"Ancestors in the Americas" : Timeline

Publish date: 2024-07-20

1838 - 1918
INDIAN and CHINESE COOLIE TRADE to the Americas and Caribbean

1856 - 1874 China’s loss of control over its own seaports (Treaty Ports) including British regulation of Chinese emigration -- is the necessary condition for the beginning of the Chinese Coolie Trade. It launched the global movement of CHINESE COOLIE LABORERS that lay the foundation for their diasporic presence in the Americas and Caribbean to this day.

“... And that is how the Chinese laborer, industrious and honorable, became the Chinese Coolie; someone both sought after and despised...” (Everyman Narrator)

1874 CHINA’S CUBA COMMISSION reports their findings after three months travel on the island and direct interrogation of Chinese workers. It is noteworthy that Chinese free migration and free labor entering California’s American West, 1850 - 1882, happens virtually simultaneously with the Chinese Coolie indentured labor being shipped unwillingly to the Americas and the Caribbean, 1850 - 1874.

Within a single family one son could end up in Cuba or Peru, while the other son ends up in California, to quite different fates. The specific character and significance of Asian immigration is complex and conditional on the specific economic and political forces at play.

INDIAN COOLIES are sent to FIJIS in PACIFIC; BRITISH GUIANA in SOUTH AMERICA; JAMAICA, TRINIDAD, BERMUDA, ST. THOMAS in the BRITISH WEST INDIES. In colonial India the British implement a policy of global labor migration that includes INDIAN WOMEN COOLIES. Their purpose is to populate the colony (e.g. Fiji), and/or to stabilize the work force with family formation. (E.g. former British Guiana, present day Guyana, 60% Indo-Guyanese).

The Indian Coolie experience in this aspect of family formation is unlike that of the Chinese Coolies who were only male, and who over time devised other adaptations to create forms of family and community life.

By 1850s Hong Kong Governor John Bowring, reports seeing Chinese Coolies being shipped out of Macao jails with the “the letters of their destinations painted on their bare chests... 'C' for Cuba, 'P' for Peru, 'S' for the Sandwich Islands...” (Hawaii)

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