Agricultural History Review, Volume 55 Part 1 (2007), p. 148

While it is not so specified in the title, this book is about the controversy in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century over the employment of Chinese workers (‘coolies’) on the sugar plantations of the Caribbean region, with a focus on southern Louisiana. Originating not only from China but also India, coolies were first introduced in large numbers to the West Indies in the late 1830s as replacement workers for recently emancipated Africans. As the use of such labourers intensified, abolitionists in the U.S. denounced it as a new form of chattel slavery, and in February 1862, soon after the outbreak of the Civil War, convinced Congress to pass a law prohibiting American ships from engaging in the transportation of ‘coolies’ from China.

In Louisiana, after the Civil War and with the abolition of slavery, sugar growers were faced with a black work force that was no longer easily managed. Inspired by the experience of their fellow planters across the Gulf of Mexico, they too experimented with the importation of Asian, particularly Chinese, contract labourers as a possible solution to their labour troubles. They sought the Chinese initially from Cuba – from among those who had finished their eight-year contracts – then from southern China and finally from the west coast of the United States. As a result, by the early 1870s Chinese had become ‘familiar sights on sugar plantations up and down the Mississippi River and its bayous’ (p.184).

Most of the Chinese in Louisiana, who totalled around two thousand, came originally as large ‘gangs of low-wage workers’ (p.199) on three-year contracts. On arrival, however, they began protesting against their inferior pay and their harsh working conditions and quickly ‘established a pattern of quitting work whenever they felt their rights violated’ (p.189). They soon ‘remade themselves’ as smaller ‘independent, itinerant labor gangs that engaged with employers for brief periods or finite tasks’ (p.205) such as during the hectic grinding season. The planters, furious at their disobedience but desperate for farmhands, had no alternative but to take them on and also to pay them higher wages. The experiment with Chinese as replacement workers on the sugar plantations thus turned out to be a failure, at least in Louisiana.

Jung’s book, however, is not so much about the Chinese workers themselves – only the sixth and last chapter focuses on them – as it is about how they were, as he puts it, ‘imagined’ by others. Americans of the period commonly referred to the Chinese as ‘coolies.’ A vaguely-defined term of uncertain origin, it carried the dual connotation of involuntary emigration and long-term (though not permanent) servitude, which were what motivated the enactment of the anti-coolie-trade law of 1862. Jung makes a persuasive argument that this little-known legislation was significant as ‘the first federal statute to restrict immigration into the United States’ (p.37) as well as a direct precursor of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Similarly, it was by equating the Chinese with coolies that the anti-Chinese elements in American society were able in 1870 to deny them the right of naturalization. But Jung otherwise does not attempt to resolve the empirical question of to what extent the Chinese in Louisiana, regardless of how they might have been imagined, were in fact voluntary immigrants or involuntary ‘coolies.’ Instead, he is content to state that ‘in a nation struggling to define slavery and freedom, coolies seemed to fall under neither yet both’ (p.6) and that they seemed to inhabit a ‘netherworld between slavery and freedom’ (p.72).

Jung also argues that coolies played an important role in the social construction of ‘whiteness’ in the United States. Opponents of coolie labour in the post-bellum South sought an alternative work force in white immigrants from Europe; in the process, all Europeans – even such heretofore disdained groups as the Irish – came to be seen as ‘white.’ As Jung concludes, ‘The movement to exclude coolies ... eventually helped to forge a white national identity across regional and class divisions’ (p.223).

The book, a revision of a Cornell PhD thesis, is thoroughly researched. The author has scoured and made excellent use of a wide range of local and regional newspapers and periodicals, U.S. diplomatic correspondence and Congressional reports, contemporary books and pamphlets, and unpublished papers of planter families. The book is well organized and generally well written; its ideas, however, are not always clearly expressed, in part because of the author’s rhetorical fondness for paradoxes.

The author, too, might have said more about the process of sugar cultivation and manufacture and the precise role that the Chinese labourers played in it. And he might have been more explicit about the terminal date of his study. Is it the end of Reconstruction in 1877, or the enactment of Chinese exclusion in 1882? Both are possibilities, but neither is highlighted. Instead, the book ends with the ‘racial imaginings of coolies’ (p.222) and the ultimate fate of the Chinese in Louisiana remains unresolved. It’s a disappointing conclusion for an otherwise fascinating book.