The Transformation of the World (37 page)

Criticisms of the system never died away in either Britain or India; they were part of a discussion on the acceptable restrictions of freedom that lasted throughout the century. The fate of Indians overseas was a permanent issue for early nationalist writers on the Subcontinent, and the lawyer Mohandas K. Gandhi waged a powerful campaign against limitations on the rights of Indians in Natal. In 1915 indenture even became the central issue of Indian politics, leading to its effective abolition the following year.
¹⁷⁰

In one respect the contract labor system differed fundamentally from the transatlantic migration: it was much more subject to political steering and could therefore be brought to an end by an executive decision. This happened not only to contain the rising tide of public criticism but also to protect “white” labor from colored competition. The end of the contract system was therefore a victory for humanitarianism and peripheral nationalism, but it was also the logical consequence of an increasingly racist response to the “brown” or “yellow” threat. No one asked the migrants what they thought. Whereas slaves fully supported the abolition of slavery, the picture was not quite so clear for Indian indentured labor. In any event there were few protests, and the migration from India continued after the system came to an end. The decisive factor on the Indian side was the wounded national pride of the Indian middle class, who were appalled that the Canadian and Australian dominions should close their borders on racial grounds to Indian labor in order to sustain the high wages of white workers.

The Chinese “Coolie” Trade

When the contract system was abolished in India, the Chinese “coolie” trade was already more or less over. It had started timidly after the end of the Opium War in 1842, flourished between 1850 and 1880, and then underwent
rapid decline. A last flickering occurred with the export of 62,000 laborers from northern China to the gold mines of the Transvaal, where they undercut the wages of local Africans. Their role and their treatment became major issues in 1906 in parliamentary and electoral politics in both Britain and South Africa. In London the new Liberal government came out against the practice, while in South Africa the mining industry opted for a return to the use of native labor.
¹⁷¹
The heyday of Chinese labor emigration was literally a “golden age.” It began with the California Gold Rush of 1848–49, continued with the flow of Chinese laborers to the goldfields of Australia between 1854 and 1877, and ended with the repatriation of the last Chinese from South Africa in 1910.
¹⁷²

The departure points for the Chinese labor migration were the southern coastal provinces of Guangdong and Fujian, where the introduction of the sweet potato and groundnut in the early seventeenth century had triggered a sharp rise in population. The accessibility of Southeast Asia by junk ship made it the natural focus for coastal inhabitants who wanted to establish contacts abroad. But the Chinese had traditionally been no keener than the Indians to migrate, the state acting as a major obstacle to overseas travel in the same way that religion had done in India. The Emperor's subjects were generally restricted in their freedom of movement; the state repeatedly took the liberty of ordering resettlement in frontier regions but was distrustful of spontaneous mobility. Imperial governments again and again prohibited people from leaving the country, or from returning once they had left. The social system, with its Confucian values, also made movement difficult, since the duty of piety toward parents and forefathers could not be discharged elsewhere than in the ancestral town or village. Between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, sporadic merchant emigration to various parts of Southeast Asia (the Philippines, Java, the Malay Peninsula) gradually crystallized into local Chinese communities with their own traditions and a distinctive cultural mix.
¹⁷³

The “opening” of China happened in 1842, at a time when new migratory structures were already emerging. There was a complementarity between southern China, marked by insecurity, overpopulation, and impoverishment, and the land of Siam, peaceful and prosperous but with a low population density. As rice production for export began to integrate the two countries into larger markets (somewhat earlier than in nearby Burma), an ethnic division of labor sprang up between Siamese agriculturalists and Chinese involved in milling, transport, and trade. By the middle of the century, Siam had the largest foreign Chinese community anywhere in the world.
¹⁷⁴
Whereas emigrants to Siam—the main destination just before the beginning of the coolie trade—mostly had their passage paid by kith and kin already living there, the coolie emigration to Malaya, Indonesia, Australia, and the Caribbean was mainly organized on an indenture basis that marked a radical break from former practices. A second novelty was at the level of transportation technology. The traditional junk trade was partly supplanted and partly complemented by European steamships, whose spread in the second half
of the century increased the flow of migrants to Southeast Asia and the Americas. Family ties and travel to join relatives constituted important contexts for the movement of Chinese labor across the seas. Operating from Southeast Asia, Chinese traders organized the transfers and sent agents along the coast of southeastern China in search of workers. The coolie trade was a multinational business. It was increasingly conducted by British, American, French, Spanish, German, Dutch, Portuguese, and Peruvian intermediaries, who often received a price per head from dubious Chinese partners. Naive farmers' children would be lured away from their parents with various tricks and tales of fabulous riches. Abduction was the simplest way for the recruiting agents to obtain exportable manpower.
¹⁷⁵
It was not an abhorrent practice characteristic of Asian “barbarians.” Until 1814, the Royal Navy had frequently used impressment to crew its warships.

The export of labor, like the contemporaneous opium trade, was against Chinese law and caused an uproar in the Chinese public. In 1852, revolts against abduction broke out in the city of Amoy (Xiamen); in 1855 there were protests throughout southern China; and in 1859 the spread of the practice led to panic and attacks on foreigners in the Shanghai region. In 1859, following the British occupation of Canton in the so-called Second Opium War, the Chinese authorities were forced into “cooperative” tolerance of the coolie trade, although it proved impossible to prevent them from sentencing kidnappers to death.
¹⁷⁶
From the start it was a serious law-and-order problem—and it remained so until it came to an end. In 1866, after an incident in which no less than the son of a regional provincial governor was kidnapped, the Chinese government forced through an international regulation that made abduction illegal under Western law too. But Portuguese Macau continued to function as a loophole, where Chinese were promised work in California and shipped off to the harsher conditions of Peru's guano islands or Cuba's sugarcane fields. When Spain and Peru attempted to reach trade agreements with China in the 1870s, commissions of inquiry were sent out and the protection of coolies was made a prerequisite. After 1874, however, the Qing government took a tougher line, imposing a general ban on the coolie trade and dispatching consular officials to look after the welfare of emigrants.
¹⁷⁷

The struggle against Indian and Chinese indenture differed from earlier campaigns against the transatlantic slave trade in that the exporting countries also brought political pressure to bear. The colonial government of India never unanimously or wholeheartedly approved of contract migration; it was eventually prepared to remove this issue as a rallying point for early Indian nationalists. The Chinese government represented an independent country that was in a weak position vis-à-vis the imperial powers. The stubborn patriotic efforts of its diplomats on behalf of Chinese coolies were not without effect. But although it helped to put an end to the system, it did not play the decisive role. More important was the fact that Chinese labor ceased to be necessary to the economies of the host countries.

Classical indenture supplied plantations, where most Indians worked overseas. A large percentage of Chinese migrants headed elsewhere: they were not condemned to compulsory labor, even if they often had to raise a loan to cover the costs of their passage. In other words, most Chinese who left their homeland were not “coolies.” The Chinese emigration to the United States that began with the California Gold Rush of 1848–49 was “free” and therefore more akin to the migration from Europe. The same is largely true of the exodus to Southeast Asia and Australia. Between 1854 and 1880, at the height of emigration from China, more than half a million nonindentured Chinese left from the port of Hong Kong alone.
¹⁷⁸

In no other mass migration of the nineteenth century was the quota of returnees so high. The ties of Chinese migrants to their place of origin were so strong that their residence abroad was sometimes regarded as temporary even after several generations. Europeans were much more inclined to think of migration as a permanent break with their past, much more prepared for assimilation and new life plans. In fact, Chinese emigration may be best understood as an overseas extension of the economy of southern China. Perhaps as many as 80 percent of the Chinese who left their country by sea in the nineteenth century returned at some point in their lives, whereas the corresponding figure for Europeans was probably around one-quarter.
¹⁷⁹
The high circularity and fluctuation of migration also means that the absolute figures at the dates when statistics were compiled are surprisingly low. The US census of 1870 recorded only 63,000 Chinese, and the census of 1880 (when Chinese immigration was already beginning to slacken) no more than 105,465.
¹⁸⁰

The only part of the world where Chinese emigrants settled in large numbers was Southeast Asia—the oldest destination by ship (the main mode of travel to Siam, Vietnam, and Burma). Here the European colonial authorities generally encouraged the immigration of Chinese, who took on the roles of merchants, entrepreneurs, or miners that neither local people nor Europeans could fill adequately. Above all, they were good taxpayers. Their industriousness and business acumen enabled them to organize themselves under the leadership of local notables and secret societies, in well-functioning communities that caused little trouble. Despite their ties to the mother country, the Chinese minorities in Southeast Asia were loyal subjects of the European colonial powers. In the long run it mattered little how they had come there. In China, as in India, certain coastal areas were completely geared to emigration and relied upon it economically. Whole families, villages, and regions developed a transnational character; many people felt closer ties with relatives or former neighbors living in Idaho (whose population at one point was 30 percent Chinese) or Peru than with their fellow countrymen in the next village.
¹⁸¹

Migration via contract labor was more controlled legally and politically, and better recorded statistically, than unregulated forms of emigration. If the latter is also taken into account, the figures for East and Southeast Asian long-distance
migrants become considerably higher. Nor should the number of those who left as traders rather than workers be underestimated. According to some calculations now widely accepted, more than 29 million Indians and 19 million Chinese emigrated between 1846 and 1940 to countries around the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific—a population movement as large as that from Europe to the Americas. However, of the 29 million Indians, no more than 6 to 7 million had permanently settled abroad; with the Chinese, as we saw before, the proportion of returnees was also much higher than with European emigrants to the New World.
¹⁸²
These migrations were quintessentially circular. Only a tenth of the Asian migrants were subject to indenture mechanisms, although private or public loans played a role in many other cases.
¹⁸³
The First World War marked less of a break for this migration in the global “South” than for the human flow across the Atlantic. Only the Great Depression and the Pacific War seriously affected emigration by Indians and Chinese.

8 Global Motives

In the nineteenth century, more people than ever before were traveling across large distances and for long periods of time. In 1882 the Buddhist master Xuyun set off on a journey to Wutaishan, a holy mountain in the Chinese province of Shandong. Since he prostrated himself fully after every three paces, he needed two years to cover the roughly fifteen hundred kilometers.
¹⁸⁴
Xuyun was a pilgrim, and any discussion of movement on a large scale should not neglect to consider pilgrimages. In Europe, Asia, and Africa religious centers continued to attract hundreds of thousands of travelers. The largest single movement was the hajj to Mecca, which was usually an expensive collective undertaking by ship and/or caravan, later made easier by the Suez Canal and the Hejaz Railway, though never safe from robbers, tricksters, and rapacious pilgrim guides, and always a major health hazard, especially since the first cholera epidemic in Mecca in 1865. The number of pilgrims (which nowadays may exceed two million) fluctuated sharply from year to year but tripled in the course of the nineteenth century to reach a total of 300,000. By far the most typical pilgrim from distant lands—Malaya, for example—was an aging member of the local elite, affluent enough to pay for the trip out of his own resources.
¹⁸⁵
Further routes opened from the Balkans and Central Asia, and after the turn of the century there was a “push east” to the holy sites from the new Islamic realms of West Africa, which partly accounts for the intra-African migration by groups of followers or even whole ethnic groups. Millenarian expectations focused on a messiah or
mahdi
, to whom people wanted to be close, especially in the times of stress following colonial invasions.
¹⁸⁶
By the nineteenth century, worldwide networks had come into being: Chinese Muslims traveled to Mecca and Cairo, while tombs of Sufi saints in the Chinese Empire became important destinations in their own right. Religiously motivated pilgrimage may shade imperceptibly into proto-tourism.
In eighteenth-century Japan visits to faraway temples and shrines came to be organized in a way that has prompted historians to speak of a “tourist industry.”
¹⁸⁷