,
flogging, and tortures, whose extreme brutality stimulated the imagination of the press.178
The only hope of relief from such hardships rested, therefore, upon death. Suicides were
almost a daily occurrence. Between 1852 and 1853 approximately sixty coolies
committed suicide by throwing themselves over the cliffs and onto the rocks.179 In order
to prevent these suicides, or attempts to escape, armed guards regularly patrolled the
ridges.180
The testimonies of Peck are confirmed by many other visitors, but on some aspects
they were instrumental to his defense of American slavery.181 Arguing that most of the
coolies had been brought (by that time) by British ships, Peck sought to attack the
supposed hypocrisy of the British anti-slavery discourse, concluding that the coolie trade
had become much worse than the slave trade itself:

The Coolies who dig the guano are brought here in English vessels—the fact is
notorious. I have often conversed with English captains who spoke freely of having
been engaged in the traffic. Whatever may be the engagement of the Coolies, and if
there be any, it is characterized by fraudulent representations and bad faith in the
other party, their transporters and those who transfer them to the Peruvian

177
Ibid., 206–212.
178
Such extreme reports, sometimes exaggerated, were still able to convey the outrage and disgust of the
contemporary eyewitness. The harrowing memory of the Chincha’s abuses, indeed, survived the end of the
coolie trade. Pino Fortini, for example, collected these popular narratives in the 1940s: “non mancavano
torture anche più sadiche, una di esse ad esempio era costruita da una vecchia chiatta che faceva acqua e
nella quale il punito incatenato doveva disperatamente reggersi per non farsi trascinare al fondo. Un altro
supplizio era quello di mettere il colpevole su di una boa spazzata continuamente dal mare, si esprimeva
naturalmente il disgraziati nel tentativo di mantenervisi aggrappati.” Pino Fortini, Audacie sui mari,
ardimenti di navigatori, avventure di pirati e di trafficanti di carne umana (Firenze: G. Agnelli, 1940),
115–129. Similar physical punishments are confirmed by Cecilia Méndez, “La otra historia del guano : Perú
1840 -1879,” Revista Andina 5, no. 1 (1987): 32.
179
“Almost every week some of them commit suicide by throwing themselves from the cliff. They are said
to do this in the belief that their spirits will awaken in their native land. Kossuth told me that more than
sixty had killed themselves this way in the two years he has been there.” Peck, Melbourne and the Chincha
Islands, 208. Cf. Narvaez, “Chinese Coolies in Cuba and Peru,” 342.
180
Méndez, “La otra historia del guano,” 45.
181
He remarked, in particular, that unlike black slaves in America, all the Chinese coolies were born free
and held captive against their will, “they, too, have been free, they were not born into slavery, they are not
domestic slaves or plantation slaves: but slaves without any title, or rights, or conceded customs - mere
over-worked beasts of burden.” Peck, Melbourne and the Chincha Islands, 206–212.

69
 government, know that they are engaged in a slave trade as much as if they brought
slaves from Africa. For argument sake and to smooth over the matter, they of course
can urge a “contract”, “apprenticeship”, “that the Coolies are as well off here as at
home”, and the like; but speaking as among men of the world, all the world knows
that they sell the Coolies into slavery—and they cannot give it any other name that
will make it smell sweeter. It is, moreover, the worst and most cruel slavery of all
forms of slavery that exist among civilized nations. […] Perhaps the name changes
the thing; if it does not, why should not the English government send out cruisers
with instructions to capture vessels of their own country laden with Coolies for this
market?182

Actually, the British government was the first to take action after these reports gained
widespread audience. In June 1854, nine British captains, witnesses to the treatment of
the Chinese on the Chinchas, wrote a petition to the British Privy Council of Trade,183 and
in September the superintendent of British trade in China (and governor of Hong Kong)
John Bowring issued an order to prohibit the transport of Chinese immigrants to the
islands by British ships.184
At the end of 1854, on the other hand, the control of the extraction site had returned to
the Gibbs & Co. firm after the non-renewal of Domingo Elías’s contract, motivated by a
complex political issue. 185 This shift, reportedly, allowed a relative progress in the
working conditions and living standards on the islands, mainly due to the replacement of
the most sadistic overseers like Kossuth and a reduction of the minimum daily load from
5 to 4 tons.186 After that year, then, wages improved from 4 to 8 dollars monthly, still
under the level of the locals, but an important step forward.187 By the end of the 1850s the
Chinese presence on the islands had shaped the local landscape. Chinese coolies had
somehow succeeded in adapting to an incredibly hostile environment and recreate
minimal spaces of socialization:

182
Ibid.
183
Memorial to the Right Honourable Lords of the Privy Council of Trade, 27 June 1854, BPP,
Correspondence upon the subject of emigration from China, 1855, 27-29.
184
Meagher, The Coolie Trade, 228.
185
In the preceding year, aiming to raise the prices, Elias had proclaimed the quasi-exhaustion of the
Chincha reserves of guano. After losing the guano contract Elias will eventually sustain the 1854 armed
coup of General Castilla. Cushman, “The Lords of Guano,” 73; Peter Blanchard, “The ‘Transitional Man’
in Nineteenth-Century Latin America : The Case of Domingo Elías of Peru,” Bulletin of Latin American
Research 15, no. 2 (1996): 157–76.
186
Mr. Sullivan to the Earl of Clarendon, 22 December 1854, BPP Correspondence upon the subject of
emigration from China, 1855, 63. Starting from 1855 the load of guano was managed by Andrei Alvarez
Calderon, who held the post until 1869, gaining huge profits. Mathew, “A Primitive Export Sector.” At the
end of his tenure Calderon was appointed Chargé d'Affaires of the Peruvian government in Rome.
187
After the end of indenture, in 1876, Chinese workers continued to toil on the guano deposits as free
jornaleros but, reportedly, with incomparably higher salaries of 2 pesos per day. Méndez, “La otra historia
del guano,” 18, 32.

70
 En el transcurso de este tiempo y a pesar de la extrema dureza de sus condiciones de
vida, los culis de las islas Chincha lograron ganar un espacio para reproducir sus
tradiciones y su cultura: ya a mediados de dos cincuenta habían “formado un teatro
en el local que habitan, en el cual hacen sus representaciones en las vísperas y los
días festivos”188

These gains, Méndez has stressed, were not only the consequences of the international
pressures, but they had been pushed steadily by the Chinese laborers’ own agency and
resistance trough collective and individual action, including open revolts.189 The Chinchas
maintained a constant number of 500 to 750 Chinese coolies until their exhaustion in the
late 1870s—even though coolie contracts after 1861 often expressly excluded work in the
guano mines—with a high rate of rotation and replacements due to illness and death.
Overall, it has been calculated that some 10,000 coolies worked on the guano beds of the
Chincha and Lobos islands to the late 1870s.190
The effects of the international opinion campaign against the coolie trade, however,
were indeed felt in mainland Peru. In November 1853 the Peruvian Foreign Minister Paz
Soldán, considered an opponent of the Chinese immigration lobby, obtained the abolition
of the government subsidy on the import of Asian settlers in Peru. At this stage, however,
the traffic had matured enough to flourish even without State subsidies; on the contrary,
the parallel abolition of Elías’ monopoly triggered an ulterior expansion of its volume.
Three years later, however, the traffic will be temporary suspended, for a combination of
external and internal motives. This measure will be inscribed, in fact, in the process of
liberal reforms launched by Castilla after his victory in the brief civil war of 1854,
alongside the cancellation of the two institutions that had more symbolized the country’s
colonial legacy: slavery and the Indian head tax. It has been noted, paradoxically, how
the capital for the emancipation of the slaves, and the "compensation" of about 7,651,500
pesos to former owners (300 pesos for each freed slave), 191 derived directly from

188
Ibid., 31.
189
“Las fuentes oficiales han dejado constancia de por lo menos tres motines de asiáticos en las isla
Chincha. El blanco principal de la violencia: el caporal. Motines ocurrieron en la isla del Medio, donde casi
la totalidad de trabajadores—no es casual—fueron siempre asiáticos. El primer motín estalló en la noche
del 25 de enero de 1866 [...] El saldo: cuatro caporales muertos, ‘que fueron asesinados desde el principio
del motín’, y acaso algunos asiáticos [...] El segundo motín ocurrió solo unos días después. Esta vez la
violencia de los chinos amenazo también a los pocos trabajadores libres que existían en la isla del Medio y
del Sur [...] El tercero amotinamiento repitió los rasgos de los primeros estallidos, particularmente del
primero.” Ibid., 30.
190
Stewart, Chinese Bondage in Peru; Meagher, The Coolie Trade, 224; Melillo, “The First Green
Revolution,” 1041.
191
“la Provvidenza, con la risorsa straordinaria del guano, ha permesso di integrare il deficit delle entrate,
unica scusa inventata per mantenere la capitazione fra le entrate regolari dello Stato”, Gerbi, Il Perù: una
storia sociale, 224.

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exploitation “worse than slavery”192 of the Chinese in the islands of guano. On the other
hand the new financial status Peruvian gave hope in the possibility of attracting European
immigration. The rhetoric of anti-slavery and the racist discourse that saw in the Chinese
a corrupting and vicious influence for the country, found themselves allied as rhetorical
tools to justify the law promulgated by Castilla on the 5 March 1856, which banned,
temporarily, the Asian immigration as an “ultraje da umanidad” .193 Despite this official
prohibition, on the other hand, coolie voyages continued in the following years under a
regime of extraordinary licenses, and the official legality of the traffic would be fully
reinstated just five years later, on 15 January 1861.

192
“we hear nothing of the wrong inflicted ‘even unto death’ upon misguided and bonded emigrants sold to
worse than slavery on the coast of Peru and into Cuban bondage “, Karl Marx, “Whose Atrocities?”, New
York Daily Tribune, 10 April 1857, quoted in Meagher, The Coolie Trade, 276.
193
Appendix n.13 Montagne and Granda Alva, Apuntes socio económicos de la emigración china en el
Perú, 1848-1874, 110.. Although Stewart gives credit to Castilla’s political stature for this reform, it should
be noted that Castilla itself had participated directly in the coolie trade, as owner of the coolie ships Isabel
Quintana in multiple voyages in 1853 and 1855. Statsko, “Moving Through the Gate of Venus,” 52.

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