Coolie
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East Indian coolies on a Trinidad Cacao Estate, circa 1903. |
The term "
coolie" refers to usually unskilled laborers from
Asia, particularly China and India, who were sent to the
United States,
Canada,
Australia,
Peru,
South Africa,
Sri Lanka,
Malaysia,
Hawaii,
Fiji,
Mauritius,
Réunion and the
West Indies in the
1800s to early
1900s. The term usually referred to
Chinese,
Indian,
Japanese and
Korean indentured labourers and is nowadays a very
derogatory term.
After slavery was abolished, there was a severe lack of labour in many European colonies. Labourers were supposed to be recruited by voluntary negotiation, however this is debated as kidnapping and trickery were frequent. The treatment of coolies was often very harsh, and the governments involved did little to remedy their plight.
Most Indian indentured labour recruited for the British colonies was organised through
Kolkatta (
Calcutta) and largely consisted of poor people from
Bengal,
Orissa and
Bihar.
After the end of the first
Opium War (1840-1842), in or about 1845, a centre for emigration at
Shantou organised a network for transporting Chinese from
Guangdong who spoke the
Chaozhou dialect to the Americas, especially to the
silver mines in
Peru and the
sugar plantations of
Cuba and other West Indian islands. Coolies were also sent from
Amoy and
Macao.
Indentured labourers from
Indochina were mainly recruited by the French and sent to their colonies.
 |
Newly arrived Indian coolies in Trinidad. |
The word "coolie" can be traced back to the
Hindi kûlî,
qulî, which means "hired laborer." Other forms occur in the
Bengali,
kuli and the
Tamil,
kuli, "daily hire." The Chinese word 苦力 (
Pinyin: kÇ"lì) was originally a transcription of the Hindi, and literally means "bitterly hard (use of) strength".The word "coolie" is also used commonly in the hindi language to refer to
porters, or people who carry your luggage at a railway station or a hotel lobby or otherwise, for a fee.
The following statement explains why coolie labor was imported for colonial enterprises: "In tropical countries where white labor is impossible, there arose with the abolition of slavery a need for cheap labor capable of doing the heavy tasks of plantations, factories, and shipping."
In
Trinidad and Tobago,
Guyana and other parts of the Caribbean, as well as
Sri Lanka and
South Africa, the word was commonly used to denote any person of Indian origin or descent.
Nowadays, it is often considered an offensive racial slur on par with "
nigger."
British Empire
In the
British Empire, a "coolie" was an
indentured labourer with conditions often resembling
slavery. The system had been inaugurated in
1834 starting in Mauritius and involved the use of licensed agents. Slavery itself had been banished from the
British Empire in
1834. Thus indentureship followed closely on the heels of slavery to replace the slaves. Laborers were only slightly better off than the slaves had been. They were supposed to receive minimal wages, or some small form of payout (sometimes a small block of land or the money for their return passage) when their time of indenture was completed, and they could not be bought or sold.
In India and
South Africa,
Mahatma Gandhi led a campaign against such indentured servitude. Many "coolies" who entered Africa stayed there permanently, effectively becoming
immigrants.
The permanent settlement of formerly indentured Indians created problems particularly in Africa. The
Natal province of the
Union of South Africa and
Kenya amassed clusters of such immigrants. In the
Transvaal, after the conclusion of the
Second Boer War, the deficiency of native labor in the Rand mines led to the enactment of an ordinance in February,
1904, providing for the importation of
Chinese laborers. The
Boer element in the Transvaal was bitterly opposed to the ordinance as tending to introduce a new factor into the already serious racial problem of
South Africa. The issue was largely responsible for the
Liberal triumph in the
United Kingdom general election, 1906, by which time over 50,000
Asiatic laborers had been imported.
The decision to put an end to the system affected firstly Natal and
Mauritius in
1910 and other places afterwards in
1917.
The Americas
Chinese coolies contributed to the building of the
Transcontinental Railroad in the
United States, as well as the
Canadian Pacific Railway in Western
Canada, but many of the Chinese laborers were not welcome to stay after its completion.
California's
Anti-Coolie Act of 1862 and
Chinese Exclusion Act of
1882 also contributed to the oppression of Chinese laborers in the United States. Coolies also labored in the
sugarcane fields of
Cuba well after the
1884 abolition of slavery in that country. Before the
Cuban Revolution in
1959,
Havana had
Latin America's largest
Chinatown. In
South America, Coolies labored in
Peru's silver mines and coastal industries (
guano, sugar, cotton) from the early-1850s to the mid-1870s; about 100,000 came as
indentured workers. They had an infamous participation in the
War of the Pacific as they looted and burned down the haciendas outlying
Lima where they worked right after Lima fell to the invading Chilean army in January 1880.
Between 1836 and 1917, at least "238,000 Indians were introduced into
British Guiana, 145,000 into Trinidad, 21,500 into
Jamaica, 39,000 into
Guadeloupe, 34,000 into
Surinam, 1,550 into
St. Lucia, 1,820 into
St. Vincent, 2,570 into
Grenada. In 1859, there were 6,748 Indians in
Martinique." Although these were incomplete statistics, Williams believed they were "sufficient to show a total introduction of nearly half a million Indians into the
Caribbean." See: Williams (1962), p. 100.
* Williams, Eric. 1962.
History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago. Andre Deutsch, London.
* Yule, Henry and Burnell, A. C. (1886):
Hobson-Jobson The Anglo-Indian Dictionary. Reprint: Ware, Hertfordshire. Wordsworth Editions Limited. 1996.
*
Le grand dictionnaire Ricci de la langue chinoise, (2001), Vol. III, p. 833.
*
Indentured servant*
Blackbirding*
Slavery*
Navvy*
Overseas Indian*
Overseas Chinese*
Chinese-Peruvian*
History of Chinese immigration to Canada*
Immigration to the United States*
Hill Coolies*
BBC documentary: Coolies: The Story of Indian Slavery*
Personal Life Of A Chinese Coolie 1868-1899*
Chinese Coolie treated worse than slavesThe term Coolie also means the act of intercourse on a ski lift
