Took this photo on the way back from watching my brother perform in the Edinburgh Tattoo.

Was quite a challenge as it was dark (obviously) and had to be shot handheld. Think my oly did alright at iso 3200! Poor girl. I do love my little overworked E-M10.

Double Exposure

Charles Culliford Boz Dickens (6 January 1837 – 20 July 1896) was the first child of the English novelist Charles Dickens and his wife Catherine. A failed businessman, he became the editor of his father's magazine All the Year Round, and a successful writer of dictionaries. He is now most remembered for his two 1879 books Dickens's Dictionary of London and Dickens's Dictionary of the Thames.

Charles Dickens Jr. was born at Furnival's Inn in Holborn, London, the first child of Charles Dickens and his then-wife Catherine Hogarth. He was called 'Charley' by family and friends. In 1847, aged 10, he entered the junior department of King's College, London. He went to Eton College, and visited Leipzig in 1853 to study German. In 1855, aged 18, he entered Barings Bank. In 1858, after his parents' separation, with his father's agreement, he went to live with his mother.

As a young man, Dickens showed skills that could have led to a career in journalism but his father encouraged him to go into business. With ambitions to become a tea merchant, he visited China, Hong Kong and Japan in 1860.

In 1861, he married Elisabeth Matilda Moule Evans, daughter of Frederick Mullett Evans, his father's former publisher. They had eight children:

Mary Angela (1862–1948)

Ethel Kate (1864–1936)

Charles Walter (1865–1923)

Sydney Margaret (1866–1955)

Dorothy Gertrude (1868–1923)

Beatrice (1869–1937)

Cecil Mary (1871–1952)

Evelyn Bessie (1873–1924)

In 1866 he was appointed as the first Honorary Secretary of the Metropolitan Regatta. In 1868, after the failure of his printing business, and bankruptcy, he was hired by his father to work at All the Year Round and was appointed sub-editor the following year. In 1870, after his father's death, Dickens, Jr. inherited the magazine and became its editor. At this time he also bought at auction Gads Hill Place, his father's Kent home, but he was forced to give it up in 1879.

In 1879 he published (jointly with his father-in-law) the first editions of his two main dictionaries, Dickens's Dictionary of London and Dickens's Dictionary of the Thames. In 1882 his dictionaries were picked up by Macmillan & Co. who also released his third dictionary, Dickens's Dictionary of Paris, delayed by verifications explained in its introduction.

Charles Dickens died of heart disease, at his home in Fulham, London, on 20 July 1896, aged 59. He was buried at Mortlake Cemetery on 23 July 1896.

Dickens' estate was worth £17 5s. 3d at his death, and his widow was granted a government pension of £100 per year. After her death in 1909 yearly Civil list pensions of £25 were granted to Mary Angela, Dorothy Gertrude, Cecil Mary and Evelyn Bessie after 'consideration of their straitened circumstances'. However, in 1910 their situation was so difficult that Ethel Dickens wrote to the Lord Chief Justice Richard Alverstone to seek assistance. In the letter, which was also published in The Daily Telegraph, she explained that her sisters, while employed in positions caring for children, and as secretaries, were 'barely making a living' and, while Ethel Kate herself had been more successful, her doctor had required her to take six months rest due to overwork.

As the centenary of their grandfather's birth approached, the reduced circumstances of Charles Jr.'s daughters led to a public fundraising appeal. On 7 January 1912 a gala performance, where 'leading actors and actresses appeared as Dickens' characters' at the London Coliseum raised £2500, while a separate appeal by The Daily Telegraph added an additional £3882. By the close of the fund in March 1912 it held £12,000, which was to provide £150 per year to each of the daughters.

Author Lucinda Hawksley, a descendant of the elder Charles Dickens, has written that 'the girls' begging letter' caused embarrassment for their uncle, London barrister Henry Fielding Dickens, while the daughters of another uncle, Alfred D'Orsay Tennyson Dickens, gave an interview to a newspaper in Australia, where they'd been raised, to make clear that they were not seeking any part of the funds.

According to Dickens biographer Claire Tomalin, Charles Walter, only son of Dickens, had already been 'disowned' by the family for marrying Ella Dare, a barmaid. Sydney Margaret went on to marry architect Thomas Bostock Whinney, while Ethel died, in 1936, of an overdose of phenobarbital after being found unconscious in her flat in Chelsea, London.

Old Mortlake Burial Grounds, Mortlake

A coolie (alternatively spelled cooli, cooly, quli, koelie, and other such variations), during the 19th and early 20th century, was a term for a locally sourced unskilled labourer hired by a company, mainly from the Indian subcontinent or Southern China.

Today, it is used varyingly as a legal inoffensive word (for example, in India for helpers carrying luggage in railway stations) and also used as a racial slur in Africa for certain people from Asia, particularly in South Africa

ETYMOLOGY

The origins of the word are uncertain but it is thought to have originated from the name of a Gujarati sect (the Kolī, who worked as day labourers) or perhaps from the Tamil word for a payment for work, kuli (கூலி). An alternative etymological explanation is that the word came from the Urdu qulī (क़ुली, قلی), which itself could be from the Turkish word for slave, qul. The word was used in this sense for labourers from India. In 1727, Dr. Engelbert Kämpfer described "coolies" as dock labourers who would unload Dutch merchant ships at Nagasaki in Japan.

The Chinese word 苦力 (pinyin: kǔlì) literally means "bitterly hard (use of) strength", in the Mandarin pronunciation.

HISTORY OF THE COOLIE TRADE

An early trade in Asian labourers is believed to have begun sometime in or around the 16th century. Social and political pressure led to the abolition of the slave trade throughout the British Empire in 1807, with other European nations following suit. Labour-intensive industries, such as cotton and sugar plantations, mines and railway construction, in the colonies were left without a cheap source of manpower. As a consequence, a large scale slavery-like trade in Asian (primarily Indian and Chinese) indentured labourers began in the 1820s to fill this vacuum. Some of these labourers signed contracts based on misleading promises, some were kidnapped and sold into the trade, some were victims of clan violence whose captors sold them to coolie brokers, while others sold themselves to pay off gambling debts. British companies were the first to experiment with this potential new form of cheap labour in 1807, when they imported 200 Chinese men to work in Trinidad.

The coolie trade was often compared to the earlier slave trade and they accomplished very similar things.

Although there are reports of ships for Asian coolies carrying women and children, the great majority of them were men. Finally, regulations were put in place, as early as 1837 by the British authorities in India to safeguard these principles of voluntary, contractual work and safe and sanitary transportation although in practice this rarely occurred especially during examples such as the Pacific Passage or the Guano Pits of Peru. The Chinese government also made efforts to secure the well-being of their nation's workers, with representations being made to relevant governments around the world.

CHINESE COOLIES

Workers from China were mainly transported to work in Peru and Cuba, but they also worked in British colonies such as Jamaica, British Guiana (now Guyana), British Malaya, Trinidad and Tobago, British Honduras (now Belize) and in the Dutch colonies Dutch East Indies and Suriname. The first shipment of Chinese labourers was to the British colony of Trinidad in 1806.

In 1847 two ships from Cuba transported workers to Havana to work in the sugar cane fields from the port of Xiamen, one of the five Chinese treaty ports opened to the British by the Treaty of Nanking in 1842. The trade soon spread to other ports in Guangdong province and demand became particularly strong in Peru for workers in the silver mines and the guano collecting industry. Australia began importing workers in 1848 and the United States began using them in 1865 on the First Transcontinental Railroad construction. These workers were deceived about their terms of employment to a much greater extent than their Indian counterparts, and consequently, there was a much higher level of Chinese emigration during this period.

The trade flourished from 1847 to 1854 without incident, until reports began to surface of the mistreatment of the workers in Cuba and Peru. As the British government had political and legal responsibility for many of the ports involved, including Amoy, the trade was shut down at these places. However, the trade simply shifted to the more accommodating port in the Portuguese enclave of Macau.

Many coolies were first deceived or kidnapped and then kept in barracoons (detention centres) or loading vessels in the ports of departure, as were African slaves. In 1875, British commissioners estimated that approximately eighty percent of the workers had been abducted. Their voyages, which are sometimes called the Pacific Passage, were as inhumane and dangerous as the notorious Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade. Mortality was very high. For example, it is estimated that from 1847 to 1859, the average mortality for coolies aboard ships to Cuba was 15.2 percent, and losses among those aboard ships to Peru were 40 percent in the 1850s and 30.44 percent from 1860 to 1863.

They were sold and were taken to work in plantations or mines with very bad living and working conditions. The duration of a contract was typically five to eight years, but many coolies did not live out their term of service because of the hard labour and mistreatment. Those who did live were often forced to remain in servitude beyond the contracted period. The coolies who worked on the sugar plantations in Cuba and in the guano beds of the Chincha Islands (the islands of Hell) of Peru were treated brutally. Seventy-five percent of the Chinese coolies in Cuba died before fulfilling their contracts. More than two-thirds of the Chinese coolies who arrived in Peru between 1849 and 1874 died within the contract period. In 1860 it was calculated that of the 4000 coolies brought to the Chinchas since the trade began, not one had survived.

Because of these unbearable conditions, Chinese coolies often revolted against their Ko-Hung bosses and foreign company bosses at ports of departure, on ships, and in foreign lands. The coolies were put in the same neighbourhoods as Africans and, since most were unable to return to their homeland or have their wives come to the New World, many married African women. The coolies' interracial relationships and marriages with Africans, Europeans and Indigenous peoples, formed some of the modern world's Afro-Asian and Asian Latin American populations.

Chinese immigration to the United States was almost entirely voluntary, but working and social conditions were still harsh. In 1868, the Burlingame Treaty allowed unrestricted Chinese immigration into the country. Within a decade significant levels of anti-Chinese sentiment had built up, stoked by populists such as Denis Kearney with racist slogans - "To an American, death is preferable to life on a par with the Chinese."

Although Chinese workers contributed to the building of the first Transcontinental Railroad in the United States and of the Canadian Pacific Railway in western Canada, Chinese settlement was discouraged after completion of the construction. California's Anti-Coolie Act of 1862 and the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 contributed to the curtailment of Chinese immigration to the United States.

Notwithstanding such attempts to restrict the influx of cheap labour from China, beginning in the 1870s Chinese workers helped construct a vast network of levees in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. These levees made thousands of acres of fertile marshlands available for agricultural production.

The 1879 Constitution of the State of California declared that "Asiatic coolieism is a form of human slavery, and is forever prohibited in this State, and all contracts for coolie labour shall be void."

Colonos asiáticos is a Spanish term for coolies. The Spanish colony of Cuba feared slavery uprisings such as those that took place in Haiti and used coolies as a transition between slaves and free labor. They were neither free nor slaves. Indentured Chinese servants also labored in the sugarcane fields of Cuba well after the 1884 abolition of slavery in that country. Two scholars of Chinese labor in Cuba, Juan Pastrana and Juan Perez de la Riva, substantiated horrific conditions of Chinese coolies in Cuba and stated that coolies were slaves in all but name. Denise Helly is one researcher who believes that despite their slave-like treatment, the free and legal status of the Asian laborers in Cuba separated them from slaves. The coolies could challenge their superiors, run away, petition government officials, and rebel according to Rodriguez Pastor and Trazegnies Granda. Once they had fulfilled their contracts the colonos asiáticos integrated into the countries of Peru, The Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Cuba. They adopted cultural traditions from the natives and also welcomed in non-Chinese to experience and participate into their own traditions. Before the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Havana had Latin America's largest Chinatown.

In South America, Chinese indentured labourers worked in Peru's silver mines and coastal industries (i.e., guano, sugar, and cotton) from the early 1850s to the mid-1870s; about 100,000 people immigrated as indentured workers. They participated in the War of the Pacific, looting and burning down the haciendas where they worked, after the capture of Lima by the invading Chilean army in January 1880. Some 2000 coolies even joined the Chilean Army in Peru, taking care of the wounded and burying the dead. Others were sent by Chileans to work in the newly conquered nitrate fields.

The Chinese Engineering and Mining Corporation, of which later U.S. president Herbert Hoover was a director, was instrumental in supplying Chinese coolie labour to South African mines from c.1902 to c.1910 at the request of mine owners, who considered such labour cheaper than native African and white labour. The horrendous conditions suffered by the coolie labourers led to questions in the British parliament as recorded in Hansard.

In 1866, the British, French and Chinese governments agreed to mitigate the abuse by requiring all traders to pay for the return of all workers after their contract ended. The employers in the British West Indies declined these conditions, bringing the trade there to an end. Until the trade was finally abolished in 1875, over 150,000 coolies had been sold to Cuba alone, the majority having been shipped from Macau. These labourers endured conditions far worse than those experienced by their Indian counterparts. Even after the 1866 reforms, the scale of abuse and conditions of near slavery did not get any better - if anything they deteriorated. In the early 1870s increased media exposure of the trade led to a public outcry, and the British, as well as the Qing government, put pressure on the Portuguese authorities to bring the trade at Macau to an end; this was ultimately achieved in 1874. By that time, a total of up to half a million Chinese workers had been exported.

The term coolie was also applied to Chinese workers recruited for contracts on cacao plantations in German Samoa. German planters went to great lengths to secure access to their "coolie" labour supply from China. In 1908 a Chinese commissioner, Lin Shu Fen, reported on the cruel treatment of coolie workers on German plantations in the western Samoan Islands. The trade began largely after the establishment of colonial German Samoa in 1900 and lasted until the arrival of New Zealand forces in 1914. More than 2000 Chinese "coolies" were present in the islands in 1914 and most were eventually repatriated by the New Zealand administration.

INDIAN COOLIES

By the 1820s, many Indians were voluntarily enlisting to go abroad for work, in the hopes of a better life. European merchants and businessmen quickly took advantage of this and began recruiting them for work as a cheap source of labour. The British began shipping Indians to colonies around the world, including Mauritius, Fiji, Natal, British East Africa, and British Malaya. The Dutch also shipped workers to labour on the plantations on Suriname and the Dutch East Indies. A system of agents was used to infiltrate the rural villages of India and recruit labourers. They would often deceive the credulous workers about the great opportunities that awaited them for their own material betterment abroad. The Indians primarily came from the Indo-Gangetic Plain, but also from Tamil Nadu and other areas to the south of the country.

Without permission from the British authorities, the French attempted to illegally transport Indian workers to their sugar producing colony, the Reunion Island, from as early as 1826. By 1830, over 3000 labourers had been transported. After this trade was discovered, the French successfully negotiated with the British in 1860 for permission to transport over 6,000 workers annually, on condition that the trade would be suspended if abuses were discovered to be taking place.

The British began to transport Indians to Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, starting in 1829. Slavery had been abolished with the planters receiving two million pounds sterling in compensation for the loss of their slaves. The planters turned to bringing in a large number of indentured labourers from India to work in the sugar cane fields. Between 1834 and 1921, around half a million indentured labourers were present on the island. They worked on sugar estates, factories, in transport and on construction sites.

In 1837, the Raj issued a set of regulations for the trade. The rules provided for each labourer to be personally authorised for transportation by an officer designated by the Government, it limited the length of service to five years subject to voluntary renewal, it made the contractor responsible for returning the worker after the contract elapsed and required the vessels to conform to basic health standards

Despite this, conditions on the ships were often extremely crowded, with rampant disease and malnutrition. The workers were paid a pittance for their labour, and were expected to work in often awful and harsh conditions. Although there were no large scale scandals involving coolie abuse in British colonies, workers often ended up being forced to work, and manipulated in such a way that they became dependent on the plantation owners so that in practice they remained there long after their contracts expired; possibly as little as 10% of the coolies actually returned to their original country of origin. Colonial legislation was also passed to severely limit their freedoms; in Mauritius a compulsory pass system was instituted to enable their movements to be easily tracked. Conditions were much worse in the French colonies of Reunion and Guadeloupe and Martinique, where workers were 'systematically overworked' and abnormally high mortality rates were recorded for those working in the mines.

However, there were also attempts by the British authorities to regulate and mitigate the worst abuses. Workers were regularly checked up on by health inspectors, and they were vetted before transportation to ensure that they were suitably healthy and fit to be able to endure the rigours of labour. Children under the age of 15 were not allowed to be transported from their parents under any circumstances.

The first campaign against the 'coolie' trade in England likened the system of indentured labour to the slavery of the past. In response to this pressure, the labour export was temporarily stopped in 1839 by the authorities when the scale of the abuses became known, but it was soon renewed due to its growing economic importance. A more rigorous regulatory framework was put into place and severe penalties were imposed for infractions in 1842. In that year, almost 35,000 people were shipped to Mauritius.

In 1844, the trade was expanded to the colonies in the West Indies, including Jamaica, Trinidad and Demerara, where the Asian population was soon a major component of the island demographic.

Starting in 1879, many Indians were transported to Fiji to work on the sugar cane plantations. Many of them chose to stay after their term of indenture elapsed and today they number about 40% of the total population. Indian workers were also imported into the Dutch colony of Suriname after the Dutch signed a treaty with the United Kingdom on the recruitment of contract workers in 1870. In Mauritius, the Indian population are now demographically dominant, with Indian festivals being celebrated as national holidays.

This system prevailed until the early twentieth century. Increasing focus on the brutalities and abuses of the trade by the sensationalist media of the time, incited public outrage and lead to the official ending of the coolie trade in 1916 by the British government. By that time tens of thousands of Chinese workers were being used along the Western Front by the allied forces (see Chinese Labour Corps).

SEX RATIOS AND INTERMARRIAGE AMONG COOLIES

A major difference between the Chinese coolie trade and the Indian coolie trade was that the Chinese coolies were all male, while East Indian women (from India) were brought alongside men as coolies. This led to a high rate of Chinese men marrying women of other ethnicities like Indian women and mixed race Creole women. Indian women and children were brought alongside Indian men as coolies while Chinese men made up 99% of Chinese colonies. The contrast with the female to male ratio among Indian and Chinese immigrants has been compared by historians. In Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies just 18,731 Chinese women and 92,985 Chinese men served as coolies on plantations. Chinese women migrated less than Javanese and Indian women as indentured coolies. The number of Chinese women as coolies was "very small" while Chinese men were easily taken into the coolie trade. In Cuba men made up the vast majority of Chinese indentured servants on sugar plantations and in Peru non-Chinese women married the mostly male Chinese coolies.

Chinese women were scarce in every place where Chinese indentured laborers were brought, the migration was dominated by Chinese men. Up to the 1940s men made up the vast majority of the Costa Rican Chinese community. Males made up the majority of the original Chinese community in Mexico and they married Mexican women.

In the early 1900s, the Chinese communities in Manila, Singapore, Mauritius, New Zealand, Victoria in Australia, the United States, and Victoria in British Columbia in Canada were all male dominated.

WIKIPEDIA

Tired overworked businessman on the desk

The status of women in modern India is a sort of a paradox. If on one hand she is at the peak of ladder of success, on the other hand she is mutely suffering the violence afflicted on her by her own family members. As compared with past women in modern times have achieved a lot but in reality they have to still travel a long way. Their path is full of roadblocks. The women have left the secured domain of their home and are now in the battlefield of life, fully armored with their talent. They had proven themselves. But in India they are yet to get their dues.

The main problems of Indian women includes:

*Malnutrition

*Poor Health

*Maternal Mortality

*Lack of education

*Mistreatment

*Overworked

*Lack of power

*Female infanticide/foeticide...................

For more photos like this one.click MY SITE subirbasak.orgfree.com.....

p.s."Copyright © – Subir Basak.

The reproduction, publication, modification, transmission or exploitation of any work contained herein for any use, personal or commercial, without my prior written permission is strictly prohibited. All rights reserved."

Quick sketch of the front of one of the house boats in the docks. Overworked it as usual - I'm finding it really hard not to do too much when it comes to watercolour.

I think I know what you mean but watch what you say

'cause they'll be try to knock you down in some way

Sometimes it feels like the world is falling asleep

How do you wake someone up from inside a dream?

Your mind would wander and searched for its place in the night

Your body followed this feeling like following light

Once that your music was born it followed you 'round

And then it gave your activities meaning and let you be loud

You're sad but you smile

It not in your eyes

Your eyeballs won't change

It's the muscles around your eyes

An egg to fertilize

A pulse to stabilize

A body to deodorize

A life to scrutinize

A child to criticize

Young adults to modernize

Citizens to terrorize

Generations to desensitize

You're dreams are sweet and obsessed

And your overworked

You're overtaken by visions of being overlooked

How disappointed would D.(ead) I.(dealistic) D.(esperate) I.(nventor) P.(ioneer) P.(hilosophers)

Be to see such power in our hands all wasted on greed

Am I a prisoner to instincts?

Or do my thoughts just live

As free and detached

As boats to the dock?

Just like when music was born

And detached from your heart

Is your free time to free minds

Or for falling apart?

Night after night

You turn out the light

You don't fall asleep right away

"Are we... are we done?"

A desk to organize

A product to advertise

A market to monopolize

Movie stars you idolize

Leaders to scandalize

Enemies to neutralize

No time to apologize

Fury to tranquilize

Weapons to synchronize

Cities to vapor-i...

www-v3.deezer.com/listen-940463 - The Strokes - Ize Of The World

A coolie (alternatively spelled cooli, cooly, quli, koelie, and other such variations), during the 19th and early 20th century, was a term for a locally sourced unskilled labourer hired by a company, mainly from the Indian subcontinent or Southern China.

Today, it is used varyingly as a legal inoffensive word (for example, in India for helpers carrying luggage in railway stations) and also used as a racial slur in Africa for certain people from Asia, particularly in South Africa

ETYMOLOGY

The origins of the word are uncertain but it is thought to have originated from the name of a Gujarati sect (the Kolī, who worked as day labourers) or perhaps from the Tamil word for a payment for work, kuli (கூலி). An alternative etymological explanation is that the word came from the Urdu qulī (क़ुली, قلی), which itself could be from the Turkish word for slave, qul. The word was used in this sense for labourers from India. In 1727, Dr. Engelbert Kämpfer described "coolies" as dock labourers who would unload Dutch merchant ships at Nagasaki in Japan.

The Chinese word 苦力 (pinyin: kǔlì) literally means "bitterly hard (use of) strength", in the Mandarin pronunciation.

HISTORY OF THE COOLIE TRADE

An early trade in Asian labourers is believed to have begun sometime in or around the 16th century. Social and political pressure led to the abolition of the slave trade throughout the British Empire in 1807, with other European nations following suit. Labour-intensive industries, such as cotton and sugar plantations, mines and railway construction, in the colonies were left without a cheap source of manpower. As a consequence, a large scale slavery-like trade in Asian (primarily Indian and Chinese) indentured labourers began in the 1820s to fill this vacuum. Some of these labourers signed contracts based on misleading promises, some were kidnapped and sold into the trade, some were victims of clan violence whose captors sold them to coolie brokers, while others sold themselves to pay off gambling debts. British companies were the first to experiment with this potential new form of cheap labour in 1807, when they imported 200 Chinese men to work in Trinidad.

The coolie trade was often compared to the earlier slave trade and they accomplished very similar things.

Although there are reports of ships for Asian coolies carrying women and children, the great majority of them were men. Finally, regulations were put in place, as early as 1837 by the British authorities in India to safeguard these principles of voluntary, contractual work and safe and sanitary transportation although in practice this rarely occurred especially during examples such as the Pacific Passage or the Guano Pits of Peru. The Chinese government also made efforts to secure the well-being of their nation's workers, with representations being made to relevant governments around the world.

CHINESE COOLIES

Workers from China were mainly transported to work in Peru and Cuba, but they also worked in British colonies such as Jamaica, British Guiana (now Guyana), British Malaya, Trinidad and Tobago, British Honduras (now Belize) and in the Dutch colonies Dutch East Indies and Suriname. The first shipment of Chinese labourers was to the British colony of Trinidad in 1806.

In 1847 two ships from Cuba transported workers to Havana to work in the sugar cane fields from the port of Xiamen, one of the five Chinese treaty ports opened to the British by the Treaty of Nanking in 1842. The trade soon spread to other ports in Guangdong province and demand became particularly strong in Peru for workers in the silver mines and the guano collecting industry. Australia began importing workers in 1848 and the United States began using them in 1865 on the First Transcontinental Railroad construction. These workers were deceived about their terms of employment to a much greater extent than their Indian counterparts, and consequently, there was a much higher level of Chinese emigration during this period.

The trade flourished from 1847 to 1854 without incident, until reports began to surface of the mistreatment of the workers in Cuba and Peru. As the British government had political and legal responsibility for many of the ports involved, including Amoy, the trade was shut down at these places. However, the trade simply shifted to the more accommodating port in the Portuguese enclave of Macau.

Many coolies were first deceived or kidnapped and then kept in barracoons (detention centres) or loading vessels in the ports of departure, as were African slaves. In 1875, British commissioners estimated that approximately eighty percent of the workers had been abducted. Their voyages, which are sometimes called the Pacific Passage, were as inhumane and dangerous as the notorious Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade. Mortality was very high. For example, it is estimated that from 1847 to 1859, the average mortality for coolies aboard ships to Cuba was 15.2 percent, and losses among those aboard ships to Peru were 40 percent in the 1850s and 30.44 percent from 1860 to 1863.

They were sold and were taken to work in plantations or mines with very bad living and working conditions. The duration of a contract was typically five to eight years, but many coolies did not live out their term of service because of the hard labour and mistreatment. Those who did live were often forced to remain in servitude beyond the contracted period. The coolies who worked on the sugar plantations in Cuba and in the guano beds of the Chincha Islands (the islands of Hell) of Peru were treated brutally. Seventy-five percent of the Chinese coolies in Cuba died before fulfilling their contracts. More than two-thirds of the Chinese coolies who arrived in Peru between 1849 and 1874 died within the contract period. In 1860 it was calculated that of the 4000 coolies brought to the Chinchas since the trade began, not one had survived.

Because of these unbearable conditions, Chinese coolies often revolted against their Ko-Hung bosses and foreign company bosses at ports of departure, on ships, and in foreign lands. The coolies were put in the same neighbourhoods as Africans and, since most were unable to return to their homeland or have their wives come to the New World, many married African women. The coolies' interracial relationships and marriages with Africans, Europeans and Indigenous peoples, formed some of the modern world's Afro-Asian and Asian Latin American populations.

Chinese immigration to the United States was almost entirely voluntary, but working and social conditions were still harsh. In 1868, the Burlingame Treaty allowed unrestricted Chinese immigration into the country. Within a decade significant levels of anti-Chinese sentiment had built up, stoked by populists such as Denis Kearney with racist slogans - "To an American, death is preferable to life on a par with the Chinese."

Although Chinese workers contributed to the building of the first Transcontinental Railroad in the United States and of the Canadian Pacific Railway in western Canada, Chinese settlement was discouraged after completion of the construction. California's Anti-Coolie Act of 1862 and the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 contributed to the curtailment of Chinese immigration to the United States.

Notwithstanding such attempts to restrict the influx of cheap labour from China, beginning in the 1870s Chinese workers helped construct a vast network of levees in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. These levees made thousands of acres of fertile marshlands available for agricultural production.

The 1879 Constitution of the State of California declared that "Asiatic coolieism is a form of human slavery, and is forever prohibited in this State, and all contracts for coolie labour shall be void."

Colonos asiáticos is a Spanish term for coolies. The Spanish colony of Cuba feared slavery uprisings such as those that took place in Haiti and used coolies as a transition between slaves and free labor. They were neither free nor slaves. Indentured Chinese servants also labored in the sugarcane fields of Cuba well after the 1884 abolition of slavery in that country. Two scholars of Chinese labor in Cuba, Juan Pastrana and Juan Perez de la Riva, substantiated horrific conditions of Chinese coolies in Cuba and stated that coolies were slaves in all but name. Denise Helly is one researcher who believes that despite their slave-like treatment, the free and legal status of the Asian laborers in Cuba separated them from slaves. The coolies could challenge their superiors, run away, petition government officials, and rebel according to Rodriguez Pastor and Trazegnies Granda. Once they had fulfilled their contracts the colonos asiáticos integrated into the countries of Peru, The Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Cuba. They adopted cultural traditions from the natives and also welcomed in non-Chinese to experience and participate into their own traditions. Before the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Havana had Latin America's largest Chinatown.

In South America, Chinese indentured labourers worked in Peru's silver mines and coastal industries (i.e., guano, sugar, and cotton) from the early 1850s to the mid-1870s; about 100,000 people immigrated as indentured workers. They participated in the War of the Pacific, looting and burning down the haciendas where they worked, after the capture of Lima by the invading Chilean army in January 1880. Some 2000 coolies even joined the Chilean Army in Peru, taking care of the wounded and burying the dead. Others were sent by Chileans to work in the newly conquered nitrate fields.

The Chinese Engineering and Mining Corporation, of which later U.S. president Herbert Hoover was a director, was instrumental in supplying Chinese coolie labour to South African mines from c.1902 to c.1910 at the request of mine owners, who considered such labour cheaper than native African and white labour. The horrendous conditions suffered by the coolie labourers led to questions in the British parliament as recorded in Hansard.

In 1866, the British, French and Chinese governments agreed to mitigate the abuse by requiring all traders to pay for the return of all workers after their contract ended. The employers in the British West Indies declined these conditions, bringing the trade there to an end. Until the trade was finally abolished in 1875, over 150,000 coolies had been sold to Cuba alone, the majority having been shipped from Macau. These labourers endured conditions far worse than those experienced by their Indian counterparts. Even after the 1866 reforms, the scale of abuse and conditions of near slavery did not get any better - if anything they deteriorated. In the early 1870s increased media exposure of the trade led to a public outcry, and the British, as well as the Qing government, put pressure on the Portuguese authorities to bring the trade at Macau to an end; this was ultimately achieved in 1874. By that time, a total of up to half a million Chinese workers had been exported.

The term coolie was also applied to Chinese workers recruited for contracts on cacao plantations in German Samoa. German planters went to great lengths to secure access to their "coolie" labour supply from China. In 1908 a Chinese commissioner, Lin Shu Fen, reported on the cruel treatment of coolie workers on German plantations in the western Samoan Islands. The trade began largely after the establishment of colonial German Samoa in 1900 and lasted until the arrival of New Zealand forces in 1914. More than 2000 Chinese "coolies" were present in the islands in 1914 and most were eventually repatriated by the New Zealand administration.

INDIAN COOLIES

By the 1820s, many Indians were voluntarily enlisting to go abroad for work, in the hopes of a better life. European merchants and businessmen quickly took advantage of this and began recruiting them for work as a cheap source of labour. The British began shipping Indians to colonies around the world, including Mauritius, Fiji, Natal, British East Africa, and British Malaya. The Dutch also shipped workers to labour on the plantations on Suriname and the Dutch East Indies. A system of agents was used to infiltrate the rural villages of India and recruit labourers. They would often deceive the credulous workers about the great opportunities that awaited them for their own material betterment abroad. The Indians primarily came from the Indo-Gangetic Plain, but also from Tamil Nadu and other areas to the south of the country.

Without permission from the British authorities, the French attempted to illegally transport Indian workers to their sugar producing colony, the Reunion Island, from as early as 1826. By 1830, over 3000 labourers had been transported. After this trade was discovered, the French successfully negotiated with the British in 1860 for permission to transport over 6,000 workers annually, on condition that the trade would be suspended if abuses were discovered to be taking place.

The British began to transport Indians to Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, starting in 1829. Slavery had been abolished with the planters receiving two million pounds sterling in compensation for the loss of their slaves. The planters turned to bringing in a large number of indentured labourers from India to work in the sugar cane fields. Between 1834 and 1921, around half a million indentured labourers were present on the island. They worked on sugar estates, factories, in transport and on construction sites.

In 1837, the Raj issued a set of regulations for the trade. The rules provided for each labourer to be personally authorised for transportation by an officer designated by the Government, it limited the length of service to five years subject to voluntary renewal, it made the contractor responsible for returning the worker after the contract elapsed and required the vessels to conform to basic health standards

Despite this, conditions on the ships were often extremely crowded, with rampant disease and malnutrition. The workers were paid a pittance for their labour, and were expected to work in often awful and harsh conditions. Although there were no large scale scandals involving coolie abuse in British colonies, workers often ended up being forced to work, and manipulated in such a way that they became dependent on the plantation owners so that in practice they remained there long after their contracts expired; possibly as little as 10% of the coolies actually returned to their original country of origin. Colonial legislation was also passed to severely limit their freedoms; in Mauritius a compulsory pass system was instituted to enable their movements to be easily tracked. Conditions were much worse in the French colonies of Reunion and Guadeloupe and Martinique, where workers were 'systematically overworked' and abnormally high mortality rates were recorded for those working in the mines.

However, there were also attempts by the British authorities to regulate and mitigate the worst abuses. Workers were regularly checked up on by health inspectors, and they were vetted before transportation to ensure that they were suitably healthy and fit to be able to endure the rigours of labour. Children under the age of 15 were not allowed to be transported from their parents under any circumstances.

The first campaign against the 'coolie' trade in England likened the system of indentured labour to the slavery of the past. In response to this pressure, the labour export was temporarily stopped in 1839 by the authorities when the scale of the abuses became known, but it was soon renewed due to its growing economic importance. A more rigorous regulatory framework was put into place and severe penalties were imposed for infractions in 1842. In that year, almost 35,000 people were shipped to Mauritius.

In 1844, the trade was expanded to the colonies in the West Indies, including Jamaica, Trinidad and Demerara, where the Asian population was soon a major component of the island demographic.

Starting in 1879, many Indians were transported to Fiji to work on the sugar cane plantations. Many of them chose to stay after their term of indenture elapsed and today they number about 40% of the total population. Indian workers were also imported into the Dutch colony of Suriname after the Dutch signed a treaty with the United Kingdom on the recruitment of contract workers in 1870. In Mauritius, the Indian population are now demographically dominant, with Indian festivals being celebrated as national holidays.

This system prevailed until the early twentieth century. Increasing focus on the brutalities and abuses of the trade by the sensationalist media of the time, incited public outrage and lead to the official ending of the coolie trade in 1916 by the British government. By that time tens of thousands of Chinese workers were being used along the Western Front by the allied forces (see Chinese Labour Corps).

SEX RATIOS AND INTERMARRIAGE AMONG COOLIES

A major difference between the Chinese coolie trade and the Indian coolie trade was that the Chinese coolies were all male, while East Indian women (from India) were brought alongside men as coolies. This led to a high rate of Chinese men marrying women of other ethnicities like Indian women and mixed race Creole women. Indian women and children were brought alongside Indian men as coolies while Chinese men made up 99% of Chinese colonies. The contrast with the female to male ratio among Indian and Chinese immigrants has been compared by historians. In Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies just 18,731 Chinese women and 92,985 Chinese men served as coolies on plantations. Chinese women migrated less than Javanese and Indian women as indentured coolies. The number of Chinese women as coolies was "very small" while Chinese men were easily taken into the coolie trade. In Cuba men made up the vast majority of Chinese indentured servants on sugar plantations and in Peru non-Chinese women married the mostly male Chinese coolies.

Chinese women were scarce in every place where Chinese indentured laborers were brought, the migration was dominated by Chinese men. Up to the 1940s men made up the vast majority of the Costa Rican Chinese community. Males made up the majority of the original Chinese community in Mexico and they married Mexican women.

In the early 1900s, the Chinese communities in Manila, Singapore, Mauritius, New Zealand, Victoria in Australia, the United States, and Victoria in British Columbia in Canada were all male dominated.

WIKIPEDIA

See notes here.

trying to survive - at least until tomorrow . . .

. . . like 363 Millionen Indians!

____________________________________________

COOLIE

A coolie (alternatively spelled cooli, cooly, quli, koelie, and other such variations), during the 19th and early 20th century, was a term for a locally sourced unskilled labourer hired by a company, mainly from the Indian subcontinent or Southern China.

Today, it is used varyingly as a legal inoffensive word (for example, in India for helpers carrying luggage in railway stations) and also used as a racial slur in Africa for certain people from Asia, particularly in South Africa

ETYMOLOGY

The origins of the word are uncertain but it is thought to have originated from the name of a Gujarati sect (the Kolī, who worked as day labourers) or perhaps from the Tamil word for a payment for work, kuli (கூலி). An alternative etymological explanation is that the word came from the Urdu qulī (क़ुली, قلی), which itself could be from the Turkish word for slave, qul. The word was used in this sense for labourers from India. In 1727, Dr. Engelbert Kämpfer described "coolies" as dock labourers who would unload Dutch merchant ships at Nagasaki in Japan.

The Chinese word 苦力 (pinyin: kǔlì) literally means "bitterly hard (use of) strength", in the Mandarin pronunciation.

HISTORY OF THE COOLIE TRADE

An early trade in Asian labourers is believed to have begun sometime in or around the 16th century. Social and political pressure led to the abolition of the slave trade throughout the British Empire in 1807, with other European nations following suit. Labour-intensive industries, such as cotton and sugar plantations, mines and railway construction, in the colonies were left without a cheap source of manpower. As a consequence, a large scale slavery-like trade in Asian (primarily Indian and Chinese) indentured labourers began in the 1820s to fill this vacuum. Some of these labourers signed contracts based on misleading promises, some were kidnapped and sold into the trade, some were victims of clan violence whose captors sold them to coolie brokers, while others sold themselves to pay off gambling debts. British companies were the first to experiment with this potential new form of cheap labour in 1807, when they imported 200 Chinese men to work in Trinidad.

The coolie trade was often compared to the earlier slave trade and they accomplished very similar things.

Although there are reports of ships for Asian coolies carrying women and children, the great majority of them were men. Finally, regulations were put in place, as early as 1837 by the British authorities in India to safeguard these principles of voluntary, contractual work and safe and sanitary transportation although in practice this rarely occurred especially during examples such as the Pacific Passage or the Guano Pits of Peru. The Chinese government also made efforts to secure the well-being of their nation's workers, with representations being made to relevant governments around the world.

CHINESE COOLIES

Workers from China were mainly transported to work in Peru and Cuba, but they also worked in British colonies such as Jamaica, British Guiana (now Guyana), British Malaya, Trinidad and Tobago, British Honduras (now Belize) and in the Dutch colonies Dutch East Indies and Suriname. The first shipment of Chinese labourers was to the British colony of Trinidad in 1806.

In 1847 two ships from Cuba transported workers to Havana to work in the sugar cane fields from the port of Xiamen, one of the five Chinese treaty ports opened to the British by the Treaty of Nanking in 1842. The trade soon spread to other ports in Guangdong province and demand became particularly strong in Peru for workers in the silver mines and the guano collecting industry. Australia began importing workers in 1848 and the United States began using them in 1865 on the First Transcontinental Railroad construction. These workers were deceived about their terms of employment to a much greater extent than their Indian counterparts, and consequently, there was a much higher level of Chinese emigration during this period.

The trade flourished from 1847 to 1854 without incident, until reports began to surface of the mistreatment of the workers in Cuba and Peru. As the British government had political and legal responsibility for many of the ports involved, including Amoy, the trade was shut down at these places. However, the trade simply shifted to the more accommodating port in the Portuguese enclave of Macau.

Many coolies were first deceived or kidnapped and then kept in barracoons (detention centres) or loading vessels in the ports of departure, as were African slaves. In 1875, British commissioners estimated that approximately eighty percent of the workers had been abducted. Their voyages, which are sometimes called the Pacific Passage, were as inhumane and dangerous as the notorious Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade. Mortality was very high. For example, it is estimated that from 1847 to 1859, the average mortality for coolies aboard ships to Cuba was 15.2 percent, and losses among those aboard ships to Peru were 40 percent in the 1850s and 30.44 percent from 1860 to 1863.

They were sold and were taken to work in plantations or mines with very bad living and working conditions. The duration of a contract was typically five to eight years, but many coolies did not live out their term of service because of the hard labour and mistreatment. Those who did live were often forced to remain in servitude beyond the contracted period. The coolies who worked on the sugar plantations in Cuba and in the guano beds of the Chincha Islands (the islands of Hell) of Peru were treated brutally. Seventy-five percent of the Chinese coolies in Cuba died before fulfilling their contracts. More than two-thirds of the Chinese coolies who arrived in Peru between 1849 and 1874 died within the contract period. In 1860 it was calculated that of the 4000 coolies brought to the Chinchas since the trade began, not one had survived.

Because of these unbearable conditions, Chinese coolies often revolted against their Ko-Hung bosses and foreign company bosses at ports of departure, on ships, and in foreign lands. The coolies were put in the same neighbourhoods as Africans and, since most were unable to return to their homeland or have their wives come to the New World, many married African women. The coolies' interracial relationships and marriages with Africans, Europeans and Indigenous peoples, formed some of the modern world's Afro-Asian and Asian Latin American populations.

Chinese immigration to the United States was almost entirely voluntary, but working and social conditions were still harsh. In 1868, the Burlingame Treaty allowed unrestricted Chinese immigration into the country. Within a decade significant levels of anti-Chinese sentiment had built up, stoked by populists such as Denis Kearney with racist slogans - "To an American, death is preferable to life on a par with the Chinese."

Although Chinese workers contributed to the building of the first Transcontinental Railroad in the United States and of the Canadian Pacific Railway in western Canada, Chinese settlement was discouraged after completion of the construction. California's Anti-Coolie Act of 1862 and the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 contributed to the curtailment of Chinese immigration to the United States.

Notwithstanding such attempts to restrict the influx of cheap labour from China, beginning in the 1870s Chinese workers helped construct a vast network of levees in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. These levees made thousands of acres of fertile marshlands available for agricultural production.

The 1879 Constitution of the State of California declared that "Asiatic coolieism is a form of human slavery, and is forever prohibited in this State, and all contracts for coolie labour shall be void."

Colonos asiáticos is a Spanish term for coolies. The Spanish colony of Cuba feared slavery uprisings such as those that took place in Haiti and used coolies as a transition between slaves and free labor. They were neither free nor slaves. Indentured Chinese servants also labored in the sugarcane fields of Cuba well after the 1884 abolition of slavery in that country. Two scholars of Chinese labor in Cuba, Juan Pastrana and Juan Perez de la Riva, substantiated horrific conditions of Chinese coolies in Cuba and stated that coolies were slaves in all but name. Denise Helly is one researcher who believes that despite their slave-like treatment, the free and legal status of the Asian laborers in Cuba separated them from slaves. The coolies could challenge their superiors, run away, petition government officials, and rebel according to Rodriguez Pastor and Trazegnies Granda. Once they had fulfilled their contracts the colonos asiáticos integrated into the countries of Peru, The Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Cuba. They adopted cultural traditions from the natives and also welcomed in non-Chinese to experience and participate into their own traditions. Before the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Havana had Latin America's largest Chinatown.

In South America, Chinese indentured labourers worked in Peru's silver mines and coastal industries (i.e., guano, sugar, and cotton) from the early 1850s to the mid-1870s; about 100,000 people immigrated as indentured workers. They participated in the War of the Pacific, looting and burning down the haciendas where they worked, after the capture of Lima by the invading Chilean army in January 1880. Some 2000 coolies even joined the Chilean Army in Peru, taking care of the wounded and burying the dead. Others were sent by Chileans to work in the newly conquered nitrate fields.

The Chinese Engineering and Mining Corporation, of which later U.S. president Herbert Hoover was a director, was instrumental in supplying Chinese coolie labour to South African mines from c.1902 to c.1910 at the request of mine owners, who considered such labour cheaper than native African and white labour. The horrendous conditions suffered by the coolie labourers led to questions in the British parliament as recorded in Hansard.

In 1866, the British, French and Chinese governments agreed to mitigate the abuse by requiring all traders to pay for the return of all workers after their contract ended. The employers in the British West Indies declined these conditions, bringing the trade there to an end. Until the trade was finally abolished in 1875, over 150,000 coolies had been sold to Cuba alone, the majority having been shipped from Macau. These labourers endured conditions far worse than those experienced by their Indian counterparts. Even after the 1866 reforms, the scale of abuse and conditions of near slavery did not get any better - if anything they deteriorated. In the early 1870s increased media exposure of the trade led to a public outcry, and the British, as well as the Qing government, put pressure on the Portuguese authorities to bring the trade at Macau to an end; this was ultimately achieved in 1874. By that time, a total of up to half a million Chinese workers had been exported.

The term coolie was also applied to Chinese workers recruited for contracts on cacao plantations in German Samoa. German planters went to great lengths to secure access to their "coolie" labour supply from China. In 1908 a Chinese commissioner, Lin Shu Fen, reported on the cruel treatment of coolie workers on German plantations in the western Samoan Islands. The trade began largely after the establishment of colonial German Samoa in 1900 and lasted until the arrival of New Zealand forces in 1914. More than 2000 Chinese "coolies" were present in the islands in 1914 and most were eventually repatriated by the New Zealand administration.

INDIAN COOLIES

By the 1820s, many Indians were voluntarily enlisting to go abroad for work, in the hopes of a better life. European merchants and businessmen quickly took advantage of this and began recruiting them for work as a cheap source of labour. The British began shipping Indians to colonies around the world, including Mauritius, Fiji, Natal, British East Africa, and British Malaya. The Dutch also shipped workers to labour on the plantations on Suriname and the Dutch East Indies. A system of agents was used to infiltrate the rural villages of India and recruit labourers. They would often deceive the credulous workers about the great opportunities that awaited them for their own material betterment abroad. The Indians primarily came from the Indo-Gangetic Plain, but also from Tamil Nadu and other areas to the south of the country.

Without permission from the British authorities, the French attempted to illegally transport Indian workers to their sugar producing colony, the Reunion Island, from as early as 1826. By 1830, over 3000 labourers had been transported. After this trade was discovered, the French successfully negotiated with the British in 1860 for permission to transport over 6,000 workers annually, on condition that the trade would be suspended if abuses were discovered to be taking place.

The British began to transport Indians to Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, starting in 1829. Slavery had been abolished with the planters receiving two million pounds sterling in compensation for the loss of their slaves. The planters turned to bringing in a large number of indentured labourers from India to work in the sugar cane fields. Between 1834 and 1921, around half a million indentured labourers were present on the island. They worked on sugar estates, factories, in transport and on construction sites.

In 1837, the Raj issued a set of regulations for the trade. The rules provided for each labourer to be personally authorised for transportation by an officer designated by the Government, it limited the length of service to five years subject to voluntary renewal, it made the contractor responsible for returning the worker after the contract elapsed and required the vessels to conform to basic health standards

Despite this, conditions on the ships were often extremely crowded, with rampant disease and malnutrition. The workers were paid a pittance for their labour, and were expected to work in often awful and harsh conditions. Although there were no large scale scandals involving coolie abuse in British colonies, workers often ended up being forced to work, and manipulated in such a way that they became dependent on the plantation owners so that in practice they remained there long after their contracts expired; possibly as little as 10% of the coolies actually returned to their original country of origin. Colonial legislation was also passed to severely limit their freedoms; in Mauritius a compulsory pass system was instituted to enable their movements to be easily tracked. Conditions were much worse in the French colonies of Reunion and Guadeloupe and Martinique, where workers were 'systematically overworked' and abnormally high mortality rates were recorded for those working in the mines.

However, there were also attempts by the British authorities to regulate and mitigate the worst abuses. Workers were regularly checked up on by health inspectors, and they were vetted before transportation to ensure that they were suitably healthy and fit to be able to endure the rigours of labour. Children under the age of 15 were not allowed to be transported from their parents under any circumstances.

The first campaign against the 'coolie' trade in England likened the system of indentured labour to the slavery of the past. In response to this pressure, the labour export was temporarily stopped in 1839 by the authorities when the scale of the abuses became known, but it was soon renewed due to its growing economic importance. A more rigorous regulatory framework was put into place and severe penalties were imposed for infractions in 1842. In that year, almost 35,000 people were shipped to Mauritius.

In 1844, the trade was expanded to the colonies in the West Indies, including Jamaica, Trinidad and Demerara, where the Asian population was soon a major component of the island demographic.

Starting in 1879, many Indians were transported to Fiji to work on the sugar cane plantations. Many of them chose to stay after their term of indenture elapsed and today they number about 40% of the total population. Indian workers were also imported into the Dutch colony of Suriname after the Dutch signed a treaty with the United Kingdom on the recruitment of contract workers in 1870. In Mauritius, the Indian population are now demographically dominant, with Indian festivals being celebrated as national holidays.

This system prevailed until the early twentieth century. Increasing focus on the brutalities and abuses of the trade by the sensationalist media of the time, incited public outrage and lead to the official ending of the coolie trade in 1916 by the British government. By that time tens of thousands of Chinese workers were being used along the Western Front by the allied forces (see Chinese Labour Corps).

SEX RATIOS AND INTERMARRIAGE AMONG COOLIES

A major difference between the Chinese coolie trade and the Indian coolie trade was that the Chinese coolies were all male, while East Indian women (from India) were brought alongside men as coolies. This led to a high rate of Chinese men marrying women of other ethnicities like Indian women and mixed race Creole women. Indian women and children were brought alongside Indian men as coolies while Chinese men made up 99% of Chinese colonies. The contrast with the female to male ratio among Indian and Chinese immigrants has been compared by historians. In Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies just 18,731 Chinese women and 92,985 Chinese men served as coolies on plantations. Chinese women migrated less than Javanese and Indian women as indentured coolies. The number of Chinese women as coolies was "very small" while Chinese men were easily taken into the coolie trade. In Cuba men made up the vast majority of Chinese indentured servants on sugar plantations and in Peru non-Chinese women married the mostly male Chinese coolies.

Chinese women were scarce in every place where Chinese indentured laborers were brought, the migration was dominated by Chinese men. Up to the 1940s men made up the vast majority of the Costa Rican Chinese community. Males made up the majority of the original Chinese community in Mexico and they married Mexican women.

In the early 1900s, the Chinese communities in Manila, Singapore, Mauritius, New Zealand, Victoria in Australia, the United States, and Victoria in British Columbia in Canada were all male dominated.

WIKIPEDIA

Every Chinese Doctor I have been to says that I have cold energy in my stomach. So I am always willing to try anything to get rid of this cold energy. Rather than living a healthy life of constant physical activity, restricted computer use, and all the other modern things that we do to make us unbalanced creatures - I chose to put myself through ancient practices - like STOMACH FIREBURNING or MOXA (mugwart) steaming!!!!

So the philosophy behind fireburning is that the fire's heat will warm up your stomach - it will start moving the cold energy out and help you restore your yin energy. After 5 times of lighting a fire and putting the fire out on my stomach - I felt so wonderful. In between each fireburning, the doctor massaged my stomach - it's the best feeling in the world. It felt as if he was caressing every part of my large and small intestinal track and giving it lots of love and care. And the best part is that in the end- when the fire burning is done correctly - he takes off the saran wrap, medicine cloth, and starts Doggy Paddling down from the top of my stomach to the very bottom of my intestines - you can HEAR A RIVER of activity going on inside! it's totalllly FREAKY - I could hear a river gurgling - as if he was totally giving me a full plumbing system overhaul!

he said that when performed with the right type of fire shapes, the doggy paddling takes all the released coldness and moves it out.

the whole entire time I focused on using qi gong breathing techniques - because I am super sensitive to energy I could feel the cold air flowing out of the bottom of my feet.

But then for a few min before or after the process - sometimes I feel that I am inadequate as a human being when I do these things because it reminds me of how out of touch I am with my body, the earth, and the stars. So going to the Chinese doctor for me is like a form of rebirth and a bit of self-punishment (for not being healthy when I am living in the states). But then I think - is it only when I travel - when I'm farthest away from everything and everyone that I intimately know - is that the only time I feel that I can take care of myself without feeling guilty? Is it only when I am unreachable that I recover from everyday life in the states - when my family stuff is so far away that it is absolutely out of my control? Then I start thinking that's stupid tricia - peace is where you are - but sometimes I feel that the only way to really extract myself out of my own life is to leave the country and cross an ocean away. I wonder if this is a pattern of modern life now - middle class people overworking and then leaving for a few months every year or few years to prevent burn out and just to re-balance. It certainly has become a pattern in my life - is the amount of traveling we do equivalent to the amount of stress we have at home? sometimes I think so...

well anyways this is seriously the best form of self-punishment - when the doctor tells me that my yin-yang isn't balanced - it actually makes me really excited to become more balanced again. I am always excited for them to say - "ok here your energy is blocked, so that's why your hair is turning white or that's why your bowel movements aren't regular." When they tell me how unbalanced I am, I start thinking about how I can take better care of myself.

AFter fireburning, the doctor told me of all the herbs and foods that I should eat to heal my body. for example, I need to eat more lemon peels. This time the doctor told me that my health was pretty good, but my back and neck is messed up from years of sitting in front of a computer. Plus I haven't been meditating or dancing as much lately :(

So I love this herbal/ancient practice - only in china...only in china. In India I tried going to the medicinal doctor - I actually went to 3 of them because I really wanted to give it a chance - well each on told me that I was too much of a "pita" and they threw my naked body on a slap of hard wood and started dumping herbal oil on me and then the woman rubbed the oil on me forcing my bones into the wood table and I slid around like a dead fish - I tried to grab onto the wood but it was impossible! - may sound wonderful-(hmm hands + oil) BUT NOT!!!!!! it was painful and the worst part was that I didn't feel more balanced afterwards. SO I've decided China is the place for me to go for medicinal care.

Historical plaque concerning "The Home Children". In front of an apartment building at 105 Isabella Street. In the gay village. Toronto, Canada. Summer evening, 2022. Pentax K1 II.

Excepts from Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Children

Home Children was the child migration scheme founded by Annie MacPherson in 1869, under which more than 100,000 children were sent from the United Kingdom to Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa. The programme was largely discontinued in the 1930s, but not entirely terminated until the 1970s.

Later research, beginning in the 1980s, exposed abuse and hardships of the relocated children. Australia apologised in 2009 for its involvement in the scheme. In February 2010 UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown made a formal apology to the families of children who suffered. Canadian Immigration Minister Jason Kenney stated in 2009 that Canada would not apologise to child migrants, preferring to "recognize that sad period" in other ways.

History

As a labour source:

The practice of sending poor or orphaned children to English and later British colonies, to help alleviate the shortage of labour, began in 1618, with the rounding-up and transportation of one hundred English vagrant children to the Virginia Colony. In the 18th century, labour shortages in the overseas colonies also encouraged the transportation of children for work in the Americas, and large numbers of children were forced to migrate, most of them from Scotland. This practice continued until it was exposed in 1757, following a civil action against Aberdeen merchants and magistrates for their involvement in the trade.

Social reform

The Children's Friend Society was founded in London in 1830 as "The Society for the Suppression of Juvenile Vagrancy through the reformation and emigration of children". In 1832, the first group of children was sent to the Cape Colony in South Africa and the Swan River Colony in Australia, and in August 1833, 230 children were shipped to Toronto and New Brunswick in Canada.

The main pioneers of child migration in the nineteenth century were the Scottish Evangelical Christian Annie MacPherson, her sister Louisa Birt, and Londoner Maria Rye. Whilst working with poor children in London in the late 1860s, MacPherson was appalled by the child slavery of the matchbox industry and resolved to devote her life to these children. In 1870, she bought a large workshop and turned it into the "Home of Industry", where poor children could work and be fed and educated. She later became convinced that the real solution for these children lay in emigration to a country of opportunity and started an emigration fund. In the first year of the fund's operation, 500 children, trained in the London homes, were shipped to Canada. MacPherson opened distribution homes in Canada in the towns of Belleville and Galt in Ontario and persuaded her sister, Louisa, to open a third home in the village of Knowlton, 112 km from Montreal. This was the beginning of a massive operation which sought to find homes and careers for 14,000 of Britain's needy children.

Maria Rye also worked amongst the poor in London and had arrived in Ontario with 68 children (50 of whom were from Liverpool) some months earlier than MacPherson, with the blessing of the Archbishop of Canterbury and The Times newspaper. Rye, who had been placing women emigrants in Canada since 1867, opened her home at Niagara-on-the-Lake in 1869, and by the turn of the century had settled some 5,000 children, mostly girls, in Ontario.

Child emigration was largely suspended for economic reasons during the Great Depression of the 1930s, but was not completely terminated until the 1970s.

As they were compulsorily shipped out of Britain, many of the children were deceived into believing their parents were dead, and that a more abundant life awaited them.[9] Some were exploited as cheap agricultural labour, or denied proper shelter and education. It was common for Home Children to run away, sometimes finding a caring family or better working conditions.

Contemporary enquiries

CHILD EMIGRATION TO CANADA The attention of the Dominion Government has been drawn to the fact that the children sent to Canada from England are street waifs and workhouse paupers, and that the professional philanthropists engaged in the work are largely prompted by mercenary and not charitable motives. A demand will be made that parliament should investigate the matter before voting any money to promote this kind of immigration.

The Star, 18 April 1891

The emigration schemes were not without their critics, and there were many rumours of ill-treatment of the children by their employers and of profiteering by the organisers of the schemes, particularly Maria Rye. In 1874 The London Board of Governors decided to send a representative, named Andrew Doyle, to Canada to visit the homes and the children to see how they were faring. Doyle's report praised the women and their staff, especially MacPherson, saying that they were inspired by the highest motives, but condemned almost everything else about the enterprise. He said that the attitude of the women in grouping together children from the workhouses, who he said were mostly of good reputation, with street children, whom he considered mostly thieves, was naive and had caused nothing but trouble in Canada. He was also critical of the checks made on the children after they were placed with settlers, which in Rye's case were mostly non-existent, and said that:

Because of Miss Rye's carelessness and Miss MacPherson's limited resources, thousands of British children, already in painful circumstances, were cast adrift to be overworked or mistreated by the settlers of early Canada who were generally honest but often hard taskmasters.

The House of Commons of Canada subsequently set up a select committee to examine Doyle's findings and there was much controversy generated by his report in Britain, but the schemes continued with some changes and were copied in other countries of the British Empire.

Exposure and apologies

Canada

A federal plaque marks Home Children immigration, a National Historic Event, near a house involved in the programme, in Stratford, Ontario

The federal government designated the "Immigration of Home Children" a National Historic Event, in 1999. A plaque from the national Historic Sites and Monuments Board commemorating the event stands in Stratford, Ontario. The Ontario Heritage Trust erected a provincial historical plaque to the Home Children the year before, in Ottawa.

After the apology by the Australian government, in 2009 the Canadian Immigration Minister, Jason Kenney, said that there was no need for Canada to apologise:

The issue has not been on the radar screen here, unlike Australia where there's been a long-standing interest. The reality is that, here in Canada, we are taking measures to recognise that sad period, but there is, I think, limited public interest in official government apologies for everything that's ever been unfortunate or [a] tragic event in our history.

The federal government proclaimed 2010 the "Year of the British Home Child" and on 1 September 2010, Canada Post released a commemorative stamp to honour those who were sent to Canada. In the province of Ontario, the British Home Child Day Act, 2011, makes 28 September each year British Home Child Day to "recognize and honour the contributions of the British home children who established roots in Ontario."

migrants.

A coolie (alternatively spelled cooli, cooly, quli, koelie, and other such variations), during the 19th and early 20th century, was a term for a locally sourced unskilled labourer hired by a company, mainly from the Indian subcontinent or Southern China.

Today, it is used varyingly as a legal inoffensive word (for example, in India for helpers carrying luggage in railway stations) and also used as a racial slur in Africa for certain people from Asia, particularly in South Africa

ETYMOLOGY

The origins of the word are uncertain but it is thought to have originated from the name of a Gujarati sect (the Kolī, who worked as day labourers) or perhaps from the Tamil word for a payment for work, kuli (கூலி). An alternative etymological explanation is that the word came from the Urdu qulī (क़ुली, قلی), which itself could be from the Turkish word for slave, qul. The word was used in this sense for labourers from India. In 1727, Dr. Engelbert Kämpfer described "coolies" as dock labourers who would unload Dutch merchant ships at Nagasaki in Japan.

The Chinese word 苦力 (pinyin: kǔlì) literally means "bitterly hard (use of) strength", in the Mandarin pronunciation.

HISTORY OF THE COOLIE TRADE

An early trade in Asian labourers is believed to have begun sometime in or around the 16th century. Social and political pressure led to the abolition of the slave trade throughout the British Empire in 1807, with other European nations following suit. Labour-intensive industries, such as cotton and sugar plantations, mines and railway construction, in the colonies were left without a cheap source of manpower. As a consequence, a large scale slavery-like trade in Asian (primarily Indian and Chinese) indentured labourers began in the 1820s to fill this vacuum. Some of these labourers signed contracts based on misleading promises, some were kidnapped and sold into the trade, some were victims of clan violence whose captors sold them to coolie brokers, while others sold themselves to pay off gambling debts. British companies were the first to experiment with this potential new form of cheap labour in 1807, when they imported 200 Chinese men to work in Trinidad.

The coolie trade was often compared to the earlier slave trade and they accomplished very similar things.

Although there are reports of ships for Asian coolies carrying women and children, the great majority of them were men. Finally, regulations were put in place, as early as 1837 by the British authorities in India to safeguard these principles of voluntary, contractual work and safe and sanitary transportation although in practice this rarely occurred especially during examples such as the Pacific Passage or the Guano Pits of Peru. The Chinese government also made efforts to secure the well-being of their nation's workers, with representations being made to relevant governments around the world.

CHINESE COOLIES

Workers from China were mainly transported to work in Peru and Cuba, but they also worked in British colonies such as Jamaica, British Guiana (now Guyana), British Malaya, Trinidad and Tobago, British Honduras (now Belize) and in the Dutch colonies Dutch East Indies and Suriname. The first shipment of Chinese labourers was to the British colony of Trinidad in 1806.

In 1847 two ships from Cuba transported workers to Havana to work in the sugar cane fields from the port of Xiamen, one of the five Chinese treaty ports opened to the British by the Treaty of Nanking in 1842. The trade soon spread to other ports in Guangdong province and demand became particularly strong in Peru for workers in the silver mines and the guano collecting industry. Australia began importing workers in 1848 and the United States began using them in 1865 on the First Transcontinental Railroad construction. These workers were deceived about their terms of employment to a much greater extent than their Indian counterparts, and consequently, there was a much higher level of Chinese emigration during this period.

The trade flourished from 1847 to 1854 without incident, until reports began to surface of the mistreatment of the workers in Cuba and Peru. As the British government had political and legal responsibility for many of the ports involved, including Amoy, the trade was shut down at these places. However, the trade simply shifted to the more accommodating port in the Portuguese enclave of Macau.

Many coolies were first deceived or kidnapped and then kept in barracoons (detention centres) or loading vessels in the ports of departure, as were African slaves. In 1875, British commissioners estimated that approximately eighty percent of the workers had been abducted. Their voyages, which are sometimes called the Pacific Passage, were as inhumane and dangerous as the notorious Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade. Mortality was very high. For example, it is estimated that from 1847 to 1859, the average mortality for coolies aboard ships to Cuba was 15.2 percent, and losses among those aboard ships to Peru were 40 percent in the 1850s and 30.44 percent from 1860 to 1863.

They were sold and were taken to work in plantations or mines with very bad living and working conditions. The duration of a contract was typically five to eight years, but many coolies did not live out their term of service because of the hard labour and mistreatment. Those who did live were often forced to remain in servitude beyond the contracted period. The coolies who worked on the sugar plantations in Cuba and in the guano beds of the Chincha Islands (the islands of Hell) of Peru were treated brutally. Seventy-five percent of the Chinese coolies in Cuba died before fulfilling their contracts. More than two-thirds of the Chinese coolies who arrived in Peru between 1849 and 1874 died within the contract period. In 1860 it was calculated that of the 4000 coolies brought to the Chinchas since the trade began, not one had survived.

Because of these unbearable conditions, Chinese coolies often revolted against their Ko-Hung bosses and foreign company bosses at ports of departure, on ships, and in foreign lands. The coolies were put in the same neighbourhoods as Africans and, since most were unable to return to their homeland or have their wives come to the New World, many married African women. The coolies' interracial relationships and marriages with Africans, Europeans and Indigenous peoples, formed some of the modern world's Afro-Asian and Asian Latin American populations.

Chinese immigration to the United States was almost entirely voluntary, but working and social conditions were still harsh. In 1868, the Burlingame Treaty allowed unrestricted Chinese immigration into the country. Within a decade significant levels of anti-Chinese sentiment had built up, stoked by populists such as Denis Kearney with racist slogans - "To an American, death is preferable to life on a par with the Chinese."

Although Chinese workers contributed to the building of the first Transcontinental Railroad in the United States and of the Canadian Pacific Railway in western Canada, Chinese settlement was discouraged after completion of the construction. California's Anti-Coolie Act of 1862 and the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 contributed to the curtailment of Chinese immigration to the United States.

Notwithstanding such attempts to restrict the influx of cheap labour from China, beginning in the 1870s Chinese workers helped construct a vast network of levees in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. These levees made thousands of acres of fertile marshlands available for agricultural production.

The 1879 Constitution of the State of California declared that "Asiatic coolieism is a form of human slavery, and is forever prohibited in this State, and all contracts for coolie labour shall be void."

Colonos asiáticos is a Spanish term for coolies. The Spanish colony of Cuba feared slavery uprisings such as those that took place in Haiti and used coolies as a transition between slaves and free labor. They were neither free nor slaves. Indentured Chinese servants also labored in the sugarcane fields of Cuba well after the 1884 abolition of slavery in that country. Two scholars of Chinese labor in Cuba, Juan Pastrana and Juan Perez de la Riva, substantiated horrific conditions of Chinese coolies in Cuba and stated that coolies were slaves in all but name. Denise Helly is one researcher who believes that despite their slave-like treatment, the free and legal status of the Asian laborers in Cuba separated them from slaves. The coolies could challenge their superiors, run away, petition government officials, and rebel according to Rodriguez Pastor and Trazegnies Granda. Once they had fulfilled their contracts the colonos asiáticos integrated into the countries of Peru, The Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Cuba. They adopted cultural traditions from the natives and also welcomed in non-Chinese to experience and participate into their own traditions. Before the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Havana had Latin America's largest Chinatown.

In South America, Chinese indentured labourers worked in Peru's silver mines and coastal industries (i.e., guano, sugar, and cotton) from the early 1850s to the mid-1870s; about 100,000 people immigrated as indentured workers. They participated in the War of the Pacific, looting and burning down the haciendas where they worked, after the capture of Lima by the invading Chilean army in January 1880. Some 2000 coolies even joined the Chilean Army in Peru, taking care of the wounded and burying the dead. Others were sent by Chileans to work in the newly conquered nitrate fields.

The Chinese Engineering and Mining Corporation, of which later U.S. president Herbert Hoover was a director, was instrumental in supplying Chinese coolie labour to South African mines from c.1902 to c.1910 at the request of mine owners, who considered such labour cheaper than native African and white labour. The horrendous conditions suffered by the coolie labourers led to questions in the British parliament as recorded in Hansard.

In 1866, the British, French and Chinese governments agreed to mitigate the abuse by requiring all traders to pay for the return of all workers after their contract ended. The employers in the British West Indies declined these conditions, bringing the trade there to an end. Until the trade was finally abolished in 1875, over 150,000 coolies had been sold to Cuba alone, the majority having been shipped from Macau. These labourers endured conditions far worse than those experienced by their Indian counterparts. Even after the 1866 reforms, the scale of abuse and conditions of near slavery did not get any better - if anything they deteriorated. In the early 1870s increased media exposure of the trade led to a public outcry, and the British, as well as the Qing government, put pressure on the Portuguese authorities to bring the trade at Macau to an end; this was ultimately achieved in 1874. By that time, a total of up to half a million Chinese workers had been exported.

The term coolie was also applied to Chinese workers recruited for contracts on cacao plantations in German Samoa. German planters went to great lengths to secure access to their "coolie" labour supply from China. In 1908 a Chinese commissioner, Lin Shu Fen, reported on the cruel treatment of coolie workers on German plantations in the western Samoan Islands. The trade began largely after the establishment of colonial German Samoa in 1900 and lasted until the arrival of New Zealand forces in 1914. More than 2000 Chinese "coolies" were present in the islands in 1914 and most were eventually repatriated by the New Zealand administration.

INDIAN COOLIES

By the 1820s, many Indians were voluntarily enlisting to go abroad for work, in the hopes of a better life. European merchants and businessmen quickly took advantage of this and began recruiting them for work as a cheap source of labour. The British began shipping Indians to colonies around the world, including Mauritius, Fiji, Natal, British East Africa, and British Malaya. The Dutch also shipped workers to labour on the plantations on Suriname and the Dutch East Indies. A system of agents was used to infiltrate the rural villages of India and recruit labourers. They would often deceive the credulous workers about the great opportunities that awaited them for their own material betterment abroad. The Indians primarily came from the Indo-Gangetic Plain, but also from Tamil Nadu and other areas to the south of the country.

Without permission from the British authorities, the French attempted to illegally transport Indian workers to their sugar producing colony, the Reunion Island, from as early as 1826. By 1830, over 3000 labourers had been transported. After this trade was discovered, the French successfully negotiated with the British in 1860 for permission to transport over 6,000 workers annually, on condition that the trade would be suspended if abuses were discovered to be taking place.

The British began to transport Indians to Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, starting in 1829. Slavery had been abolished with the planters receiving two million pounds sterling in compensation for the loss of their slaves. The planters turned to bringing in a large number of indentured labourers from India to work in the sugar cane fields. Between 1834 and 1921, around half a million indentured labourers were present on the island. They worked on sugar estates, factories, in transport and on construction sites.

In 1837, the Raj issued a set of regulations for the trade. The rules provided for each labourer to be personally authorised for transportation by an officer designated by the Government, it limited the length of service to five years subject to voluntary renewal, it made the contractor responsible for returning the worker after the contract elapsed and required the vessels to conform to basic health standards

Despite this, conditions on the ships were often extremely crowded, with rampant disease and malnutrition. The workers were paid a pittance for their labour, and were expected to work in often awful and harsh conditions. Although there were no large scale scandals involving coolie abuse in British colonies, workers often ended up being forced to work, and manipulated in such a way that they became dependent on the plantation owners so that in practice they remained there long after their contracts expired; possibly as little as 10% of the coolies actually returned to their original country of origin. Colonial legislation was also passed to severely limit their freedoms; in Mauritius a compulsory pass system was instituted to enable their movements to be easily tracked. Conditions were much worse in the French colonies of Reunion and Guadeloupe and Martinique, where workers were 'systematically overworked' and abnormally high mortality rates were recorded for those working in the mines.

However, there were also attempts by the British authorities to regulate and mitigate the worst abuses. Workers were regularly checked up on by health inspectors, and they were vetted before transportation to ensure that they were suitably healthy and fit to be able to endure the rigours of labour. Children under the age of 15 were not allowed to be transported from their parents under any circumstances.

The first campaign against the 'coolie' trade in England likened the system of indentured labour to the slavery of the past. In response to this pressure, the labour export was temporarily stopped in 1839 by the authorities when the scale of the abuses became known, but it was soon renewed due to its growing economic importance. A more rigorous regulatory framework was put into place and severe penalties were imposed for infractions in 1842. In that year, almost 35,000 people were shipped to Mauritius.

In 1844, the trade was expanded to the colonies in the West Indies, including Jamaica, Trinidad and Demerara, where the Asian population was soon a major component of the island demographic.

Starting in 1879, many Indians were transported to Fiji to work on the sugar cane plantations. Many of them chose to stay after their term of indenture elapsed and today they number about 40% of the total population. Indian workers were also imported into the Dutch colony of Suriname after the Dutch signed a treaty with the United Kingdom on the recruitment of contract workers in 1870. In Mauritius, the Indian population are now demographically dominant, with Indian festivals being celebrated as national holidays.

This system prevailed until the early twentieth century. Increasing focus on the brutalities and abuses of the trade by the sensationalist media of the time, incited public outrage and lead to the official ending of the coolie trade in 1916 by the British government. By that time tens of thousands of Chinese workers were being used along the Western Front by the allied forces (see Chinese Labour Corps).

SEX RATIOS AND INTERMARRIAGE AMONG COOLIES

A major difference between the Chinese coolie trade and the Indian coolie trade was that the Chinese coolies were all male, while East Indian women (from India) were brought alongside men as coolies. This led to a high rate of Chinese men marrying women of other ethnicities like Indian women and mixed race Creole women. Indian women and children were brought alongside Indian men as coolies while Chinese men made up 99% of Chinese colonies. The contrast with the female to male ratio among Indian and Chinese immigrants has been compared by historians. In Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies just 18,731 Chinese women and 92,985 Chinese men served as coolies on plantations. Chinese women migrated less than Javanese and Indian women as indentured coolies. The number of Chinese women as coolies was "very small" while Chinese men were easily taken into the coolie trade. In Cuba men made up the vast majority of Chinese indentured servants on sugar plantations and in Peru non-Chinese women married the mostly male Chinese coolies.

Chinese women were scarce in every place where Chinese indentured laborers were brought, the migration was dominated by Chinese men. Up to the 1940s men made up the vast majority of the Costa Rican Chinese community. Males made up the majority of the original Chinese community in Mexico and they married Mexican women.

In the early 1900s, the Chinese communities in Manila, Singapore, Mauritius, New Zealand, Victoria in Australia, the United States, and Victoria in British Columbia in Canada were all male dominated.

WIKIPEDIA

Twenty20 seems to have been around forever, and cricket's movers and shakers are now showing almost indecent haste in their collective attempts to milk the format for all it's worth. But Twenty20, the brainchild of ECB marketing manager Stuart Robertson, only made its first appearance on June 13, 2003.

The competition was launched to general suspicion on November 13, 2002, although trial matches had taken place earlier in the year. In general they had gone well, although early plans to incorporate a golden over, in which runs would count double, were quietly shelved. The ECB struggled to find a sponsor until late in the day, and sceptics were quick to point out that the launch was set to be on a Friday the 13th.

On the eve of the first batch of five matches, the media was unsure what to make of it. Most decided it would attract crowds, few believed it would turn out to be anything more than a bit of a giggle.

"The only way to approach the whole adventure is with an open mind," wrote Christopher Martin-Jenkins in The Times. "Like many a novelty, given fair weather, it will succeed at first. My guess, however, is that it will, in the end, have a negligible effect on crowds, finance, standards or interest. The general impression that these are "fun" events will serve the purpose of attracting young people who are used to noise, spectacle and instant gratification; but the game's intrinsic qualities will remain its chief attraction."

Simon Barnes, also in The Times was hardly any more enthusiastic, with the noise his main objection. "It's the trappings I can't stand. The garnish. The gimmicks. The wrapping, the ribbons, the packaging. The noise. Music should be banned from all sporting occasions, live and televised. Never mind keeping politics out of sport; if we can keep music out, I'll be happy."

In The Sun, John Ethridge had a warning. "The traditional cricket followers might be advised to stay away for fear of choking on their gin and tonics. But the new generations of children and families are welcome with open arms."

"If it does not come off, there is nowhere else to go," Mike Selvey wrote in The Guardian before offering a prescient prediction. "When the idea was first floated, a natural response was to predict that star players, many of whom already complain of overwork, would take the opportunity to sit out the competition. That would be unforgivable. New heroes could be created here.

"Those who might dismiss the format as pot noodle cricket that will destroy techniques could be way off the mark. Two weeks or so is not going to do any lasting damage and, besides, this is a competition that can be utilised to improve one-day skills."

Derek Pringle in The Daily Telegraph was not so sure. "Like baseball, a game lasts three hours, which should not tax the modern attention span too much. Slotting in mostly after-work hours during the week, the competition at least gives itself a chance, though rival events such as television soaps, homework and dinner may prove beyond sacrifice for some."

Cricinfo's Andrew Miller was upbeat but not without a note of caution. "Unless the teams themselves can put aside the razzmatazz, and knuckle down for some hard-fought competition, the whole fortnight will have the glib sterility of a graduate-recruitment fair."

Paul Dews in the Yorkshire Evening Post was the positive of them all, railing against those pouring scorn on Twenty20 before it had even started. "Quite why so many people are waiting to destroy a competition that hasn't even started remains a mystery, because the ECB should be applauded for breaking with tradition and giving something new a go. Twenty20 certainly isn't the future of cricket, but it could help the long-term planning of the game and should be judged on its crowd-pulling merits."

Most of the counties joined in the fun. Nottinghamshire, tongue firmly in cheek, got their more toned players to pose topless on posters as they billed games as Girls' Nights Out. The models were Kevin Pietersen, Chris Cairns, Paul Franks and Gareth Clough (not a regular but he sneaked in by virtue of having the chest most admired by the female marketing staff). Worcestershire placed a Jacuzzi on the boundary edge; Gloucestershire warned their committee that if any of them turned up wearing a tie they would be kicked out; Yorkshire sold tickets at £2; Glamorgan asked fans to turn up in pyjamas.

There were a few glitches. Middlesex abandoned Lord's for more rural settings after the local council stuffily rejected requests for music to be allowed, while Derbyshire's forward-thinking plan to involve cheerleaders fell foul of the political-correctness lobby who ensured that there were no IPL-style youngsters but a more middle-aged selection.

The first uncontrollable obstacle, the weather, was superb for the opening round of games. The Sky TV cameras were at The Rose Bowl, along with 9000 spectators, Hampshire's second largest crowd ever. Viewers at home enjoyed a more relaxed style, commentators in the players' dugouts and interaction with fielders via microphones taped uncomfortably to their ears.

Around 10,000 flocked to The Oval, twice the expected gate, which caused long queues at the bars; Durham, Taunton and Worcester also reported excellent sales. In all, 30,050 turned up for the arrival of a new era.

"Anything less would have been a failure given the novelty of the matches and the intensive marketing effort that has gone into them," noted Martin-Jenkins. The ECB had ploughed more than £200,000 into market research to, as Etheridge, observed "come up with the unbelievable revelation that cricket is watched mainly by white, middle-class, middle-aged men."

"Welcome to Cricket Like You've Never Seen It," Selvey quipped. "Well, not since a National League match reduced under the Duckworth-Lewis method anyway."

The demographic surprised many. "There were children yesterday - lots of them," reported Tanya Aldred at Southampton. "There were toddlers. And there were women. It was no revolution but, compared to the average four-day county match, it was the Clothes Show Live at the NEC. The Guinness van was selling glasses of Pernod and Martini, the beer tent offered a special offer on Bacardi Breezers."

The Mirror touched on the same theme. "The traditionalists stayed away, the kids came out to play, and maybe, just maybe, cricket took a genuine step towards reversing its dwindling popularity.

If the public and media didn't know what to expect, neither did the players. "We're going to bowl first," explained Surrey captain Adam Hollioake on winning the toss against Middlesex, "because I haven't got a clue what's going to happen."

Fears it would be a flash in the pan, a decent turn-out from the curious before a return to the more usual smattering of spectators, proved unfounded. The following night the crowds were as good. The weather remained glorious throughout and the Twenty20 Cup was a hit. Even so, few had any inkling of quite what an impact Robertson's idea was going to have.

Martin Williamson

People ask me what the Falklands are like.

So I will tell you.

Imagine the Outer Hebrides had been scattered in the South Atlantic, all grass covered, eroded, wind-blown. Home to hundreds of thousands of sheep. And mines.

Most of us had not heard of the Falklands until 1982 when Argentina invaded them, despite the Government having been warned the invasion was coming. So, an armada was formed and a task force sent, and over the course of four months the islands were taken back by force.

Since the war, the old Port Stanley airfield had closed and a new airport built about a 45 minute's drive away. That is Mount Pleasant.

RAF Mount Pleasant.

MPA.

A base had been built around it.

It was grim.

And yet, was modern, heated and we had one satellite channel, which broadcast live, not two weeks behind any more. And there was a radio station, which was shared by local radio and BFBS.

Some 2,000 islanders were protected by approx 2400 servicemen and women, and was one of the few places where members of the three forces served side by side. All on a detachment that last 124 days, or four months It was an interesting mix.

Most of us lived in a long low accommodation block, 12 Facility (well, at the RAF and Navy end, the other end of a mile long corridor was the Army end. Something like 35 Facility, and like the Bronx. The Army end had a cinema, so once that finished you had to be careful on the long walk back, as ambshes and robbery were not unknown.

The islands are thousands of miles away from England, and you get there on a trooper flight. A fleet of ancient and overwork Tri-stars ferry two rotations a week, 364 days a year, taking off from RAF Brize Norton, going via Ascension Island to refuel before heading south of the equator to the Falklands.

Life at home was already difficult, so the chance of four months away was attractive, so myself a couple others from Lyneham were making fun in the departure "lounge" at Brize while everyone else was miserable.

Once the door close, you are no classed as soldiers, in that you are not trusted with anything else than cans of beer and boxes of wine Spirits were unavailable to junior ranks for the duration of your tour, as apparently, you could not be trusted. The RAF had taken on a batch of mini DVD players, so we had something to watch during the flight before the only stop at Ascension Island, Or Assi.

Assi is the top part of an old volcano formed by the mid-atlantic ridge. A massive runway had been built on the high plateau, as well as a radio and communications relay station. There is nothing, no land for thousands of miles around. So, on final approach, the plane is skipping over the wave tops until suddenly there are rocks, a cliff and you are down. as we were to be down the Falklands in winter, we were all dressed up in our winter woolies. Assi is on the equator and as warm as you would think.

Although every flight stops there, planes are almost never delayed there and the pilots would always try to press on. We stopped and whilst the plane was refueled and restocked with food, there was time for a round or two at the bar down by the "beach". After an hour we were called back, and as the plane taxied, I saw a pool of fluid underneath one of the engines. It was spotted and the plane stopped and engines powered down.

We were taken off and told to go back to the bar.

Which we did.

Hours later we were told the plane could not be fixed and we were to spend the night on Assi, we had to go and sign bedding find where we were to sleep. Our barracks were like holiday chalets, looked really cute. I went into one, turned the light on and the floor moved. Dozens of cockroaches went for cover.

Oh, this was great.

We went back to the and drank it dry. As you do, then went back to the chalet and made our beds and tried to sleep. Darkness had come suddenly, and we were so tired.

Next day we boarded the plane and all was fine, so we carried on south for hour upon hour.

Landing at MPA is always fun; there is always a side wind, just the strength is different. People come out to watch it land, because on that is not only a couple of hundreds servicemen and women, but a week's mail, newspapers and magazines as well as supplies for the NAAFI shop.

Once the plane has taxied to the terminal, the passengers have to then listen to a mine brief, and dangers of mines, not to remove or deface mine signs. Then the happiest person in the whole world is there to meet you, as you are their replacement. He takes you in a landrover to one facility or the other, then up the the four man room where he has given up his bed, got you a clean duvet and sheets. You are tired disoriented, and this is your first night of 124, and you are taken to one of the many bars and drink, hoping you can find your way back to your bed. If you're unlucky there might be an initiation to go through, nothing bad, just a little humiliation and more drinking. The next morning, the person you replaced, who slept on an armchair will catch his flight home.

You are now the FNG; the Falklands New Guy, and the butt of all jokes and japes, have to make brews and clean, and will do so until the next FNG arrives, when he will take your place.

In every section, there is a chuff chart; a board with 124 pins on it, and each pin marks a day, and first think each morning, the first person in moves the talleys you have to make in your first week forward one day. Not only does the chuff chark mark off the days to do, but also the milestones, and as time passes your ranking among your colleagues go up until you become an FOG; Falklands Old Guy.

I worked in Coates Armoury, looking after the thousands of weapons that we would use to defend the island in the event of another invasion. Every three months there was an exercise during which we would issue weapons to all service personal, then we would lock the door to the armoury and sit through the fun and games, listening to the radio or watching videos, for 12 hours until the guy doing the other 12 hour shift to take over and you go to bed.

Tis was the exciting bit.

The rest was mundane stuff, just maintaining weapons, showing people how to clean their rifles if they'd been fired, charging them s a box of tea bags of a box of fruit case slices to do it for them. So the days and weeks flew by.

Off shift, there was two things to do down there, either keep fit or drink. Some did both. I kept fit, building up what I did week on week until by the final month I was doing double boxercise twice a week, two hours four other days a week and a sports afternoon on Friday. I became a lean and mean guy and was really as fit as I have ever been before or certainly since.

Halfway along the corridor was Weavers, run by the WVRS, and offered tea, coffee, cakes and an oasis of non military stuff. That was a fine way to spend a Sunday, reading last week's apapers with a slice of date and walnut cake a a cup of fresh coffee.

The other pass time was shadying.

Shadying was the creation of souvenirs made out of scrap metal, coins and shells that people would buy off you. Each section would trade parts with each other so we could make more money. Only FOGs could shady, so you waited until one guy got posted and you took your turn, learning as you went to cut brass maps of the islands, shining them up and glueing then to wooden plaques. In a good week you could make £100, and as beer was a pund a can, really live the high life. Or you could buy phone cards to call home, at fifteen quid for ten minutes.

Ao, as the weeks went buy I worked, trained in the gym and shadied all the hours I could. As I worked near to the library, I was the room's entertainment officer, and got videos to watch each night on the room video and portable TV while we sipped brews and munch custard creams. At weekends, there would be transport into Port Stanley down the dirt track main road for an afternoon spent looking through the sparse gift shop of going to one of the bars where they would serve beers in a GLASS.

Many of the places we heard during the war were in fact just a collection of houses, sometimes as few as three, these had battles named after them, but now were all quiet again, some farms offering bed and breakfast for us to use when we had our four days R&R. We could take this whenever we wanted, and I took mine right at the end of my tour, so had four days off, one day back then fly home. Perfect.

My other hobby was taking part in the regular quizzes on the radio. BFBS held them, that went on for weeks, asking questions of what is this noise, or stuff like that, but sometimes trivia questions, which I would take part in. I won a load of stuff in my time, including on the last day when I get back from R&R, I was in work to just clear and sort out some loose ends, and the new question came up: What was the first thing Maralyn Monroe advertised?

I knew.

I said I knew but would not phone in as I had cleared and was now a non FOG. So, one of the others called in, Jelly knows they said to the DJ. SO, I was friends with the DJ, and he said put me on the phone. I went on.

So, what's the answer he asked.

Bearing in mind previous answers had been diamonds, silk dresses and so on.

Potatoes I said. For the Idaho Potato Company. It was a calendar.

Bing.

Bing.

Bing.

Bugger he said, this usually lasts weeks.

I got another bag of swag to take back home.

A coolie (alternatively spelled cooli, cooly, quli, koelie, and other such variations), during the 19th and early 20th century, was a term for a locally sourced unskilled labourer hired by a company, mainly from the Indian subcontinent or Southern China.

Today, it is used varyingly as a legal inoffensive word (for example, in India for helpers carrying luggage in railway stations) and also used as a racial slur in Africa for certain people from Asia, particularly in South Africa

ETYMOLOGY

The origins of the word are uncertain but it is thought to have originated from the name of a Gujarati sect (the Kolī, who worked as day labourers) or perhaps from the Tamil word for a payment for work, kuli (கூலி). An alternative etymological explanation is that the word came from the Urdu qulī (क़ुली, قلی), which itself could be from the Turkish word for slave, qul. The word was used in this sense for labourers from India. In 1727, Dr. Engelbert Kämpfer described "coolies" as dock labourers who would unload Dutch merchant ships at Nagasaki in Japan.

The Chinese word 苦力 (pinyin: kǔlì) literally means "bitterly hard (use of) strength", in the Mandarin pronunciation.

HISTORY OF THE COOLIE TRADE

An early trade in Asian labourers is believed to have begun sometime in or around the 16th century. Social and political pressure led to the abolition of the slave trade throughout the British Empire in 1807, with other European nations following suit. Labour-intensive industries, such as cotton and sugar plantations, mines and railway construction, in the colonies were left without a cheap source of manpower. As a consequence, a large scale slavery-like trade in Asian (primarily Indian and Chinese) indentured labourers began in the 1820s to fill this vacuum. Some of these labourers signed contracts based on misleading promises, some were kidnapped and sold into the trade, some were victims of clan violence whose captors sold them to coolie brokers, while others sold themselves to pay off gambling debts. British companies were the first to experiment with this potential new form of cheap labour in 1807, when they imported 200 Chinese men to work in Trinidad.

The coolie trade was often compared to the earlier slave trade and they accomplished very similar things.

Although there are reports of ships for Asian coolies carrying women and children, the great majority of them were men. Finally, regulations were put in place, as early as 1837 by the British authorities in India to safeguard these principles of voluntary, contractual work and safe and sanitary transportation although in practice this rarely occurred especially during examples such as the Pacific Passage or the Guano Pits of Peru. The Chinese government also made efforts to secure the well-being of their nation's workers, with representations being made to relevant governments around the world.

CHINESE COOLIES

Workers from China were mainly transported to work in Peru and Cuba, but they also worked in British colonies such as Jamaica, British Guiana (now Guyana), British Malaya, Trinidad and Tobago, British Honduras (now Belize) and in the Dutch colonies Dutch East Indies and Suriname. The first shipment of Chinese labourers was to the British colony of Trinidad in 1806.

In 1847 two ships from Cuba transported workers to Havana to work in the sugar cane fields from the port of Xiamen, one of the five Chinese treaty ports opened to the British by the Treaty of Nanking in 1842. The trade soon spread to other ports in Guangdong province and demand became particularly strong in Peru for workers in the silver mines and the guano collecting industry. Australia began importing workers in 1848 and the United States began using them in 1865 on the First Transcontinental Railroad construction. These workers were deceived about their terms of employment to a much greater extent than their Indian counterparts, and consequently, there was a much higher level of Chinese emigration during this period.

The trade flourished from 1847 to 1854 without incident, until reports began to surface of the mistreatment of the workers in Cuba and Peru. As the British government had political and legal responsibility for many of the ports involved, including Amoy, the trade was shut down at these places. However, the trade simply shifted to the more accommodating port in the Portuguese enclave of Macau.

Many coolies were first deceived or kidnapped and then kept in barracoons (detention centres) or loading vessels in the ports of departure, as were African slaves. In 1875, British commissioners estimated that approximately eighty percent of the workers had been abducted. Their voyages, which are sometimes called the Pacific Passage, were as inhumane and dangerous as the notorious Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade. Mortality was very high. For example, it is estimated that from 1847 to 1859, the average mortality for coolies aboard ships to Cuba was 15.2 percent, and losses among those aboard ships to Peru were 40 percent in the 1850s and 30.44 percent from 1860 to 1863.

They were sold and were taken to work in plantations or mines with very bad living and working conditions. The duration of a contract was typically five to eight years, but many coolies did not live out their term of service because of the hard labour and mistreatment. Those who did live were often forced to remain in servitude beyond the contracted period. The coolies who worked on the sugar plantations in Cuba and in the guano beds of the Chincha Islands (the islands of Hell) of Peru were treated brutally. Seventy-five percent of the Chinese coolies in Cuba died before fulfilling their contracts. More than two-thirds of the Chinese coolies who arrived in Peru between 1849 and 1874 died within the contract period. In 1860 it was calculated that of the 4000 coolies brought to the Chinchas since the trade began, not one had survived.

Because of these unbearable conditions, Chinese coolies often revolted against their Ko-Hung bosses and foreign company bosses at ports of departure, on ships, and in foreign lands. The coolies were put in the same neighbourhoods as Africans and, since most were unable to return to their homeland or have their wives come to the New World, many married African women. The coolies' interracial relationships and marriages with Africans, Europeans and Indigenous peoples, formed some of the modern world's Afro-Asian and Asian Latin American populations.

Chinese immigration to the United States was almost entirely voluntary, but working and social conditions were still harsh. In 1868, the Burlingame Treaty allowed unrestricted Chinese immigration into the country. Within a decade significant levels of anti-Chinese sentiment had built up, stoked by populists such as Denis Kearney with racist slogans - "To an American, death is preferable to life on a par with the Chinese."

Although Chinese workers contributed to the building of the first Transcontinental Railroad in the United States and of the Canadian Pacific Railway in western Canada, Chinese settlement was discouraged after completion of the construction. California's Anti-Coolie Act of 1862 and the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 contributed to the curtailment of Chinese immigration to the United States.

Notwithstanding such attempts to restrict the influx of cheap labour from China, beginning in the 1870s Chinese workers helped construct a vast network of levees in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. These levees made thousands of acres of fertile marshlands available for agricultural production.

The 1879 Constitution of the State of California declared that "Asiatic coolieism is a form of human slavery, and is forever prohibited in this State, and all contracts for coolie labour shall be void."

Colonos asiáticos is a Spanish term for coolies. The Spanish colony of Cuba feared slavery uprisings such as those that took place in Haiti and used coolies as a transition between slaves and free labor. They were neither free nor slaves. Indentured Chinese servants also labored in the sugarcane fields of Cuba well after the 1884 abolition of slavery in that country. Two scholars of Chinese labor in Cuba, Juan Pastrana and Juan Perez de la Riva, substantiated horrific conditions of Chinese coolies in Cuba and stated that coolies were slaves in all but name. Denise Helly is one researcher who believes that despite their slave-like treatment, the free and legal status of the Asian laborers in Cuba separated them from slaves. The coolies could challenge their superiors, run away, petition government officials, and rebel according to Rodriguez Pastor and Trazegnies Granda. Once they had fulfilled their contracts the colonos asiáticos integrated into the countries of Peru, The Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Cuba. They adopted cultural traditions from the natives and also welcomed in non-Chinese to experience and participate into their own traditions. Before the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Havana had Latin America's largest Chinatown.

In South America, Chinese indentured labourers worked in Peru's silver mines and coastal industries (i.e., guano, sugar, and cotton) from the early 1850s to the mid-1870s; about 100,000 people immigrated as indentured workers. They participated in the War of the Pacific, looting and burning down the haciendas where they worked, after the capture of Lima by the invading Chilean army in January 1880. Some 2000 coolies even joined the Chilean Army in Peru, taking care of the wounded and burying the dead. Others were sent by Chileans to work in the newly conquered nitrate fields.

The Chinese Engineering and Mining Corporation, of which later U.S. president Herbert Hoover was a director, was instrumental in supplying Chinese coolie labour to South African mines from c.1902 to c.1910 at the request of mine owners, who considered such labour cheaper than native African and white labour. The horrendous conditions suffered by the coolie labourers led to questions in the British parliament as recorded in Hansard.

In 1866, the British, French and Chinese governments agreed to mitigate the abuse by requiring all traders to pay for the return of all workers after their contract ended. The employers in the British West Indies declined these conditions, bringing the trade there to an end. Until the trade was finally abolished in 1875, over 150,000 coolies had been sold to Cuba alone, the majority having been shipped from Macau. These labourers endured conditions far worse than those experienced by their Indian counterparts. Even after the 1866 reforms, the scale of abuse and conditions of near slavery did not get any better - if anything they deteriorated. In the early 1870s increased media exposure of the trade led to a public outcry, and the British, as well as the Qing government, put pressure on the Portuguese authorities to bring the trade at Macau to an end; this was ultimately achieved in 1874. By that time, a total of up to half a million Chinese workers had been exported.

The term coolie was also applied to Chinese workers recruited for contracts on cacao plantations in German Samoa. German planters went to great lengths to secure access to their "coolie" labour supply from China. In 1908 a Chinese commissioner, Lin Shu Fen, reported on the cruel treatment of coolie workers on German plantations in the western Samoan Islands. The trade began largely after the establishment of colonial German Samoa in 1900 and lasted until the arrival of New Zealand forces in 1914. More than 2000 Chinese "coolies" were present in the islands in 1914 and most were eventually repatriated by the New Zealand administration.

INDIAN COOLIES

By the 1820s, many Indians were voluntarily enlisting to go abroad for work, in the hopes of a better life. European merchants and businessmen quickly took advantage of this and began recruiting them for work as a cheap source of labour. The British began shipping Indians to colonies around the world, including Mauritius, Fiji, Natal, British East Africa, and British Malaya. The Dutch also shipped workers to labour on the plantations on Suriname and the Dutch East Indies. A system of agents was used to infiltrate the rural villages of India and recruit labourers. They would often deceive the credulous workers about the great opportunities that awaited them for their own material betterment abroad. The Indians primarily came from the Indo-Gangetic Plain, but also from Tamil Nadu and other areas to the south of the country.

Without permission from the British authorities, the French attempted to illegally transport Indian workers to their sugar producing colony, the Reunion Island, from as early as 1826. By 1830, over 3000 labourers had been transported. After this trade was discovered, the French successfully negotiated with the British in 1860 for permission to transport over 6,000 workers annually, on condition that the trade would be suspended if abuses were discovered to be taking place.

The British began to transport Indians to Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, starting in 1829. Slavery had been abolished with the planters receiving two million pounds sterling in compensation for the loss of their slaves. The planters turned to bringing in a large number of indentured labourers from India to work in the sugar cane fields. Between 1834 and 1921, around half a million indentured labourers were present on the island. They worked on sugar estates, factories, in transport and on construction sites.

In 1837, the Raj issued a set of regulations for the trade. The rules provided for each labourer to be personally authorised for transportation by an officer designated by the Government, it limited the length of service to five years subject to voluntary renewal, it made the contractor responsible for returning the worker after the contract elapsed and required the vessels to conform to basic health standards

Despite this, conditions on the ships were often extremely crowded, with rampant disease and malnutrition. The workers were paid a pittance for their labour, and were expected to work in often awful and harsh conditions. Although there were no large scale scandals involving coolie abuse in British colonies, workers often ended up being forced to work, and manipulated in such a way that they became dependent on the plantation owners so that in practice they remained there long after their contracts expired; possibly as little as 10% of the coolies actually returned to their original country of origin. Colonial legislation was also passed to severely limit their freedoms; in Mauritius a compulsory pass system was instituted to enable their movements to be easily tracked. Conditions were much worse in the French colonies of Reunion and Guadeloupe and Martinique, where workers were 'systematically overworked' and abnormally high mortality rates were recorded for those working in the mines.

However, there were also attempts by the British authorities to regulate and mitigate the worst abuses. Workers were regularly checked up on by health inspectors, and they were vetted before transportation to ensure that they were suitably healthy and fit to be able to endure the rigours of labour. Children under the age of 15 were not allowed to be transported from their parents under any circumstances.

The first campaign against the 'coolie' trade in England likened the system of indentured labour to the slavery of the past. In response to this pressure, the labour export was temporarily stopped in 1839 by the authorities when the scale of the abuses became known, but it was soon renewed due to its growing economic importance. A more rigorous regulatory framework was put into place and severe penalties were imposed for infractions in 1842. In that year, almost 35,000 people were shipped to Mauritius.

In 1844, the trade was expanded to the colonies in the West Indies, including Jamaica, Trinidad and Demerara, where the Asian population was soon a major component of the island demographic.

Starting in 1879, many Indians were transported to Fiji to work on the sugar cane plantations. Many of them chose to stay after their term of indenture elapsed and today they number about 40% of the total population. Indian workers were also imported into the Dutch colony of Suriname after the Dutch signed a treaty with the United Kingdom on the recruitment of contract workers in 1870. In Mauritius, the Indian population are now demographically dominant, with Indian festivals being celebrated as national holidays.

This system prevailed until the early twentieth century. Increasing focus on the brutalities and abuses of the trade by the sensationalist media of the time, incited public outrage and lead to the official ending of the coolie trade in 1916 by the British government. By that time tens of thousands of Chinese workers were being used along the Western Front by the allied forces (see Chinese Labour Corps).

SEX RATIOS AND INTERMARRIAGE AMONG COOLIES

A major difference between the Chinese coolie trade and the Indian coolie trade was that the Chinese coolies were all male, while East Indian women (from India) were brought alongside men as coolies. This led to a high rate of Chinese men marrying women of other ethnicities like Indian women and mixed race Creole women. Indian women and children were brought alongside Indian men as coolies while Chinese men made up 99% of Chinese colonies. The contrast with the female to male ratio among Indian and Chinese immigrants has been compared by historians. In Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies just 18,731 Chinese women and 92,985 Chinese men served as coolies on plantations. Chinese women migrated less than Javanese and Indian women as indentured coolies. The number of Chinese women as coolies was "very small" while Chinese men were easily taken into the coolie trade. In Cuba men made up the vast majority of Chinese indentured servants on sugar plantations and in Peru non-Chinese women married the mostly male Chinese coolies.

Chinese women were scarce in every place where Chinese indentured laborers were brought, the migration was dominated by Chinese men. Up to the 1940s men made up the vast majority of the Costa Rican Chinese community. Males made up the majority of the original Chinese community in Mexico and they married Mexican women.

In the early 1900s, the Chinese communities in Manila, Singapore, Mauritius, New Zealand, Victoria in Australia, the United States, and Victoria in British Columbia in Canada were all male dominated.

WIKIPEDIA

A coolie (alternatively spelled cooli, cooly, quli, koelie, and other such variations), during the 19th and early 20th century, was a term for a locally sourced unskilled labourer hired by a company, mainly from the Indian subcontinent or Southern China.

Today, it is used varyingly as a legal inoffensive word (for example, in India for helpers carrying luggage in railway stations) and also used as a racial slur in Africa for certain people from Asia, particularly in South Africa

ETYMOLOGY

The origins of the word are uncertain but it is thought to have originated from the name of a Gujarati sect (the Kolī, who worked as day labourers) or perhaps from the Tamil word for a payment for work, kuli (கூலி). An alternative etymological explanation is that the word came from the Urdu qulī (क़ुली, قلی), which itself could be from the Turkish word for slave, qul. The word was used in this sense for labourers from India. In 1727, Dr. Engelbert Kämpfer described "coolies" as dock labourers who would unload Dutch merchant ships at Nagasaki in Japan.

The Chinese word 苦力 (pinyin: kǔlì) literally means "bitterly hard (use of) strength", in the Mandarin pronunciation.

HISTORY OF THE COOLIE TRADE

An early trade in Asian labourers is believed to have begun sometime in or around the 16th century. Social and political pressure led to the abolition of the slave trade throughout the British Empire in 1807, with other European nations following suit. Labour-intensive industries, such as cotton and sugar plantations, mines and railway construction, in the colonies were left without a cheap source of manpower. As a consequence, a large scale slavery-like trade in Asian (primarily Indian and Chinese) indentured labourers began in the 1820s to fill this vacuum. Some of these labourers signed contracts based on misleading promises, some were kidnapped and sold into the trade, some were victims of clan violence whose captors sold them to coolie brokers, while others sold themselves to pay off gambling debts. British companies were the first to experiment with this potential new form of cheap labour in 1807, when they imported 200 Chinese men to work in Trinidad.

The coolie trade was often compared to the earlier slave trade and they accomplished very similar things.

Although there are reports of ships for Asian coolies carrying women and children, the great majority of them were men. Finally, regulations were put in place, as early as 1837 by the British authorities in India to safeguard these principles of voluntary, contractual work and safe and sanitary transportation although in practice this rarely occurred especially during examples such as the Pacific Passage or the Guano Pits of Peru. The Chinese government also made efforts to secure the well-being of their nation's workers, with representations being made to relevant governments around the world.

CHINESE COOLIES

Workers from China were mainly transported to work in Peru and Cuba, but they also worked in British colonies such as Jamaica, British Guiana (now Guyana), British Malaya, Trinidad and Tobago, British Honduras (now Belize) and in the Dutch colonies Dutch East Indies and Suriname. The first shipment of Chinese labourers was to the British colony of Trinidad in 1806.

In 1847 two ships from Cuba transported workers to Havana to work in the sugar cane fields from the port of Xiamen, one of the five Chinese treaty ports opened to the British by the Treaty of Nanking in 1842. The trade soon spread to other ports in Guangdong province and demand became particularly strong in Peru for workers in the silver mines and the guano collecting industry. Australia began importing workers in 1848 and the United States began using them in 1865 on the First Transcontinental Railroad construction. These workers were deceived about their terms of employment to a much greater extent than their Indian counterparts, and consequently, there was a much higher level of Chinese emigration during this period.

The trade flourished from 1847 to 1854 without incident, until reports began to surface of the mistreatment of the workers in Cuba and Peru. As the British government had political and legal responsibility for many of the ports involved, including Amoy, the trade was shut down at these places. However, the trade simply shifted to the more accommodating port in the Portuguese enclave of Macau.

Many coolies were first deceived or kidnapped and then kept in barracoons (detention centres) or loading vessels in the ports of departure, as were African slaves. In 1875, British commissioners estimated that approximately eighty percent of the workers had been abducted. Their voyages, which are sometimes called the Pacific Passage, were as inhumane and dangerous as the notorious Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade. Mortality was very high. For example, it is estimated that from 1847 to 1859, the average mortality for coolies aboard ships to Cuba was 15.2 percent, and losses among those aboard ships to Peru were 40 percent in the 1850s and 30.44 percent from 1860 to 1863.

They were sold and were taken to work in plantations or mines with very bad living and working conditions. The duration of a contract was typically five to eight years, but many coolies did not live out their term of service because of the hard labour and mistreatment. Those who did live were often forced to remain in servitude beyond the contracted period. The coolies who worked on the sugar plantations in Cuba and in the guano beds of the Chincha Islands (the islands of Hell) of Peru were treated brutally. Seventy-five percent of the Chinese coolies in Cuba died before fulfilling their contracts. More than two-thirds of the Chinese coolies who arrived in Peru between 1849 and 1874 died within the contract period. In 1860 it was calculated that of the 4000 coolies brought to the Chinchas since the trade began, not one had survived.

Because of these unbearable conditions, Chinese coolies often revolted against their Ko-Hung bosses and foreign company bosses at ports of departure, on ships, and in foreign lands. The coolies were put in the same neighbourhoods as Africans and, since most were unable to return to their homeland or have their wives come to the New World, many married African women. The coolies' interracial relationships and marriages with Africans, Europeans and Indigenous peoples, formed some of the modern world's Afro-Asian and Asian Latin American populations.

Chinese immigration to the United States was almost entirely voluntary, but working and social conditions were still harsh. In 1868, the Burlingame Treaty allowed unrestricted Chinese immigration into the country. Within a decade significant levels of anti-Chinese sentiment had built up, stoked by populists such as Denis Kearney with racist slogans - "To an American, death is preferable to life on a par with the Chinese."

Although Chinese workers contributed to the building of the first Transcontinental Railroad in the United States and of the Canadian Pacific Railway in western Canada, Chinese settlement was discouraged after completion of the construction. California's Anti-Coolie Act of 1862 and the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 contributed to the curtailment of Chinese immigration to the United States.

Notwithstanding such attempts to restrict the influx of cheap labour from China, beginning in the 1870s Chinese workers helped construct a vast network of levees in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. These levees made thousands of acres of fertile marshlands available for agricultural production.

The 1879 Constitution of the State of California declared that "Asiatic coolieism is a form of human slavery, and is forever prohibited in this State, and all contracts for coolie labour shall be void."

Colonos asiáticos is a Spanish term for coolies. The Spanish colony of Cuba feared slavery uprisings such as those that took place in Haiti and used coolies as a transition between slaves and free labor. They were neither free nor slaves. Indentured Chinese servants also labored in the sugarcane fields of Cuba well after the 1884 abolition of slavery in that country. Two scholars of Chinese labor in Cuba, Juan Pastrana and Juan Perez de la Riva, substantiated horrific conditions of Chinese coolies in Cuba and stated that coolies were slaves in all but name. Denise Helly is one researcher who believes that despite their slave-like treatment, the free and legal status of the Asian laborers in Cuba separated them from slaves. The coolies could challenge their superiors, run away, petition government officials, and rebel according to Rodriguez Pastor and Trazegnies Granda. Once they had fulfilled their contracts the colonos asiáticos integrated into the countries of Peru, The Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Cuba. They adopted cultural traditions from the natives and also welcomed in non-Chinese to experience and participate into their own traditions. Before the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Havana had Latin America's largest Chinatown.

In South America, Chinese indentured labourers worked in Peru's silver mines and coastal industries (i.e., guano, sugar, and cotton) from the early 1850s to the mid-1870s; about 100,000 people immigrated as indentured workers. They participated in the War of the Pacific, looting and burning down the haciendas where they worked, after the capture of Lima by the invading Chilean army in January 1880. Some 2000 coolies even joined the Chilean Army in Peru, taking care of the wounded and burying the dead. Others were sent by Chileans to work in the newly conquered nitrate fields.

The Chinese Engineering and Mining Corporation, of which later U.S. president Herbert Hoover was a director, was instrumental in supplying Chinese coolie labour to South African mines from c.1902 to c.1910 at the request of mine owners, who considered such labour cheaper than native African and white labour. The horrendous conditions suffered by the coolie labourers led to questions in the British parliament as recorded in Hansard.

In 1866, the British, French and Chinese governments agreed to mitigate the abuse by requiring all traders to pay for the return of all workers after their contract ended. The employers in the British West Indies declined these conditions, bringing the trade there to an end. Until the trade was finally abolished in 1875, over 150,000 coolies had been sold to Cuba alone, the majority having been shipped from Macau. These labourers endured conditions far worse than those experienced by their Indian counterparts. Even after the 1866 reforms, the scale of abuse and conditions of near slavery did not get any better - if anything they deteriorated. In the early 1870s increased media exposure of the trade led to a public outcry, and the British, as well as the Qing government, put pressure on the Portuguese authorities to bring the trade at Macau to an end; this was ultimately achieved in 1874. By that time, a total of up to half a million Chinese workers had been exported.

The term coolie was also applied to Chinese workers recruited for contracts on cacao plantations in German Samoa. German planters went to great lengths to secure access to their "coolie" labour supply from China. In 1908 a Chinese commissioner, Lin Shu Fen, reported on the cruel treatment of coolie workers on German plantations in the western Samoan Islands. The trade began largely after the establishment of colonial German Samoa in 1900 and lasted until the arrival of New Zealand forces in 1914. More than 2000 Chinese "coolies" were present in the islands in 1914 and most were eventually repatriated by the New Zealand administration.

INDIAN COOLIES

By the 1820s, many Indians were voluntarily enlisting to go abroad for work, in the hopes of a better life. European merchants and businessmen quickly took advantage of this and began recruiting them for work as a cheap source of labour. The British began shipping Indians to colonies around the world, including Mauritius, Fiji, Natal, British East Africa, and British Malaya. The Dutch also shipped workers to labour on the plantations on Suriname and the Dutch East Indies. A system of agents was used to infiltrate the rural villages of India and recruit labourers. They would often deceive the credulous workers about the great opportunities that awaited them for their own material betterment abroad. The Indians primarily came from the Indo-Gangetic Plain, but also from Tamil Nadu and other areas to the south of the country.

Without permission from the British authorities, the French attempted to illegally transport Indian workers to their sugar producing colony, the Reunion Island, from as early as 1826. By 1830, over 3000 labourers had been transported. After this trade was discovered, the French successfully negotiated with the British in 1860 for permission to transport over 6,000 workers annually, on condition that the trade would be suspended if abuses were discovered to be taking place.

The British began to transport Indians to Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, starting in 1829. Slavery had been abolished with the planters receiving two million pounds sterling in compensation for the loss of their slaves. The planters turned to bringing in a large number of indentured labourers from India to work in the sugar cane fields. Between 1834 and 1921, around half a million indentured labourers were present on the island. They worked on sugar estates, factories, in transport and on construction sites.

In 1837, the Raj issued a set of regulations for the trade. The rules provided for each labourer to be personally authorised for transportation by an officer designated by the Government, it limited the length of service to five years subject to voluntary renewal, it made the contractor responsible for returning the worker after the contract elapsed and required the vessels to conform to basic health standards

Despite this, conditions on the ships were often extremely crowded, with rampant disease and malnutrition. The workers were paid a pittance for their labour, and were expected to work in often awful and harsh conditions. Although there were no large scale scandals involving coolie abuse in British colonies, workers often ended up being forced to work, and manipulated in such a way that they became dependent on the plantation owners so that in practice they remained there long after their contracts expired; possibly as little as 10% of the coolies actually returned to their original country of origin. Colonial legislation was also passed to severely limit their freedoms; in Mauritius a compulsory pass system was instituted to enable their movements to be easily tracked. Conditions were much worse in the French colonies of Reunion and Guadeloupe and Martinique, where workers were 'systematically overworked' and abnormally high mortality rates were recorded for those working in the mines.

However, there were also attempts by the British authorities to regulate and mitigate the worst abuses. Workers were regularly checked up on by health inspectors, and they were vetted before transportation to ensure that they were suitably healthy and fit to be able to endure the rigours of labour. Children under the age of 15 were not allowed to be transported from their parents under any circumstances.

The first campaign against the 'coolie' trade in England likened the system of indentured labour to the slavery of the past. In response to this pressure, the labour export was temporarily stopped in 1839 by the authorities when the scale of the abuses became known, but it was soon renewed due to its growing economic importance. A more rigorous regulatory framework was put into place and severe penalties were imposed for infractions in 1842. In that year, almost 35,000 people were shipped to Mauritius.

In 1844, the trade was expanded to the colonies in the West Indies, including Jamaica, Trinidad and Demerara, where the Asian population was soon a major component of the island demographic.

Starting in 1879, many Indians were transported to Fiji to work on the sugar cane plantations. Many of them chose to stay after their term of indenture elapsed and today they number about 40% of the total population. Indian workers were also imported into the Dutch colony of Suriname after the Dutch signed a treaty with the United Kingdom on the recruitment of contract workers in 1870. In Mauritius, the Indian population are now demographically dominant, with Indian festivals being celebrated as national holidays.

This system prevailed until the early twentieth century. Increasing focus on the brutalities and abuses of the trade by the sensationalist media of the time, incited public outrage and lead to the official ending of the coolie trade in 1916 by the British government. By that time tens of thousands of Chinese workers were being used along the Western Front by the allied forces (see Chinese Labour Corps).

SEX RATIOS AND INTERMARRIAGE AMONG COOLIES

A major difference between the Chinese coolie trade and the Indian coolie trade was that the Chinese coolies were all male, while East Indian women (from India) were brought alongside men as coolies. This led to a high rate of Chinese men marrying women of other ethnicities like Indian women and mixed race Creole women. Indian women and children were brought alongside Indian men as coolies while Chinese men made up 99% of Chinese colonies. The contrast with the female to male ratio among Indian and Chinese immigrants has been compared by historians. In Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies just 18,731 Chinese women and 92,985 Chinese men served as coolies on plantations. Chinese women migrated less than Javanese and Indian women as indentured coolies. The number of Chinese women as coolies was "very small" while Chinese men were easily taken into the coolie trade. In Cuba men made up the vast majority of Chinese indentured servants on sugar plantations and in Peru non-Chinese women married the mostly male Chinese coolies.

Chinese women were scarce in every place where Chinese indentured laborers were brought, the migration was dominated by Chinese men. Up to the 1940s men made up the vast majority of the Costa Rican Chinese community. Males made up the majority of the original Chinese community in Mexico and they married Mexican women.

In the early 1900s, the Chinese communities in Manila, Singapore, Mauritius, New Zealand, Victoria in Australia, the United States, and Victoria in British Columbia in Canada were all male dominated.

WIKIPEDIA

Bartender was definitely overworked and underpaid today. (Her hair is just flying) An estimated 450,000 people crammed the streets in Lakeview East and Boystown during the 36th annual Chicago Pride Parade. Photo was taken inside The Closet Bar on N. Broadway, on Chicago’s north side.

The only post production was to crop my original photo

View On Black

Premium Loft, Studio M Hotel, Singapore

Indeed, she is worrying about my heath lately and obviously her mind isn't in peace neither. Tomorrow will be the last part of ECG scanning and the report will be out too, we are expecting the heart specialist to explain what actually went wrong during the first episode and the tilt test too.

A friend of mine sent me an article on "11-hour work days can harm your heart, study shows", especially one of the paragraph reported, "Working long days is associated with a remarkable increase in risk of heart disease," said Mika Kivimaki of Britain's University College London, who led the research. He said it may be a "wake-up call for people who overwork themselves." That said and make me start to believe that, my heart is acting strange after the running/jogging, it should be slow down the heartbeating apparently it takes ages to slow down. Given the fact that i have been in shift works for years and recently overloaded. And just like today, i have 14 hours sleep. Initially thought of having a short nap at 5pm evening and end up wake up in the next morning. That's truly shown how exhausts I am.

Just leave everything behind my mind now, not to think so much and always believe that phrase, "Let the nature take its course..." We will see what would the heart specialist advised and work it from there.

You must see this on large View On White and View On Black

----

P/s : This is new Camera Raw v6 editing, CS5 parts can be seen in the commentary too.

Philadelphia 2009 - Home

The battle of 2009 is etched into my face. Almost every waking minute was occupied with doing, planning, thinking and working. It was a seven day a week storm of opportunities, discoveries, setbacks, and mental realignments. In the end I won. I paid dearly in isolation, and in the deprivation of many of the things I love and enjoy. I learned a lot and it was all worth it. Now it's time for the healing.

This is picture I shot few years back of St Andrew Church Bandra Hill Road..my favorite and I had just got the hang of night photography..

I joined Flickr 10 June 2007.

I was a member earlier too but had deleted my account.

It was Monsieur El Gekko who led us here like the pied piper of Buzznet, and my elder son Asif Shakir presented me the Pro membership , and completed my pictorial formalities.

Flickr has been a blessing in disguise , as I was able to show my photography without text as I am an incorrigible photo blogger.

I was never a writer or a poet but the Blog Goddess sculpted me such.

I am hypersensitive to harsh criticism, that attack my country, my Shia faith or my race .

Most of my poems written at the poetry site were responses to such vicious vile and scurrilous attacks, as the management never paid heed even after writing poems to highlight my plight, I am not into competitive poetry nor competitive photography.

So reaching the top has never been my aim or my desire .

I am a very simple person, I believe any religion that harms humanity is no religion to subscribe too, what I do as rituals of my faith is my personal derivation , and should not bother anyone but radical elements.

I may write poems rubbishing women poets buts its only to tease, I may write I am married to 7 women and have 23 children, fact is I am married to a single woman for 30 years and have 3 kids and a recent addition of a grandchild Marziya Shakir, who completes 1 month on this auspicious day..

I am lucky to have some of the finest friends here at Flickr who have been a great help ,Ben Bell Df Duck DaVinca Neil Romanek,Yorrik , PPC,Poseyal, Killiweb Tom Andrews, Daikitora Lierdasim Pemh,Ameesh and hordes of them who read and see my pictures.

The recent incident almost the first of its kind at Flickr about people who hate Truth and who after having me deb bared at a poetry site for exposing White Racism,tried the same here at Flickr.

I am ready to accept any judgment and I am bound by a terms of Service contract but greater than that is one of respecting other members too.. without hurting anyone intentionally or intentionally.

I have since last two days overworked myself editing my poems and also deleting those that I wrote in a fit of anger at my detractors of my former poetry site..its stupendous task,and this was important as the battle ground was not Flickr..nor had I targeted Flickr members..

Even the poem I wrote on Anjali who had written foul comments on my post I deleted..I have decided racism exists its not about color but about a wicked mind super imposing its views on another mind from a different alien culture..

I have removed all my blogs from Flickr and third party searches till I remove all those poems that give importance to my detractors and add to my poetic notoriety.

So I have been quiet, as I treated Flickr as my home site by default I have to start from here , I have for the time being disabled my Word Press BlogSpot and Ipernity blogs..from public view.

Inconvenience is regretted.

I wish you all Flickr Support Management, my friends contacts who have helped me in my growth Merry Xmas and a very Happy New Year..

I end this with a poem on me written by eminent English poet David Hazell a fighter of human rights and against artistic injustice and Racism..He wrote this poem at my former poetry site forum, a poem that showed that even after leaving I am bad mouthed called vile names by one or two women who hate me for showing their true xenophobic poetic hate for a brown Indian poet, who had reached the top of a White Mans ceiling.. luckily overflew a Cuckoos nest..

David Hazell (12/23/2007 7:54:00 AM) Post reply | Read 1 reply

Firoze Shakir, the noblest of men

When will we e’er see HIS like again?

Like Jesus himself HE stands aloof,

Crucified for speaking truth.

Hounded by drunken cockhunter hags,

Parrot faced cows who have had their last shags.

Spat on by racists who poeticise

That they are not racists, but thin, their disguise.

Puerile their poetry, shallow their hearts.

Passionless prattle, penned by wet farts.

Morons menopausal, with droopy old dugs

And foul fascist bastards who trail slime like slugs.

Cowardly gangsters, who spit from the crowd,

Heartless and mindless, they weave the saint’s shroud.

Firoze, is a champion of those oppressed,

By ravening wolves, who in lambskin are dressed.

But death hath not dominion, HE shall return!

And cleanse with HIS love, those who righteousness spurn.

REPENT NOW! Ye demons whose purpose is fell.

Or be cursed in your bile

To spend Christmas

In HELL!

David Hazell

Comments n this poem..

www.poemhunter.com/forum/discussion.asp?forum=1007&pa...

Betsy Stangle (12/23/2007 1:21:00 PM) Post reply | Read 1 reply

If you truly believe this dribble than you are as bad as if not worse than him. He was the racist, the only one on the site. He had no morals, at least any that were evident to any on here and may be shown by the fact that he has seven wives, which is called bigomy. He is not missed and he did all in his power to put over 75 per cent of the good writers in here in a 'living hell.'

Read what you've just written, It's disgusting. Anyhow he's already snuck back in using one of his other names Vickram or Vickam or something like that. Also a couple nights ago he tried a new one...Melody Maker or some such name in which he was stupid enough to post a poem, first I think, with his phrase Bollywood in it. The fact that he's in the Forum writing to himself is sick. Seven wives, my arse, he couldn't service one for he is always on a computer. Never mind go to work and earn a living to support them.

I hope PH reads the disgusting poem you've written above that I'm commenting on. Read it sir, for you are the only one other than the various FS in all his disguises and full of BILE. You are worse than Scrooge.As to hell it won't be people at PH who will be in but perhaps ones like you and him should consider it as a place that would welcome your filty rantings and give you it's warmest spot in that deep burning hole.

Betsy Stangle (12/23/2007 1:37:00 PM) Post reply

He had that name before he stopped posting under Love Poetry hate racism [actually he loves racism as he's the only racist on site as it's all he talks about] and used it to write comments on himself. Of course, we all know of another man here who did that as well but at least he was not a vile, disgusting. He was a good human just insecure. He had another new one the other night too. He's never left, never...How in the world can he be on here at all hours and working to support seven wives and too many kids to count. How, because not one woman in the universe would marry such perverted filth. He is here to try and ruin Christmas for us. He is either Scrooge reincarnated or Osama Bin Laden has finally been found. Best let President Bush know as well as PH.

Elysabeth Faslund (12/23/2007 9:32:00 AM) Post reply | Read 1 reply

His 'new' 'name' is this 'Vikraim'....be happy...

To PH Managemt

I am out of PH I dont need to come by the back door told to you several times, I cannot be in Mumbai and In cardiff at the same time I am not Vikram or anyone else .

It hurts the way this lady Betsy Stangle and Elysabeth Faslund have tarnished my name and I cannot even defend myself.. this is nothing but pure racism to my memory as a former Poem Hunter member..

Please rein them or warn them atleast ..

I am disgusted at their ongoing rantings of hate for me.

Firoze Shakir

Betsy Stangle Female, 37, United States (12/23/2007 1:31:00 PM)

(This massage was posted as a reply to that message) to vikram

She is not BETSY, I AM, you fool and yes you are him and we all, people in here on site and in here know it and guess what now PH does as well. You are also the guy from Thursday or Friday, Melody something...remember, you took one of your own names 'Bollywoood' and put it in there.

You won't bother us at PH for no one cares to be associated with the one racist on here and that is you. You are a pathetic excuse for a human being and that's being kind. You have cheated your way through the IP's so that none of the poets who should be there, want to be anymore. Not with Love Poetry and Firoze Shakir on their list.

So go to the Photo Porno site that you as Fizore said on here that that is what you wanted PH to become. Your names may be on the list, but no one clicks on you that knew who you are, still are.

So have fun typing to yourself and your alter ego David Hazell and the crazed 87 year old Sherrie who spends all day filling the pages here with useless dribble.

Know this, you have messed with the wrong people. There are people on this site who do have personal contact with PH and do have good legal representation where money is no obstacle, so have at it for your goose will be cooked. Don't worry know one here wants you as their Christmas Goose.

my message sent to the poetry management..

Why don't you put some moderation at your poem hunter forum...

Its time you put some control and reined such talk cancerous disease that has set in by these two virulent ladies Elysabeth Faslund and Betsy Stangle

Like me thousand others are reading all the forum quotes..

Its time you took a serious stand..

Firoze Shakir

A coolie (alternatively spelled cooli, cooly, quli, koelie, and other such variations), during the 19th and early 20th century, was a term for a locally sourced unskilled labourer hired by a company, mainly from the Indian subcontinent or Southern China.

Today, it is used varyingly as a legal inoffensive word (for example, in India for helpers carrying luggage in railway stations) and also used as a racial slur in Africa for certain people from Asia, particularly in South Africa

ETYMOLOGY

The origins of the word are uncertain but it is thought to have originated from the name of a Gujarati sect (the Kolī, who worked as day labourers) or perhaps from the Tamil word for a payment for work, kuli (கூலி). An alternative etymological explanation is that the word came from the Urdu qulī (क़ुली, قلی), which itself could be from the Turkish word for slave, qul. The word was used in this sense for labourers from India. In 1727, Dr. Engelbert Kämpfer described "coolies" as dock labourers who would unload Dutch merchant ships at Nagasaki in Japan.

The Chinese word 苦力 (pinyin: kǔlì) literally means "bitterly hard (use of) strength", in the Mandarin pronunciation.

HISTORY OF THE COOLIE TRADE

An early trade in Asian labourers is believed to have begun sometime in or around the 16th century. Social and political pressure led to the abolition of the slave trade throughout the British Empire in 1807, with other European nations following suit. Labour-intensive industries, such as cotton and sugar plantations, mines and railway construction, in the colonies were left without a cheap source of manpower. As a consequence, a large scale slavery-like trade in Asian (primarily Indian and Chinese) indentured labourers began in the 1820s to fill this vacuum. Some of these labourers signed contracts based on misleading promises, some were kidnapped and sold into the trade, some were victims of clan violence whose captors sold them to coolie brokers, while others sold themselves to pay off gambling debts. British companies were the first to experiment with this potential new form of cheap labour in 1807, when they imported 200 Chinese men to work in Trinidad.

The coolie trade was often compared to the earlier slave trade and they accomplished very similar things.

Although there are reports of ships for Asian coolies carrying women and children, the great majority of them were men. Finally, regulations were put in place, as early as 1837 by the British authorities in India to safeguard these principles of voluntary, contractual work and safe and sanitary transportation although in practice this rarely occurred especially during examples such as the Pacific Passage or the Guano Pits of Peru. The Chinese government also made efforts to secure the well-being of their nation's workers, with representations being made to relevant governments around the world.

CHINESE COOLIES

Workers from China were mainly transported to work in Peru and Cuba, but they also worked in British colonies such as Jamaica, British Guiana (now Guyana), British Malaya, Trinidad and Tobago, British Honduras (now Belize) and in the Dutch colonies Dutch East Indies and Suriname. The first shipment of Chinese labourers was to the British colony of Trinidad in 1806.

In 1847 two ships from Cuba transported workers to Havana to work in the sugar cane fields from the port of Xiamen, one of the five Chinese treaty ports opened to the British by the Treaty of Nanking in 1842. The trade soon spread to other ports in Guangdong province and demand became particularly strong in Peru for workers in the silver mines and the guano collecting industry. Australia began importing workers in 1848 and the United States began using them in 1865 on the First Transcontinental Railroad construction. These workers were deceived about their terms of employment to a much greater extent than their Indian counterparts, and consequently, there was a much higher level of Chinese emigration during this period.

The trade flourished from 1847 to 1854 without incident, until reports began to surface of the mistreatment of the workers in Cuba and Peru. As the British government had political and legal responsibility for many of the ports involved, including Amoy, the trade was shut down at these places. However, the trade simply shifted to the more accommodating port in the Portuguese enclave of Macau.

Many coolies were first deceived or kidnapped and then kept in barracoons (detention centres) or loading vessels in the ports of departure, as were African slaves. In 1875, British commissioners estimated that approximately eighty percent of the workers had been abducted. Their voyages, which are sometimes called the Pacific Passage, were as inhumane and dangerous as the notorious Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade. Mortality was very high. For example, it is estimated that from 1847 to 1859, the average mortality for coolies aboard ships to Cuba was 15.2 percent, and losses among those aboard ships to Peru were 40 percent in the 1850s and 30.44 percent from 1860 to 1863.

They were sold and were taken to work in plantations or mines with very bad living and working conditions. The duration of a contract was typically five to eight years, but many coolies did not live out their term of service because of the hard labour and mistreatment. Those who did live were often forced to remain in servitude beyond the contracted period. The coolies who worked on the sugar plantations in Cuba and in the guano beds of the Chincha Islands (the islands of Hell) of Peru were treated brutally. Seventy-five percent of the Chinese coolies in Cuba died before fulfilling their contracts. More than two-thirds of the Chinese coolies who arrived in Peru between 1849 and 1874 died within the contract period. In 1860 it was calculated that of the 4000 coolies brought to the Chinchas since the trade began, not one had survived.

Because of these unbearable conditions, Chinese coolies often revolted against their Ko-Hung bosses and foreign company bosses at ports of departure, on ships, and in foreign lands. The coolies were put in the same neighbourhoods as Africans and, since most were unable to return to their homeland or have their wives come to the New World, many married African women. The coolies' interracial relationships and marriages with Africans, Europeans and Indigenous peoples, formed some of the modern world's Afro-Asian and Asian Latin American populations.

Chinese immigration to the United States was almost entirely voluntary, but working and social conditions were still harsh. In 1868, the Burlingame Treaty allowed unrestricted Chinese immigration into the country. Within a decade significant levels of anti-Chinese sentiment had built up, stoked by populists such as Denis Kearney with racist slogans - "To an American, death is preferable to life on a par with the Chinese."

Although Chinese workers contributed to the building of the first Transcontinental Railroad in the United States and of the Canadian Pacific Railway in western Canada, Chinese settlement was discouraged after completion of the construction. California's Anti-Coolie Act of 1862 and the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 contributed to the curtailment of Chinese immigration to the United States.

Notwithstanding such attempts to restrict the influx of cheap labour from China, beginning in the 1870s Chinese workers helped construct a vast network of levees in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. These levees made thousands of acres of fertile marshlands available for agricultural production.

The 1879 Constitution of the State of California declared that "Asiatic coolieism is a form of human slavery, and is forever prohibited in this State, and all contracts for coolie labour shall be void."

Colonos asiáticos is a Spanish term for coolies. The Spanish colony of Cuba feared slavery uprisings such as those that took place in Haiti and used coolies as a transition between slaves and free labor. They were neither free nor slaves. Indentured Chinese servants also labored in the sugarcane fields of Cuba well after the 1884 abolition of slavery in that country. Two scholars of Chinese labor in Cuba, Juan Pastrana and Juan Perez de la Riva, substantiated horrific conditions of Chinese coolies in Cuba and stated that coolies were slaves in all but name. Denise Helly is one researcher who believes that despite their slave-like treatment, the free and legal status of the Asian laborers in Cuba separated them from slaves. The coolies could challenge their superiors, run away, petition government officials, and rebel according to Rodriguez Pastor and Trazegnies Granda. Once they had fulfilled their contracts the colonos asiáticos integrated into the countries of Peru, The Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Cuba. They adopted cultural traditions from the natives and also welcomed in non-Chinese to experience and participate into their own traditions. Before the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Havana had Latin America's largest Chinatown.

In South America, Chinese indentured labourers worked in Peru's silver mines and coastal industries (i.e., guano, sugar, and cotton) from the early 1850s to the mid-1870s; about 100,000 people immigrated as indentured workers. They participated in the War of the Pacific, looting and burning down the haciendas where they worked, after the capture of Lima by the invading Chilean army in January 1880. Some 2000 coolies even joined the Chilean Army in Peru, taking care of the wounded and burying the dead. Others were sent by Chileans to work in the newly conquered nitrate fields.

The Chinese Engineering and Mining Corporation, of which later U.S. president Herbert Hoover was a director, was instrumental in supplying Chinese coolie labour to South African mines from c.1902 to c.1910 at the request of mine owners, who considered such labour cheaper than native African and white labour. The horrendous conditions suffered by the coolie labourers led to questions in the British parliament as recorded in Hansard.

In 1866, the British, French and Chinese governments agreed to mitigate the abuse by requiring all traders to pay for the return of all workers after their contract ended. The employers in the British West Indies declined these conditions, bringing the trade there to an end. Until the trade was finally abolished in 1875, over 150,000 coolies had been sold to Cuba alone, the majority having been shipped from Macau. These labourers endured conditions far worse than those experienced by their Indian counterparts. Even after the 1866 reforms, the scale of abuse and conditions of near slavery did not get any better - if anything they deteriorated. In the early 1870s increased media exposure of the trade led to a public outcry, and the British, as well as the Qing government, put pressure on the Portuguese authorities to bring the trade at Macau to an end; this was ultimately achieved in 1874. By that time, a total of up to half a million Chinese workers had been exported.

The term coolie was also applied to Chinese workers recruited for contracts on cacao plantations in German Samoa. German planters went to great lengths to secure access to their "coolie" labour supply from China. In 1908 a Chinese commissioner, Lin Shu Fen, reported on the cruel treatment of coolie workers on German plantations in the western Samoan Islands. The trade began largely after the establishment of colonial German Samoa in 1900 and lasted until the arrival of New Zealand forces in 1914. More than 2000 Chinese "coolies" were present in the islands in 1914 and most were eventually repatriated by the New Zealand administration.

INDIAN COOLIES

By the 1820s, many Indians were voluntarily enlisting to go abroad for work, in the hopes of a better life. European merchants and businessmen quickly took advantage of this and began recruiting them for work as a cheap source of labour. The British began shipping Indians to colonies around the world, including Mauritius, Fiji, Natal, British East Africa, and British Malaya. The Dutch also shipped workers to labour on the plantations on Suriname and the Dutch East Indies. A system of agents was used to infiltrate the rural villages of India and recruit labourers. They would often deceive the credulous workers about the great opportunities that awaited them for their own material betterment abroad. The Indians primarily came from the Indo-Gangetic Plain, but also from Tamil Nadu and other areas to the south of the country.

Without permission from the British authorities, the French attempted to illegally transport Indian workers to their sugar producing colony, the Reunion Island, from as early as 1826. By 1830, over 3000 labourers had been transported. After this trade was discovered, the French successfully negotiated with the British in 1860 for permission to transport over 6,000 workers annually, on condition that the trade would be suspended if abuses were discovered to be taking place.

The British began to transport Indians to Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, starting in 1829. Slavery had been abolished with the planters receiving two million pounds sterling in compensation for the loss of their slaves. The planters turned to bringing in a large number of indentured labourers from India to work in the sugar cane fields. Between 1834 and 1921, around half a million indentured labourers were present on the island. They worked on sugar estates, factories, in transport and on construction sites.

In 1837, the Raj issued a set of regulations for the trade. The rules provided for each labourer to be personally authorised for transportation by an officer designated by the Government, it limited the length of service to five years subject to voluntary renewal, it made the contractor responsible for returning the worker after the contract elapsed and required the vessels to conform to basic health standards

Despite this, conditions on the ships were often extremely crowded, with rampant disease and malnutrition. The workers were paid a pittance for their labour, and were expected to work in often awful and harsh conditions. Although there were no large scale scandals involving coolie abuse in British colonies, workers often ended up being forced to work, and manipulated in such a way that they became dependent on the plantation owners so that in practice they remained there long after their contracts expired; possibly as little as 10% of the coolies actually returned to their original country of origin. Colonial legislation was also passed to severely limit their freedoms; in Mauritius a compulsory pass system was instituted to enable their movements to be easily tracked. Conditions were much worse in the French colonies of Reunion and Guadeloupe and Martinique, where workers were 'systematically overworked' and abnormally high mortality rates were recorded for those working in the mines.

However, there were also attempts by the British authorities to regulate and mitigate the worst abuses. Workers were regularly checked up on by health inspectors, and they were vetted before transportation to ensure that they were suitably healthy and fit to be able to endure the rigours of labour. Children under the age of 15 were not allowed to be transported from their parents under any circumstances.

The first campaign against the 'coolie' trade in England likened the system of indentured labour to the slavery of the past. In response to this pressure, the labour export was temporarily stopped in 1839 by the authorities when the scale of the abuses became known, but it was soon renewed due to its growing economic importance. A more rigorous regulatory framework was put into place and severe penalties were imposed for infractions in 1842. In that year, almost 35,000 people were shipped to Mauritius.

In 1844, the trade was expanded to the colonies in the West Indies, including Jamaica, Trinidad and Demerara, where the Asian population was soon a major component of the island demographic.

Starting in 1879, many Indians were transported to Fiji to work on the sugar cane plantations. Many of them chose to stay after their term of indenture elapsed and today they number about 40% of the total population. Indian workers were also imported into the Dutch colony of Suriname after the Dutch signed a treaty with the United Kingdom on the recruitment of contract workers in 1870. In Mauritius, the Indian population are now demographically dominant, with Indian festivals being celebrated as national holidays.

This system prevailed until the early twentieth century. Increasing focus on the brutalities and abuses of the trade by the sensationalist media of the time, incited public outrage and lead to the official ending of the coolie trade in 1916 by the British government. By that time tens of thousands of Chinese workers were being used along the Western Front by the allied forces (see Chinese Labour Corps).

SEX RATIOS AND INTERMARRIAGE AMONG COOLIES

A major difference between the Chinese coolie trade and the Indian coolie trade was that the Chinese coolies were all male, while East Indian women (from India) were brought alongside men as coolies. This led to a high rate of Chinese men marrying women of other ethnicities like Indian women and mixed race Creole women. Indian women and children were brought alongside Indian men as coolies while Chinese men made up 99% of Chinese colonies. The contrast with the female to male ratio among Indian and Chinese immigrants has been compared by historians. In Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies just 18,731 Chinese women and 92,985 Chinese men served as coolies on plantations. Chinese women migrated less than Javanese and Indian women as indentured coolies. The number of Chinese women as coolies was "very small" while Chinese men were easily taken into the coolie trade. In Cuba men made up the vast majority of Chinese indentured servants on sugar plantations and in Peru non-Chinese women married the mostly male Chinese coolies.

Chinese women were scarce in every place where Chinese indentured laborers were brought, the migration was dominated by Chinese men. Up to the 1940s men made up the vast majority of the Costa Rican Chinese community. Males made up the majority of the original Chinese community in Mexico and they married Mexican women.

In the early 1900s, the Chinese communities in Manila, Singapore, Mauritius, New Zealand, Victoria in Australia, the United States, and Victoria in British Columbia in Canada were all male dominated.

WIKIPEDIA

On arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau the trains would pull up on the unloading ramp in front of the awaiting SS officers and guards, kapos and the Sonderkommando.

The Jews were thrown out of the railway wagons and made to leave their belongings behind them. They were then ordered to form lines ready for the selection process. This was when the Nazis selected which Jews would be sent straight to their deaths in the gas chambers and which Jews would remain alive temporarily.

More than 80 per cent of those who arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau were murdered at once. The majority of the remainder died as a result of overwork, ill-treatment, disease or lack of food.

A coolie (alternatively spelled cooli, cooly, quli, koelie, and other such variations), during the 19th and early 20th century, was a term for a locally sourced unskilled labourer hired by a company, mainly from the Indian subcontinent or Southern China.

Today, it is used varyingly as a legal inoffensive word (for example, in India for helpers carrying luggage in railway stations) and also used as a racial slur in Africa for certain people from Asia, particularly in South Africa

ETYMOLOGY

The origins of the word are uncertain but it is thought to have originated from the name of a Gujarati sect (the Kolī, who worked as day labourers) or perhaps from the Tamil word for a payment for work, kuli (கூலி). An alternative etymological explanation is that the word came from the Urdu qulī (क़ुली, قلی), which itself could be from the Turkish word for slave, qul. The word was used in this sense for labourers from India. In 1727, Dr. Engelbert Kämpfer described "coolies" as dock labourers who would unload Dutch merchant ships at Nagasaki in Japan.

The Chinese word 苦力 (pinyin: kǔlì) literally means "bitterly hard (use of) strength", in the Mandarin pronunciation.

HISTORY OF THE COOLIE TRADE

An early trade in Asian labourers is believed to have begun sometime in or around the 16th century. Social and political pressure led to the abolition of the slave trade throughout the British Empire in 1807, with other European nations following suit. Labour-intensive industries, such as cotton and sugar plantations, mines and railway construction, in the colonies were left without a cheap source of manpower. As a consequence, a large scale slavery-like trade in Asian (primarily Indian and Chinese) indentured labourers began in the 1820s to fill this vacuum. Some of these labourers signed contracts based on misleading promises, some were kidnapped and sold into the trade, some were victims of clan violence whose captors sold them to coolie brokers, while others sold themselves to pay off gambling debts. British companies were the first to experiment with this potential new form of cheap labour in 1807, when they imported 200 Chinese men to work in Trinidad.

The coolie trade was often compared to the earlier slave trade and they accomplished very similar things.

Although there are reports of ships for Asian coolies carrying women and children, the great majority of them were men. Finally, regulations were put in place, as early as 1837 by the British authorities in India to safeguard these principles of voluntary, contractual work and safe and sanitary transportation although in practice this rarely occurred especially during examples such as the Pacific Passage or the Guano Pits of Peru. The Chinese government also made efforts to secure the well-being of their nation's workers, with representations being made to relevant governments around the world.

CHINESE COOLIES

Workers from China were mainly transported to work in Peru and Cuba, but they also worked in British colonies such as Jamaica, British Guiana (now Guyana), British Malaya, Trinidad and Tobago, British Honduras (now Belize) and in the Dutch colonies Dutch East Indies and Suriname. The first shipment of Chinese labourers was to the British colony of Trinidad in 1806.

In 1847 two ships from Cuba transported workers to Havana to work in the sugar cane fields from the port of Xiamen, one of the five Chinese treaty ports opened to the British by the Treaty of Nanking in 1842. The trade soon spread to other ports in Guangdong province and demand became particularly strong in Peru for workers in the silver mines and the guano collecting industry. Australia began importing workers in 1848 and the United States began using them in 1865 on the First Transcontinental Railroad construction. These workers were deceived about their terms of employment to a much greater extent than their Indian counterparts, and consequently, there was a much higher level of Chinese emigration during this period.

The trade flourished from 1847 to 1854 without incident, until reports began to surface of the mistreatment of the workers in Cuba and Peru. As the British government had political and legal responsibility for many of the ports involved, including Amoy, the trade was shut down at these places. However, the trade simply shifted to the more accommodating port in the Portuguese enclave of Macau.

Many coolies were first deceived or kidnapped and then kept in barracoons (detention centres) or loading vessels in the ports of departure, as were African slaves. In 1875, British commissioners estimated that approximately eighty percent of the workers had been abducted. Their voyages, which are sometimes called the Pacific Passage, were as inhumane and dangerous as the notorious Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade. Mortality was very high. For example, it is estimated that from 1847 to 1859, the average mortality for coolies aboard ships to Cuba was 15.2 percent, and losses among those aboard ships to Peru were 40 percent in the 1850s and 30.44 percent from 1860 to 1863.

They were sold and were taken to work in plantations or mines with very bad living and working conditions. The duration of a contract was typically five to eight years, but many coolies did not live out their term of service because of the hard labour and mistreatment. Those who did live were often forced to remain in servitude beyond the contracted period. The coolies who worked on the sugar plantations in Cuba and in the guano beds of the Chincha Islands (the islands of Hell) of Peru were treated brutally. Seventy-five percent of the Chinese coolies in Cuba died before fulfilling their contracts. More than two-thirds of the Chinese coolies who arrived in Peru between 1849 and 1874 died within the contract period. In 1860 it was calculated that of the 4000 coolies brought to the Chinchas since the trade began, not one had survived.

Because of these unbearable conditions, Chinese coolies often revolted against their Ko-Hung bosses and foreign company bosses at ports of departure, on ships, and in foreign lands. The coolies were put in the same neighbourhoods as Africans and, since most were unable to return to their homeland or have their wives come to the New World, many married African women. The coolies' interracial relationships and marriages with Africans, Europeans and Indigenous peoples, formed some of the modern world's Afro-Asian and Asian Latin American populations.

Chinese immigration to the United States was almost entirely voluntary, but working and social conditions were still harsh. In 1868, the Burlingame Treaty allowed unrestricted Chinese immigration into the country. Within a decade significant levels of anti-Chinese sentiment had built up, stoked by populists such as Denis Kearney with racist slogans - "To an American, death is preferable to life on a par with the Chinese."

Although Chinese workers contributed to the building of the first Transcontinental Railroad in the United States and of the Canadian Pacific Railway in western Canada, Chinese settlement was discouraged after completion of the construction. California's Anti-Coolie Act of 1862 and the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 contributed to the curtailment of Chinese immigration to the United States.

Notwithstanding such attempts to restrict the influx of cheap labour from China, beginning in the 1870s Chinese workers helped construct a vast network of levees in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. These levees made thousands of acres of fertile marshlands available for agricultural production.

The 1879 Constitution of the State of California declared that "Asiatic coolieism is a form of human slavery, and is forever prohibited in this State, and all contracts for coolie labour shall be void."

Colonos asiáticos is a Spanish term for coolies. The Spanish colony of Cuba feared slavery uprisings such as those that took place in Haiti and used coolies as a transition between slaves and free labor. They were neither free nor slaves. Indentured Chinese servants also labored in the sugarcane fields of Cuba well after the 1884 abolition of slavery in that country. Two scholars of Chinese labor in Cuba, Juan Pastrana and Juan Perez de la Riva, substantiated horrific conditions of Chinese coolies in Cuba and stated that coolies were slaves in all but name. Denise Helly is one researcher who believes that despite their slave-like treatment, the free and legal status of the Asian laborers in Cuba separated them from slaves. The coolies could challenge their superiors, run away, petition government officials, and rebel according to Rodriguez Pastor and Trazegnies Granda. Once they had fulfilled their contracts the colonos asiáticos integrated into the countries of Peru, The Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Cuba. They adopted cultural traditions from the natives and also welcomed in non-Chinese to experience and participate into their own traditions. Before the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Havana had Latin America's largest Chinatown.

In South America, Chinese indentured labourers worked in Peru's silver mines and coastal industries (i.e., guano, sugar, and cotton) from the early 1850s to the mid-1870s; about 100,000 people immigrated as indentured workers. They participated in the War of the Pacific, looting and burning down the haciendas where they worked, after the capture of Lima by the invading Chilean army in January 1880. Some 2000 coolies even joined the Chilean Army in Peru, taking care of the wounded and burying the dead. Others were sent by Chileans to work in the newly conquered nitrate fields.

The Chinese Engineering and Mining Corporation, of which later U.S. president Herbert Hoover was a director, was instrumental in supplying Chinese coolie labour to South African mines from c.1902 to c.1910 at the request of mine owners, who considered such labour cheaper than native African and white labour. The horrendous conditions suffered by the coolie labourers led to questions in the British parliament as recorded in Hansard.

In 1866, the British, French and Chinese governments agreed to mitigate the abuse by requiring all traders to pay for the return of all workers after their contract ended. The employers in the British West Indies declined these conditions, bringing the trade there to an end. Until the trade was finally abolished in 1875, over 150,000 coolies had been sold to Cuba alone, the majority having been shipped from Macau. These labourers endured conditions far worse than those experienced by their Indian counterparts. Even after the 1866 reforms, the scale of abuse and conditions of near slavery did not get any better - if anything they deteriorated. In the early 1870s increased media exposure of the trade led to a public outcry, and the British, as well as the Qing government, put pressure on the Portuguese authorities to bring the trade at Macau to an end; this was ultimately achieved in 1874. By that time, a total of up to half a million Chinese workers had been exported.

The term coolie was also applied to Chinese workers recruited for contracts on cacao plantations in German Samoa. German planters went to great lengths to secure access to their "coolie" labour supply from China. In 1908 a Chinese commissioner, Lin Shu Fen, reported on the cruel treatment of coolie workers on German plantations in the western Samoan Islands. The trade began largely after the establishment of colonial German Samoa in 1900 and lasted until the arrival of New Zealand forces in 1914. More than 2000 Chinese "coolies" were present in the islands in 1914 and most were eventually repatriated by the New Zealand administration.

INDIAN COOLIES

By the 1820s, many Indians were voluntarily enlisting to go abroad for work, in the hopes of a better life. European merchants and businessmen quickly took advantage of this and began recruiting them for work as a cheap source of labour. The British began shipping Indians to colonies around the world, including Mauritius, Fiji, Natal, British East Africa, and British Malaya. The Dutch also shipped workers to labour on the plantations on Suriname and the Dutch East Indies. A system of agents was used to infiltrate the rural villages of India and recruit labourers. They would often deceive the credulous workers about the great opportunities that awaited them for their own material betterment abroad. The Indians primarily came from the Indo-Gangetic Plain, but also from Tamil Nadu and other areas to the south of the country.

Without permission from the British authorities, the French attempted to illegally transport Indian workers to their sugar producing colony, the Reunion Island, from as early as 1826. By 1830, over 3000 labourers had been transported. After this trade was discovered, the French successfully negotiated with the British in 1860 for permission to transport over 6,000 workers annually, on condition that the trade would be suspended if abuses were discovered to be taking place.

The British began to transport Indians to Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, starting in 1829. Slavery had been abolished with the planters receiving two million pounds sterling in compensation for the loss of their slaves. The planters turned to bringing in a large number of indentured labourers from India to work in the sugar cane fields. Between 1834 and 1921, around half a million indentured labourers were present on the island. They worked on sugar estates, factories, in transport and on construction sites.

In 1837, the Raj issued a set of regulations for the trade. The rules provided for each labourer to be personally authorised for transportation by an officer designated by the Government, it limited the length of service to five years subject to voluntary renewal, it made the contractor responsible for returning the worker after the contract elapsed and required the vessels to conform to basic health standards

Despite this, conditions on the ships were often extremely crowded, with rampant disease and malnutrition. The workers were paid a pittance for their labour, and were expected to work in often awful and harsh conditions. Although there were no large scale scandals involving coolie abuse in British colonies, workers often ended up being forced to work, and manipulated in such a way that they became dependent on the plantation owners so that in practice they remained there long after their contracts expired; possibly as little as 10% of the coolies actually returned to their original country of origin. Colonial legislation was also passed to severely limit their freedoms; in Mauritius a compulsory pass system was instituted to enable their movements to be easily tracked. Conditions were much worse in the French colonies of Reunion and Guadeloupe and Martinique, where workers were 'systematically overworked' and abnormally high mortality rates were recorded for those working in the mines.

However, there were also attempts by the British authorities to regulate and mitigate the worst abuses. Workers were regularly checked up on by health inspectors, and they were vetted before transportation to ensure that they were suitably healthy and fit to be able to endure the rigours of labour. Children under the age of 15 were not allowed to be transported from their parents under any circumstances.

The first campaign against the 'coolie' trade in England likened the system of indentured labour to the slavery of the past. In response to this pressure, the labour export was temporarily stopped in 1839 by the authorities when the scale of the abuses became known, but it was soon renewed due to its growing economic importance. A more rigorous regulatory framework was put into place and severe penalties were imposed for infractions in 1842. In that year, almost 35,000 people were shipped to Mauritius.

In 1844, the trade was expanded to the colonies in the West Indies, including Jamaica, Trinidad and Demerara, where the Asian population was soon a major component of the island demographic.

Starting in 1879, many Indians were transported to Fiji to work on the sugar cane plantations. Many of them chose to stay after their term of indenture elapsed and today they number about 40% of the total population. Indian workers were also imported into the Dutch colony of Suriname after the Dutch signed a treaty with the United Kingdom on the recruitment of contract workers in 1870. In Mauritius, the Indian population are now demographically dominant, with Indian festivals being celebrated as national holidays.

This system prevailed until the early twentieth century. Increasing focus on the brutalities and abuses of the trade by the sensationalist media of the time, incited public outrage and lead to the official ending of the coolie trade in 1916 by the British government. By that time tens of thousands of Chinese workers were being used along the Western Front by the allied forces (see Chinese Labour Corps).

SEX RATIOS AND INTERMARRIAGE AMONG COOLIES

A major difference between the Chinese coolie trade and the Indian coolie trade was that the Chinese coolies were all male, while East Indian women (from India) were brought alongside men as coolies. This led to a high rate of Chinese men marrying women of other ethnicities like Indian women and mixed race Creole women. Indian women and children were brought alongside Indian men as coolies while Chinese men made up 99% of Chinese colonies. The contrast with the female to male ratio among Indian and Chinese immigrants has been compared by historians. In Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies just 18,731 Chinese women and 92,985 Chinese men served as coolies on plantations. Chinese women migrated less than Javanese and Indian women as indentured coolies. The number of Chinese women as coolies was "very small" while Chinese men were easily taken into the coolie trade. In Cuba men made up the vast majority of Chinese indentured servants on sugar plantations and in Peru non-Chinese women married the mostly male Chinese coolies.

Chinese women were scarce in every place where Chinese indentured laborers were brought, the migration was dominated by Chinese men. Up to the 1940s men made up the vast majority of the Costa Rican Chinese community. Males made up the majority of the original Chinese community in Mexico and they married Mexican women.

In the early 1900s, the Chinese communities in Manila, Singapore, Mauritius, New Zealand, Victoria in Australia, the United States, and Victoria in British Columbia in Canada were all male dominated.

WIKIPEDIA

A coolie (alternatively spelled cooli, cooly, quli, koelie, and other such variations), during the 19th and early 20th century, was a term for a locally sourced unskilled labourer hired by a company, mainly from the Indian subcontinent or Southern China.

Today, it is used varyingly as a legal inoffensive word (for example, in India for helpers carrying luggage in railway stations) and also used as a racial slur in Africa for certain people from Asia, particularly in South Africa

ETYMOLOGY

The origins of the word are uncertain but it is thought to have originated from the name of a Gujarati sect (the Kolī, who worked as day labourers) or perhaps from the Tamil word for a payment for work, kuli (கூலி). An alternative etymological explanation is that the word came from the Urdu qulī (क़ुली, قلی), which itself could be from the Turkish word for slave, qul. The word was used in this sense for labourers from India. In 1727, Dr. Engelbert Kämpfer described "coolies" as dock labourers who would unload Dutch merchant ships at Nagasaki in Japan.

The Chinese word 苦力 (pinyin: kǔlì) literally means "bitterly hard (use of) strength", in the Mandarin pronunciation.

HISTORY OF THE COOLIE TRADE

An early trade in Asian labourers is believed to have begun sometime in or around the 16th century. Social and political pressure led to the abolition of the slave trade throughout the British Empire in 1807, with other European nations following suit. Labour-intensive industries, such as cotton and sugar plantations, mines and railway construction, in the colonies were left without a cheap source of manpower. As a consequence, a large scale slavery-like trade in Asian (primarily Indian and Chinese) indentured labourers began in the 1820s to fill this vacuum. Some of these labourers signed contracts based on misleading promises, some were kidnapped and sold into the trade, some were victims of clan violence whose captors sold them to coolie brokers, while others sold themselves to pay off gambling debts. British companies were the first to experiment with this potential new form of cheap labour in 1807, when they imported 200 Chinese men to work in Trinidad.

The coolie trade was often compared to the earlier slave trade and they accomplished very similar things.

Although there are reports of ships for Asian coolies carrying women and children, the great majority of them were men. Finally, regulations were put in place, as early as 1837 by the British authorities in India to safeguard these principles of voluntary, contractual work and safe and sanitary transportation although in practice this rarely occurred especially during examples such as the Pacific Passage or the Guano Pits of Peru. The Chinese government also made efforts to secure the well-being of their nation's workers, with representations being made to relevant governments around the world.

CHINESE COOLIES

Workers from China were mainly transported to work in Peru and Cuba, but they also worked in British colonies such as Jamaica, British Guiana (now Guyana), British Malaya, Trinidad and Tobago, British Honduras (now Belize) and in the Dutch colonies Dutch East Indies and Suriname. The first shipment of Chinese labourers was to the British colony of Trinidad in 1806.

In 1847 two ships from Cuba transported workers to Havana to work in the sugar cane fields from the port of Xiamen, one of the five Chinese treaty ports opened to the British by the Treaty of Nanking in 1842. The trade soon spread to other ports in Guangdong province and demand became particularly strong in Peru for workers in the silver mines and the guano collecting industry. Australia began importing workers in 1848 and the United States began using them in 1865 on the First Transcontinental Railroad construction. These workers were deceived about their terms of employment to a much greater extent than their Indian counterparts, and consequently, there was a much higher level of Chinese emigration during this period.

The trade flourished from 1847 to 1854 without incident, until reports began to surface of the mistreatment of the workers in Cuba and Peru. As the British government had political and legal responsibility for many of the ports involved, including Amoy, the trade was shut down at these places. However, the trade simply shifted to the more accommodating port in the Portuguese enclave of Macau.

Many coolies were first deceived or kidnapped and then kept in barracoons (detention centres) or loading vessels in the ports of departure, as were African slaves. In 1875, British commissioners estimated that approximately eighty percent of the workers had been abducted. Their voyages, which are sometimes called the Pacific Passage, were as inhumane and dangerous as the notorious Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade. Mortality was very high. For example, it is estimated that from 1847 to 1859, the average mortality for coolies aboard ships to Cuba was 15.2 percent, and losses among those aboard ships to Peru were 40 percent in the 1850s and 30.44 percent from 1860 to 1863.

They were sold and were taken to work in plantations or mines with very bad living and working conditions. The duration of a contract was typically five to eight years, but many coolies did not live out their term of service because of the hard labour and mistreatment. Those who did live were often forced to remain in servitude beyond the contracted period. The coolies who worked on the sugar plantations in Cuba and in the guano beds of the Chincha Islands (the islands of Hell) of Peru were treated brutally. Seventy-five percent of the Chinese coolies in Cuba died before fulfilling their contracts. More than two-thirds of the Chinese coolies who arrived in Peru between 1849 and 1874 died within the contract period. In 1860 it was calculated that of the 4000 coolies brought to the Chinchas since the trade began, not one had survived.

Because of these unbearable conditions, Chinese coolies often revolted against their Ko-Hung bosses and foreign company bosses at ports of departure, on ships, and in foreign lands. The coolies were put in the same neighbourhoods as Africans and, since most were unable to return to their homeland or have their wives come to the New World, many married African women. The coolies' interracial relationships and marriages with Africans, Europeans and Indigenous peoples, formed some of the modern world's Afro-Asian and Asian Latin American populations.

Chinese immigration to the United States was almost entirely voluntary, but working and social conditions were still harsh. In 1868, the Burlingame Treaty allowed unrestricted Chinese immigration into the country. Within a decade significant levels of anti-Chinese sentiment had built up, stoked by populists such as Denis Kearney with racist slogans - "To an American, death is preferable to life on a par with the Chinese."

Although Chinese workers contributed to the building of the first Transcontinental Railroad in the United States and of the Canadian Pacific Railway in western Canada, Chinese settlement was discouraged after completion of the construction. California's Anti-Coolie Act of 1862 and the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 contributed to the curtailment of Chinese immigration to the United States.

Notwithstanding such attempts to restrict the influx of cheap labour from China, beginning in the 1870s Chinese workers helped construct a vast network of levees in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. These levees made thousands of acres of fertile marshlands available for agricultural production.

The 1879 Constitution of the State of California declared that "Asiatic coolieism is a form of human slavery, and is forever prohibited in this State, and all contracts for coolie labour shall be void."

Colonos asiáticos is a Spanish term for coolies. The Spanish colony of Cuba feared slavery uprisings such as those that took place in Haiti and used coolies as a transition between slaves and free labor. They were neither free nor slaves. Indentured Chinese servants also labored in the sugarcane fields of Cuba well after the 1884 abolition of slavery in that country. Two scholars of Chinese labor in Cuba, Juan Pastrana and Juan Perez de la Riva, substantiated horrific conditions of Chinese coolies in Cuba and stated that coolies were slaves in all but name. Denise Helly is one researcher who believes that despite their slave-like treatment, the free and legal status of the Asian laborers in Cuba separated them from slaves. The coolies could challenge their superiors, run away, petition government officials, and rebel according to Rodriguez Pastor and Trazegnies Granda. Once they had fulfilled their contracts the colonos asiáticos integrated into the countries of Peru, The Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Cuba. They adopted cultural traditions from the natives and also welcomed in non-Chinese to experience and participate into their own traditions. Before the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Havana had Latin America's largest Chinatown.

In South America, Chinese indentured labourers worked in Peru's silver mines and coastal industries (i.e., guano, sugar, and cotton) from the early 1850s to the mid-1870s; about 100,000 people immigrated as indentured workers. They participated in the War of the Pacific, looting and burning down the haciendas where they worked, after the capture of Lima by the invading Chilean army in January 1880. Some 2000 coolies even joined the Chilean Army in Peru, taking care of the wounded and burying the dead. Others were sent by Chileans to work in the newly conquered nitrate fields.

The Chinese Engineering and Mining Corporation, of which later U.S. president Herbert Hoover was a director, was instrumental in supplying Chinese coolie labour to South African mines from c.1902 to c.1910 at the request of mine owners, who considered such labour cheaper than native African and white labour. The horrendous conditions suffered by the coolie labourers led to questions in the British parliament as recorded in Hansard.

In 1866, the British, French and Chinese governments agreed to mitigate the abuse by requiring all traders to pay for the return of all workers after their contract ended. The employers in the British West Indies declined these conditions, bringing the trade there to an end. Until the trade was finally abolished in 1875, over 150,000 coolies had been sold to Cuba alone, the majority having been shipped from Macau. These labourers endured conditions far worse than those experienced by their Indian counterparts. Even after the 1866 reforms, the scale of abuse and conditions of near slavery did not get any better - if anything they deteriorated. In the early 1870s increased media exposure of the trade led to a public outcry, and the British, as well as the Qing government, put pressure on the Portuguese authorities to bring the trade at Macau to an end; this was ultimately achieved in 1874. By that time, a total of up to half a million Chinese workers had been exported.

The term coolie was also applied to Chinese workers recruited for contracts on cacao plantations in German Samoa. German planters went to great lengths to secure access to their "coolie" labour supply from China. In 1908 a Chinese commissioner, Lin Shu Fen, reported on the cruel treatment of coolie workers on German plantations in the western Samoan Islands. The trade began largely after the establishment of colonial German Samoa in 1900 and lasted until the arrival of New Zealand forces in 1914. More than 2000 Chinese "coolies" were present in the islands in 1914 and most were eventually repatriated by the New Zealand administration.

INDIAN COOLIES

By the 1820s, many Indians were voluntarily enlisting to go abroad for work, in the hopes of a better life. European merchants and businessmen quickly took advantage of this and began recruiting them for work as a cheap source of labour. The British began shipping Indians to colonies around the world, including Mauritius, Fiji, Natal, British East Africa, and British Malaya. The Dutch also shipped workers to labour on the plantations on Suriname and the Dutch East Indies. A system of agents was used to infiltrate the rural villages of India and recruit labourers. They would often deceive the credulous workers about the great opportunities that awaited them for their own material betterment abroad. The Indians primarily came from the Indo-Gangetic Plain, but also from Tamil Nadu and other areas to the south of the country.

Without permission from the British authorities, the French attempted to illegally transport Indian workers to their sugar producing colony, the Reunion Island, from as early as 1826. By 1830, over 3000 labourers had been transported. After this trade was discovered, the French successfully negotiated with the British in 1860 for permission to transport over 6,000 workers annually, on condition that the trade would be suspended if abuses were discovered to be taking place.

The British began to transport Indians to Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, starting in 1829. Slavery had been abolished with the planters receiving two million pounds sterling in compensation for the loss of their slaves. The planters turned to bringing in a large number of indentured labourers from India to work in the sugar cane fields. Between 1834 and 1921, around half a million indentured labourers were present on the island. They worked on sugar estates, factories, in transport and on construction sites.

In 1837, the Raj issued a set of regulations for the trade. The rules provided for each labourer to be personally authorised for transportation by an officer designated by the Government, it limited the length of service to five years subject to voluntary renewal, it made the contractor responsible for returning the worker after the contract elapsed and required the vessels to conform to basic health standards

Despite this, conditions on the ships were often extremely crowded, with rampant disease and malnutrition. The workers were paid a pittance for their labour, and were expected to work in often awful and harsh conditions. Although there were no large scale scandals involving coolie abuse in British colonies, workers often ended up being forced to work, and manipulated in such a way that they became dependent on the plantation owners so that in practice they remained there long after their contracts expired; possibly as little as 10% of the coolies actually returned to their original country of origin. Colonial legislation was also passed to severely limit their freedoms; in Mauritius a compulsory pass system was instituted to enable their movements to be easily tracked. Conditions were much worse in the French colonies of Reunion and Guadeloupe and Martinique, where workers were 'systematically overworked' and abnormally high mortality rates were recorded for those working in the mines.

However, there were also attempts by the British authorities to regulate and mitigate the worst abuses. Workers were regularly checked up on by health inspectors, and they were vetted before transportation to ensure that they were suitably healthy and fit to be able to endure the rigours of labour. Children under the age of 15 were not allowed to be transported from their parents under any circumstances.

The first campaign against the 'coolie' trade in England likened the system of indentured labour to the slavery of the past. In response to this pressure, the labour export was temporarily stopped in 1839 by the authorities when the scale of the abuses became known, but it was soon renewed due to its growing economic importance. A more rigorous regulatory framework was put into place and severe penalties were imposed for infractions in 1842. In that year, almost 35,000 people were shipped to Mauritius.

In 1844, the trade was expanded to the colonies in the West Indies, including Jamaica, Trinidad and Demerara, where the Asian population was soon a major component of the island demographic.

Starting in 1879, many Indians were transported to Fiji to work on the sugar cane plantations. Many of them chose to stay after their term of indenture elapsed and today they number about 40% of the total population. Indian workers were also imported into the Dutch colony of Suriname after the Dutch signed a treaty with the United Kingdom on the recruitment of contract workers in 1870. In Mauritius, the Indian population are now demographically dominant, with Indian festivals being celebrated as national holidays.

This system prevailed until the early twentieth century. Increasing focus on the brutalities and abuses of the trade by the sensationalist media of the time, incited public outrage and lead to the official ending of the coolie trade in 1916 by the British government. By that time tens of thousands of Chinese workers were being used along the Western Front by the allied forces (see Chinese Labour Corps).

SEX RATIOS AND INTERMARRIAGE AMONG COOLIES

A major difference between the Chinese coolie trade and the Indian coolie trade was that the Chinese coolies were all male, while East Indian women (from India) were brought alongside men as coolies. This led to a high rate of Chinese men marrying women of other ethnicities like Indian women and mixed race Creole women. Indian women and children were brought alongside Indian men as coolies while Chinese men made up 99% of Chinese colonies. The contrast with the female to male ratio among Indian and Chinese immigrants has been compared by historians. In Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies just 18,731 Chinese women and 92,985 Chinese men served as coolies on plantations. Chinese women migrated less than Javanese and Indian women as indentured coolies. The number of Chinese women as coolies was "very small" while Chinese men were easily taken into the coolie trade. In Cuba men made up the vast majority of Chinese indentured servants on sugar plantations and in Peru non-Chinese women married the mostly male Chinese coolies.

Chinese women were scarce in every place where Chinese indentured laborers were brought, the migration was dominated by Chinese men. Up to the 1940s men made up the vast majority of the Costa Rican Chinese community. Males made up the majority of the original Chinese community in Mexico and they married Mexican women.

In the early 1900s, the Chinese communities in Manila, Singapore, Mauritius, New Zealand, Victoria in Australia, the United States, and Victoria in British Columbia in Canada were all male dominated.

WIKIPEDIA

A coolie (alternatively spelled cooli, cooly, quli, koelie, and other such variations), during the 19th and early 20th century, was a term for a locally sourced unskilled labourer hired by a company, mainly from the Indian subcontinent or Southern China.

Today, it is used varyingly as a legal inoffensive word (for example, in India for helpers carrying luggage in railway stations) and also used as a racial slur in Africa for certain people from Asia, particularly in South Africa

ETYMOLOGY

The origins of the word are uncertain but it is thought to have originated from the name of a Gujarati sect (the Kolī, who worked as day labourers) or perhaps from the Tamil word for a payment for work, kuli (கூலி). An alternative etymological explanation is that the word came from the Urdu qulī (क़ुली, قلی), which itself could be from the Turkish word for slave, qul. The word was used in this sense for labourers from India. In 1727, Dr. Engelbert Kämpfer described "coolies" as dock labourers who would unload Dutch merchant ships at Nagasaki in Japan.

The Chinese word 苦力 (pinyin: kǔlì) literally means "bitterly hard (use of) strength", in the Mandarin pronunciation.

HISTORY OF THE COOLIE TRADE

An early trade in Asian labourers is believed to have begun sometime in or around the 16th century. Social and political pressure led to the abolition of the slave trade throughout the British Empire in 1807, with other European nations following suit. Labour-intensive industries, such as cotton and sugar plantations, mines and railway construction, in the colonies were left without a cheap source of manpower. As a consequence, a large scale slavery-like trade in Asian (primarily Indian and Chinese) indentured labourers began in the 1820s to fill this vacuum. Some of these labourers signed contracts based on misleading promises, some were kidnapped and sold into the trade, some were victims of clan violence whose captors sold them to coolie brokers, while others sold themselves to pay off gambling debts. British companies were the first to experiment with this potential new form of cheap labour in 1807, when they imported 200 Chinese men to work in Trinidad.

The coolie trade was often compared to the earlier slave trade and they accomplished very similar things.

Although there are reports of ships for Asian coolies carrying women and children, the great majority of them were men. Finally, regulations were put in place, as early as 1837 by the British authorities in India to safeguard these principles of voluntary, contractual work and safe and sanitary transportation although in practice this rarely occurred especially during examples such as the Pacific Passage or the Guano Pits of Peru. The Chinese government also made efforts to secure the well-being of their nation's workers, with representations being made to relevant governments around the world.

CHINESE COOLIES

Workers from China were mainly transported to work in Peru and Cuba, but they also worked in British colonies such as Jamaica, British Guiana (now Guyana), British Malaya, Trinidad and Tobago, British Honduras (now Belize) and in the Dutch colonies Dutch East Indies and Suriname. The first shipment of Chinese labourers was to the British colony of Trinidad in 1806.

In 1847 two ships from Cuba transported workers to Havana to work in the sugar cane fields from the port of Xiamen, one of the five Chinese treaty ports opened to the British by the Treaty of Nanking in 1842. The trade soon spread to other ports in Guangdong province and demand became particularly strong in Peru for workers in the silver mines and the guano collecting industry. Australia began importing workers in 1848 and the United States began using them in 1865 on the First Transcontinental Railroad construction. These workers were deceived about their terms of employment to a much greater extent than their Indian counterparts, and consequently, there was a much higher level of Chinese emigration during this period.

The trade flourished from 1847 to 1854 without incident, until reports began to surface of the mistreatment of the workers in Cuba and Peru. As the British government had political and legal responsibility for many of the ports involved, including Amoy, the trade was shut down at these places. However, the trade simply shifted to the more accommodating port in the Portuguese enclave of Macau.

Many coolies were first deceived or kidnapped and then kept in barracoons (detention centres) or loading vessels in the ports of departure, as were African slaves. In 1875, British commissioners estimated that approximately eighty percent of the workers had been abducted. Their voyages, which are sometimes called the Pacific Passage, were as inhumane and dangerous as the notorious Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade. Mortality was very high. For example, it is estimated that from 1847 to 1859, the average mortality for coolies aboard ships to Cuba was 15.2 percent, and losses among those aboard ships to Peru were 40 percent in the 1850s and 30.44 percent from 1860 to 1863.

They were sold and were taken to work in plantations or mines with very bad living and working conditions. The duration of a contract was typically five to eight years, but many coolies did not live out their term of service because of the hard labour and mistreatment. Those who did live were often forced to remain in servitude beyond the contracted period. The coolies who worked on the sugar plantations in Cuba and in the guano beds of the Chincha Islands (the islands of Hell) of Peru were treated brutally. Seventy-five percent of the Chinese coolies in Cuba died before fulfilling their contracts. More than two-thirds of the Chinese coolies who arrived in Peru between 1849 and 1874 died within the contract period. In 1860 it was calculated that of the 4000 coolies brought to the Chinchas since the trade began, not one had survived.

Because of these unbearable conditions, Chinese coolies often revolted against their Ko-Hung bosses and foreign company bosses at ports of departure, on ships, and in foreign lands. The coolies were put in the same neighbourhoods as Africans and, since most were unable to return to their homeland or have their wives come to the New World, many married African women. The coolies' interracial relationships and marriages with Africans, Europeans and Indigenous peoples, formed some of the modern world's Afro-Asian and Asian Latin American populations.

Chinese immigration to the United States was almost entirely voluntary, but working and social conditions were still harsh. In 1868, the Burlingame Treaty allowed unrestricted Chinese immigration into the country. Within a decade significant levels of anti-Chinese sentiment had built up, stoked by populists such as Denis Kearney with racist slogans - "To an American, death is preferable to life on a par with the Chinese."

Although Chinese workers contributed to the building of the first Transcontinental Railroad in the United States and of the Canadian Pacific Railway in western Canada, Chinese settlement was discouraged after completion of the construction. California's Anti-Coolie Act of 1862 and the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 contributed to the curtailment of Chinese immigration to the United States.

Notwithstanding such attempts to restrict the influx of cheap labour from China, beginning in the 1870s Chinese workers helped construct a vast network of levees in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. These levees made thousands of acres of fertile marshlands available for agricultural production.

The 1879 Constitution of the State of California declared that "Asiatic coolieism is a form of human slavery, and is forever prohibited in this State, and all contracts for coolie labour shall be void."

Colonos asiáticos is a Spanish term for coolies. The Spanish colony of Cuba feared slavery uprisings such as those that took place in Haiti and used coolies as a transition between slaves and free labor. They were neither free nor slaves. Indentured Chinese servants also labored in the sugarcane fields of Cuba well after the 1884 abolition of slavery in that country. Two scholars of Chinese labor in Cuba, Juan Pastrana and Juan Perez de la Riva, substantiated horrific conditions of Chinese coolies in Cuba and stated that coolies were slaves in all but name. Denise Helly is one researcher who believes that despite their slave-like treatment, the free and legal status of the Asian laborers in Cuba separated them from slaves. The coolies could challenge their superiors, run away, petition government officials, and rebel according to Rodriguez Pastor and Trazegnies Granda. Once they had fulfilled their contracts the colonos asiáticos integrated into the countries of Peru, The Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Cuba. They adopted cultural traditions from the natives and also welcomed in non-Chinese to experience and participate into their own traditions. Before the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Havana had Latin America's largest Chinatown.

In South America, Chinese indentured labourers worked in Peru's silver mines and coastal industries (i.e., guano, sugar, and cotton) from the early 1850s to the mid-1870s; about 100,000 people immigrated as indentured workers. They participated in the War of the Pacific, looting and burning down the haciendas where they worked, after the capture of Lima by the invading Chilean army in January 1880. Some 2000 coolies even joined the Chilean Army in Peru, taking care of the wounded and burying the dead. Others were sent by Chileans to work in the newly conquered nitrate fields.

The Chinese Engineering and Mining Corporation, of which later U.S. president Herbert Hoover was a director, was instrumental in supplying Chinese coolie labour to South African mines from c.1902 to c.1910 at the request of mine owners, who considered such labour cheaper than native African and white labour. The horrendous conditions suffered by the coolie labourers led to questions in the British parliament as recorded in Hansard.

In 1866, the British, French and Chinese governments agreed to mitigate the abuse by requiring all traders to pay for the return of all workers after their contract ended. The employers in the British West Indies declined these conditions, bringing the trade there to an end. Until the trade was finally abolished in 1875, over 150,000 coolies had been sold to Cuba alone, the majority having been shipped from Macau. These labourers endured conditions far worse than those experienced by their Indian counterparts. Even after the 1866 reforms, the scale of abuse and conditions of near slavery did not get any better - if anything they deteriorated. In the early 1870s increased media exposure of the trade led to a public outcry, and the British, as well as the Qing government, put pressure on the Portuguese authorities to bring the trade at Macau to an end; this was ultimately achieved in 1874. By that time, a total of up to half a million Chinese workers had been exported.

The term coolie was also applied to Chinese workers recruited for contracts on cacao plantations in German Samoa. German planters went to great lengths to secure access to their "coolie" labour supply from China. In 1908 a Chinese commissioner, Lin Shu Fen, reported on the cruel treatment of coolie workers on German plantations in the western Samoan Islands. The trade began largely after the establishment of colonial German Samoa in 1900 and lasted until the arrival of New Zealand forces in 1914. More than 2000 Chinese "coolies" were present in the islands in 1914 and most were eventually repatriated by the New Zealand administration.

INDIAN COOLIES

By the 1820s, many Indians were voluntarily enlisting to go abroad for work, in the hopes of a better life. European merchants and businessmen quickly took advantage of this and began recruiting them for work as a cheap source of labour. The British began shipping Indians to colonies around the world, including Mauritius, Fiji, Natal, British East Africa, and British Malaya. The Dutch also shipped workers to labour on the plantations on Suriname and the Dutch East Indies. A system of agents was used to infiltrate the rural villages of India and recruit labourers. They would often deceive the credulous workers about the great opportunities that awaited them for their own material betterment abroad. The Indians primarily came from the Indo-Gangetic Plain, but also from Tamil Nadu and other areas to the south of the country.

Without permission from the British authorities, the French attempted to illegally transport Indian workers to their sugar producing colony, the Reunion Island, from as early as 1826. By 1830, over 3000 labourers had been transported. After this trade was discovered, the French successfully negotiated with the British in 1860 for permission to transport over 6,000 workers annually, on condition that the trade would be suspended if abuses were discovered to be taking place.

The British began to transport Indians to Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, starting in 1829. Slavery had been abolished with the planters receiving two million pounds sterling in compensation for the loss of their slaves. The planters turned to bringing in a large number of indentured labourers from India to work in the sugar cane fields. Between 1834 and 1921, around half a million indentured labourers were present on the island. They worked on sugar estates, factories, in transport and on construction sites.

In 1837, the Raj issued a set of regulations for the trade. The rules provided for each labourer to be personally authorised for transportation by an officer designated by the Government, it limited the length of service to five years subject to voluntary renewal, it made the contractor responsible for returning the worker after the contract elapsed and required the vessels to conform to basic health standards

Despite this, conditions on the ships were often extremely crowded, with rampant disease and malnutrition. The workers were paid a pittance for their labour, and were expected to work in often awful and harsh conditions. Although there were no large scale scandals involving coolie abuse in British colonies, workers often ended up being forced to work, and manipulated in such a way that they became dependent on the plantation owners so that in practice they remained there long after their contracts expired; possibly as little as 10% of the coolies actually returned to their original country of origin. Colonial legislation was also passed to severely limit their freedoms; in Mauritius a compulsory pass system was instituted to enable their movements to be easily tracked. Conditions were much worse in the French colonies of Reunion and Guadeloupe and Martinique, where workers were 'systematically overworked' and abnormally high mortality rates were recorded for those working in the mines.

However, there were also attempts by the British authorities to regulate and mitigate the worst abuses. Workers were regularly checked up on by health inspectors, and they were vetted before transportation to ensure that they were suitably healthy and fit to be able to endure the rigours of labour. Children under the age of 15 were not allowed to be transported from their parents under any circumstances.

The first campaign against the 'coolie' trade in England likened the system of indentured labour to the slavery of the past. In response to this pressure, the labour export was temporarily stopped in 1839 by the authorities when the scale of the abuses became known, but it was soon renewed due to its growing economic importance. A more rigorous regulatory framework was put into place and severe penalties were imposed for infractions in 1842. In that year, almost 35,000 people were shipped to Mauritius.

In 1844, the trade was expanded to the colonies in the West Indies, including Jamaica, Trinidad and Demerara, where the Asian population was soon a major component of the island demographic.

Starting in 1879, many Indians were transported to Fiji to work on the sugar cane plantations. Many of them chose to stay after their term of indenture elapsed and today they number about 40% of the total population. Indian workers were also imported into the Dutch colony of Suriname after the Dutch signed a treaty with the United Kingdom on the recruitment of contract workers in 1870. In Mauritius, the Indian population are now demographically dominant, with Indian festivals being celebrated as national holidays.

This system prevailed until the early twentieth century. Increasing focus on the brutalities and abuses of the trade by the sensationalist media of the time, incited public outrage and lead to the official ending of the coolie trade in 1916 by the British government. By that time tens of thousands of Chinese workers were being used along the Western Front by the allied forces (see Chinese Labour Corps).

SEX RATIOS AND INTERMARRIAGE AMONG COOLIES

A major difference between the Chinese coolie trade and the Indian coolie trade was that the Chinese coolies were all male, while East Indian women (from India) were brought alongside men as coolies. This led to a high rate of Chinese men marrying women of other ethnicities like Indian women and mixed race Creole women. Indian women and children were brought alongside Indian men as coolies while Chinese men made up 99% of Chinese colonies. The contrast with the female to male ratio among Indian and Chinese immigrants has been compared by historians. In Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies just 18,731 Chinese women and 92,985 Chinese men served as coolies on plantations. Chinese women migrated less than Javanese and Indian women as indentured coolies. The number of Chinese women as coolies was "very small" while Chinese men were easily taken into the coolie trade. In Cuba men made up the vast majority of Chinese indentured servants on sugar plantations and in Peru non-Chinese women married the mostly male Chinese coolies.

Chinese women were scarce in every place where Chinese indentured laborers were brought, the migration was dominated by Chinese men. Up to the 1940s men made up the vast majority of the Costa Rican Chinese community. Males made up the majority of the original Chinese community in Mexico and they married Mexican women.

In the early 1900s, the Chinese communities in Manila, Singapore, Mauritius, New Zealand, Victoria in Australia, the United States, and Victoria in British Columbia in Canada were all male dominated.

WIKIPEDIA

the club, has had a remarkable career. She asserts she has had at least a dozen separate existences. Theosophically considered, the earliest inkling of her goes back to 1200 B. C., when she and Mme. Blavatsky had a pastoral sojourn in Egypt.

Daughter of a Rum Seller

As far as plain history is concerned, Mrs. Tingley was born in Newburyport, Mass. about fifty-five years ago. Her father was named Westcott, and his saloon and hotel were conducted in such a manner as to bring down upon him the displeasure of the community. The authorities eventually refused to renew the license for the place.

The daughter of this establishment obtained an insight into life far different from the peaceful existence in the valley of the Nile, for she was then a reckless hoyden. She has some recollection of being sent to a convent in Montreal, but the historians, who have no esoteric notions, fail to find any time in her life which could have been devoted to religious training.

Mrs. Tingley a Printer's Wife

She fled to New Orleans and married Richard Cooke, a compositor, by whom she had one child, which she said she adopted. This child, Flossie, was beautiful and her photograph has frequently been produced on Easter cards and mottoes. She is generally depicted as carrying lilies.

Mrs. Tingley’s second husband was George W. Parent, a detective and later a saloon-keeper, and it is not known whether or not she had any children by him. She adopted two boys, however, who have been known by various names. Her first two husbands obtained divorces on the ground of desertion.

Mrs. Tingley was in Boston for a few years, and then she made her appearance in New York. There, under the direction of Prof. Paul McCarthy, Mrs. Tingley studied hypnotism. As the professor once stated, he greatly improved her psychic gifts. There can be no doubt of Mrs. Tingley’s powers of hypnotism, and she used them with great advantage.

The manner in which the woman seized the leadership of the cult was remarkable. After the death of Judge Ernest T. Hargrove, a young English barrister of good family had been called over to New York, and had made the president of the theosophical society.

The seizure of the machinery of government of the society was one of the rarest bits of generalship in the history of such organizations. Mrs. Tingley convinced certain members, many of whom were men and women of education and attainments, that though Hargrove might be all well in his way as the nominal president, she was really the secret head of the organization, the adept whose personality was not to be revealed until one year after the death of Judge.

So it was that in May, 1896, the reincarnation of Mme. Blavatsky became “The Great Unknown.” She officiated as a veiled priestess at a remarkable ceremony, at which Claude Falls Wright, then secretary of the society, and Miss Laura Leoline Leonard were married.

Seizes Control of Society

At that time her portly form, swathed in draperies, stood upon a platform in front of a stump, supposed to symbolize the tree of life. When her identity as the head of the order was revealed Mrs. Tingley tood actual control. Hargrove was driven back to Temple Bar. Many of the prominent theosophists were alienated, and the society passed into the hands of a clique headed by Mrs. Tingley.

The name of the organization was changed to that of the Universal Brotherhood. The public was asked to contribute to the purple pence fund, and with the proceeds Mrs. Tingley and half a dozen of her cult started on a crusade around the world which consisted principally of sightseeing.

From Hypnotism to Theosophy

From spiritualism Mrs. Tingley turned her attention to theosophy, which was attracting much attention. She made the acquaintance of William Q. Judge, whom she seems to have impressed by her powers as a hypnotist.

In his writings after his death were found several fragmentary references to her. She pieced these together, and upon them advanced a claim that she was the reincarnation of Mme. Blavatsky, and had been chosen as the successor of Mr. Judge.

Her remarkable personality so impressed Dr. Wood of Providence, R. I. that he built the Raja Yoga school for theosophists at Point Loma. This is a superb tract of 1,600 acres, adorned with magnificent buildings. The total value of the tract and the buildings is estimated at $2,500,000. The theosophists are possessed of other property, which in all forms is worth close to $9,000,000.

The colony at Point Loma has been the center of innumerable scandals and sensations since Mme. Tingley became its ruler. Four years ago it passed its worst crisis, when a rebellion in the brotherhood threatened its disruption.

She Has Absolute Power

Soon after firmly establishing her leadership over the cult Mme. Tingley engineered a reorganization and obtained the adoption of a constitution that gives her absolute power over every individual member of the Universal Brotherhood and over every penny of its funds.

Instead of giving out theosophical teachings after the manner of her predecessors she contested herself with pumpint “vibrations” and “generating currents” upon the inner planes, if any one can guess what that means.

She chose purple for her royal color, wore gowns of it, and called herself by the name of it until now among the faithful name of Tingley is almost unspoken. To them she is “Purple” or “Purple Mother.”

She selected a “cabinet” of twelve of the ablest men she could find – and richest. Their term of office begins and ends with her pleasure.

She removed the headquarters of the organization, bag and baggage, to a point which had been discovered in her great crusade around the world to be the esoteric center of the earth, and here, with weird ceremonies, she laid the cornerstone of a School for the Revival of Lost Mysteries.

Rebellion Breaks Out

Her arbitrary rule provoked a rebellion, which reached a climax in the resignation of Dr. Jerome A. Anderson, for years one of her strongest supporters. Dr. Anderson for fifteen years was a devoted theosophist and one of the most influential members of the society. His resignation was followed by a score of others in San Francisco, and there is no means of knowing how many in other places deserted the cult.

Dr. Anderson was a member of the inner circle or cabinet of the high priestess. At the time of his revelations he gave as his reasons:

“I left the Universal Brotherhood simply because I lost all confidence in its leader, Mrs. Katherine A. Tingley. I have seen the organization which she took over from W. Q. Judge, both large and enthusiastic, dwindled away in lodges and membership until it is now little more than a mere handful of her personal admirers; I have seen ‘loyalty’ to all her whims and caprices made the supreme test of membership.”

“I have yet to know of a prominent person leaving the ranks who has not been accused of having done so from base and unworthy motives, and of whom many have been most unmercifully slandered as to their private characters. I have seen theosophy travestied, and substituted for philosophy, and a worldwide organization degenerated into 150 cooped up at Point Loma, with not a man, woman, or child of them daring to oppose her slightest whim.”

“In fact, she has reduced the organization to the degree that it has become only one among a score of similar hamburgs, with a ‘leader’ at the head whom all must adore. I have seen able, learned men and women clothe themselves in ridiculous costumes and go through absurd ceremonies at her bidding; I have seen money extravagantly wasted; I have seen honest energy wantonly dissipated; I have seen her favors follow, and follow only upon flattery and fawning; I have heard her called to her face a ‘planetary spirit’ by one of her chief flatterers without protest, and with evident gratification; I have known meetings after meeting held by her, at which she was present during which all teaching was disregarded and every word uttered was in personal laudation of her and of the imaginary great deeds she had accomplished.”

“Everything at the Point is show and pretense; even when strangers are permitted to see the children at their play the curtain rises on as carefully prepared a ‘situation’ as at any theater. The buildings are shams – filmay, stuccoed, or cemented structures that present an imposing appearance, but which one could go through by hacking his way with a hatchet almost as fast as one could walk.”

Life in Lomaland Is Weird

The life lived by members of the Point Loma colony, which Mr. Gage will adopt, is one one succession of weird ceremonies.

Lomaland is astir before sunrise. From the window you can see a procession moving toward the hill that is known as the sacred ground. The men are dressed somewhat as Greeks and Romans were wont to array themselves, in white undershirts, a sort of pajamas, reaching the knee, below which the leg is bare, and draped about the shoulders a place of cheesecloth.

Passing into the sacred ground these men range themselves facing the sun. There is a short reading, perhaps from teh “Ghita,” perhaps one of Spots’ letters, which this inspired dog contributes regularly to the brotherhood publications (you can only guess, for sound does not travel so far), and then each one stoops down and picks up a little handful of dirt and tosses it back again. That is all.

The procession retraces its steps and the men take off their Greek garments, for some of them are guards and guides, and there must be no sign of short pajamas, bare legs, and cheesecloth togas when the gates are open to the public at 10 o’clock.

This is the daily ceremony of the Sons of the Rising Sun. While it is in progress another ceremony is taking place at the Homestead. Men and women, some in regular clothes, some in cheesecloth robes, all barefooted, have circled around the Homestead three times, and stopping on the eastern veranda, have chanted the praises of Lomaland.

No Prying Allowed

If you chance to step out upon the balcony to see what is going on you will be politely requested to withdraw. Not-even a member of the society is allowed the privilege of looking on.

Starvation is a feature of the theosophists’ regime. By degrees Mme. Tingley has cut down their rations, and she comforts those who get a quarter of an egg a piece, a slice of toast, a walnut or two and a few raisins by saying this is an “ideal” breakfast and will make those who eat it more refined and spiritual.

But she does not join the early worshipers of the sun. Late in the morning she finishes her nap and is ready for a good square meal. The faithful believe that in the early hours her spirit has left her body and is away attending to national affairs. But later a woman of breeding and refinement, trembling with hunger after her “ideal” breakfast and weak from overwork, bears to the high priestess a tray stacked with everything the market affords and the best of its kind.

Gage’s Garb to Be Scanty

Mr. Gage also, when he becomes a full fledged member of the cult, will have to forgo many of the garments he has been in the habit of wearing.

In the libel suit brought by Mme. Tingley against a Pacific coast paper recently, which has just resulted in a $7,500 verdict in her favor, the evidence established many weird customs and dress of her subjects.

One of the witnesses described the reception given Mr. Spalding when he arrived at Point Loma with his bride. All the inmates, children included, assembled near the Spalding residence and rendered Greek songs, tripped through Homeric dances and other fancy steps, all of which, in the dark night, was especially picturesque.

The costumes for the bridal ceremony as described by Dr. Jerome A. Anderson, who resigned from Mme. Tingley’s cabinet, gave the scene a most ghostlike appearance. Participants in the Spalding bridal ceremony were dressed in a costume supposed to be like that of the ancient Greeks.

“It was something,” said Dr. Anderson, “like a loose skirt tied with a cord. I wore underclothing underneath, but I saw many who did not. It was, to say the least, a chilly costume when worn out of doors.”

Doesn’t Like Term “Mother”

The women wore costumes of similar character, but Mrs. Tingley’s attire was more elaborate than the others. She had donned her large embroidered robe of purple, whence she is known among the cult as “The Purple.” Formally she was called “Mother,” but she forbade that title.

Excommunicated Tingleyites state that in her dog Spot, Mme. Tingley found the reincarnated soul of William Q. Judge, former high priest of the Universal Brotherhood and founder of the American school of theosophy. Spot is carefully tended and has several suits of clothes to protect him from the changes in the weather; for, if he should die, the intelligence of William Q. Judge might reappear in some animal thousands of miles from Lomaland, and the Universal Brotherhood would lose one of its most valuable advisors.

In appearance Mrs. Tingley is a small, rather plump woman of genial, yet decided manner. She keeps much of herself, conducts a vast correspondence, and personally attends to all the business of the Raja Yoga school. She exacts implicit obedience from everyone at Lomaland.

Gage’s Secretary Denies All

New York, July 8 – [Special] – Lyman, J. Gage left New York on a western trip during the last week in April of this year. All that time the report gained credence that he was to join Mme. Tingley’s colony in California. His secretary, H. S. Morrison, entered this denial:

“Mr. Gage left New York a week ago Tuesday for the west. He spent a day in Chicago, where his son Eli lives, then went to Denver, where he planned to spend some time visiting his sister, Mrs. Brainerd. According to what he told me before he left, I expect him back within a month.”

“Of course, Mr. Gage is a member of the Society of Psychical Research, and like many other thoughtful men of today, he is much interested in psychical subjects. I believe he has met Mrs. Tingley and thinks her a remarkable woman. He admires the work she is doing in her colony at Point Loma. But he does not believe in theosophy, as far as I know, and he never had nor has now any intention of joining Mrs. Tingley’s colonies.”

“There was some sort of absurd report current some years ago about Mr. Gage joining Dowie’s colony, I believe. It arose from Dowie going to see Mr. Gage in Washington about letting some lace making immigrants for his colony into the county. That was all there was to it.”

“The fact that Mr. Gage has been working hard for fifty-five years and now has retired from active work, to be at liberty to do what he pleases and go where he pleases, I expect he will start soon for Europe.”

On his retirement from the cabinet, Secretary Gage came to New York and took up the duties of president of the United States Trust company. He filled this position until a short time ago. On March 19, he announced his coming retirement and in explanation added:

“I have been working fifty-five years and am nearly 70 years old now. If I’m ever going to take any leisure it is about time for me to begin. I have been obeying other people’s wishes for a long time. Now I am going to do just as I please. As a private citizen I will have the right to follow my own inclinations entirely.”

“Have you made any plans for the future?” he was asked.

“None, except that I will travel,” he replied.

“Has there been any disagreement between yourself and the officers of the company, or has there been any other business reason for your retirement?”

“None at all,” he said. “Everything has been harmonious and satisfactory.”

Gage said the United States Trust company was about the only concern in which he was actively engaged, so his retirement practically will be from all business activity.

“I have been in the public eye for some time,” Gage added, “and I am glad to get out of it.”

From Office Boy to President

From office boy up the long and difficult ladder to the presidency of the First National bank of Chicago, an institution which he practically created, then to the high post of secretary of the treasury under President McKinley, an office he filled with conspicuous honor and distinction – such in its briefest form is the record of Lyman J. Gage.

Mr. Gage was 70 years old in June. He was born in De Ruyter, N. Y., in June 1836. The first money he earned was $5 a month he received as a clerk in the Rome (N. Y.) post office after he left school.

In 1884 he first took up the profession in which he became distinguished, when he entered the Oneida Central bank at a salary of $100 a year. It was the insufficiency of this salary and chance that contributed chiefly to a train of circumstances that developed one of the world’s greatest bankers. He sought an increase. It was refused. Then young Gage did what so many other self-made Americans did in their youth, struck out for Chicago.

Enters Chicago in 1855

He came to Chicago in 1855, when he was 19 years old.

A career of conquest did not immediately open before him. Indeed, he had only stepped upon the threshold of a way that led to success afar off and through many vicissitudes.

The banks and other institutions in which he sought employment in the line of his experience had no vacancies that he could fill, but there remained other lines of industry in which he thought that he could make a living, and he found a chance to work hard for small pay in a lumber yard and planing mill, where bookkeeping formed a part of his duty. This was not what he had sought, but he went at it with alacrity, and for three years followed it industriously and without complaint.

It was not till 1858 he was given, his first position in a Chicago bank. The Merchants Savings, Loan and Trust company, wanting a bookkeeper set him at work at a salary of $500 per year. He regarded himself as fairly started now upon a road of life that led upward.

Is Advanced Rapidly

Events proved the good grounding of his hope. He laid hold of his new labor with a will and worked with that effectiveness that usually results in an occupation for which a man has natural ability. In less than six months he was promoted to paying teller, at a salary of $1,200, and at the expiration of a year was further advanced to assistant cashier, at a salary of $2,000.

At the end of another year he was given the post of cashier, which he held until 1868 when, having served the institution a complete decade, he severed his connection with it to assume a more advantageous connection with the First National bank of Chicago.

He went into this great financial institution on most alluring terms as its cashier, his abilities having been readily recognized some years before by its management. He soon gave evidence unmistakable of the possession of a high order of banking genius. His services did much toward extending the popularity of the bank, and in 1882, when a new charter was procured and a reorganization effected, he was elected vice president and manager. He filled these offices for nine years with the entire satisfaction in the directors and stockholders, and after discharging the active duties of the executive for several years, he was selected president of the bank in January, 1891.

Interested in Public Works

He was president of the bankers’ section of the World’s Progress and one of the chief promoters of the Art Institute and later of the Field Columbian museum.

When in Chicago Mr. Gage’s humanitarian interests led him into the study of economics, especially the relations of capital to labor, and he has taken prominent part in labor, and he has taken a prominent part in the discussion of questions growing out of those relations, and has sought to advance plans for their mutual benefit. Every great problem of labor or reform – for the moral and material well being of his fellowmen – has had in him an earnest student and strong worker.

He was in the forefront in the battle waged by the Civic federation, of which he was president, for the purification of the city of Chicago, and was a frequent speaker and wielded a large influence in the monster meeting s which were held by that body to purge the city of gambling houses and other evils.

Mr. Gage never held a political office, though frequently asked to become a candidate. He declined the nomination for the office of mayor of Chicago twice. Feb. 15, 1897, he resigned the presidency of the bank to enter President McKinley’s cabinet as secretary of the treasury. He was appointed March 4, and confirmed March 5, 1897, and immediately took the oath of office.

He was married in Denver in 1887 to Mrs. Lloyd D. Gage, his brother’s widow. She died May 17, 1901. In recent years Mr. Gage devoted himself to the Central Trust company, New York, where he resided. He resigned this post a few months ago.

All homemade, too. Although the scones were not a disaster, they didn't turn out the way a scone is supposed to be! I think I overworked the dough.

My daughter decided that some freshly picked dandelions would be a good addition to the photo!

The strawberry and apple conserve is fabulous. It consists of a green apple, strawberries, sugar, lemon juice and the seeds from one vanilla pod.

The honey cream consists of honey, pouring cream and mascarpone that have been whisked to soft peaks.

Makes for a great afternoon tea; I enjoyed mine with a cup of Earl Gray.

Recipe from MasterChef Australia magazine, issue #3.

Read more at The Sweetest Kitchen...

A coolie (alternatively spelled cooli, cooly, quli, koelie, and other such variations), during the 19th and early 20th century, was a term for a locally sourced unskilled labourer hired by a company, mainly from the Indian subcontinent or Southern China.

Today, it is used varyingly as a legal inoffensive word (for example, in India for helpers carrying luggage in railway stations) and also used as a racial slur in Africa for certain people from Asia, particularly in South Africa

ETYMOLOGY

The origins of the word are uncertain but it is thought to have originated from the name of a Gujarati sect (the Kolī, who worked as day labourers) or perhaps from the Tamil word for a payment for work, kuli (கூலி). An alternative etymological explanation is that the word came from the Urdu qulī (क़ुली, قلی), which itself could be from the Turkish word for slave, qul. The word was used in this sense for labourers from India. In 1727, Dr. Engelbert Kämpfer described "coolies" as dock labourers who would unload Dutch merchant ships at Nagasaki in Japan.

The Chinese word 苦力 (pinyin: kǔlì) literally means "bitterly hard (use of) strength", in the Mandarin pronunciation.

HISTORY OF THE COOLIE TRADE

An early trade in Asian labourers is believed to have begun sometime in or around the 16th century. Social and political pressure led to the abolition of the slave trade throughout the British Empire in 1807, with other European nations following suit. Labour-intensive industries, such as cotton and sugar plantations, mines and railway construction, in the colonies were left without a cheap source of manpower. As a consequence, a large scale slavery-like trade in Asian (primarily Indian and Chinese) indentured labourers began in the 1820s to fill this vacuum. Some of these labourers signed contracts based on misleading promises, some were kidnapped and sold into the trade, some were victims of clan violence whose captors sold them to coolie brokers, while others sold themselves to pay off gambling debts. British companies were the first to experiment with this potential new form of cheap labour in 1807, when they imported 200 Chinese men to work in Trinidad.

The coolie trade was often compared to the earlier slave trade and they accomplished very similar things.

Although there are reports of ships for Asian coolies carrying women and children, the great majority of them were men. Finally, regulations were put in place, as early as 1837 by the British authorities in India to safeguard these principles of voluntary, contractual work and safe and sanitary transportation although in practice this rarely occurred especially during examples such as the Pacific Passage or the Guano Pits of Peru. The Chinese government also made efforts to secure the well-being of their nation's workers, with representations being made to relevant governments around the world.

CHINESE COOLIES

Workers from China were mainly transported to work in Peru and Cuba, but they also worked in British colonies such as Jamaica, British Guiana (now Guyana), British Malaya, Trinidad and Tobago, British Honduras (now Belize) and in the Dutch colonies Dutch East Indies and Suriname. The first shipment of Chinese labourers was to the British colony of Trinidad in 1806.

In 1847 two ships from Cuba transported workers to Havana to work in the sugar cane fields from the port of Xiamen, one of the five Chinese treaty ports opened to the British by the Treaty of Nanking in 1842. The trade soon spread to other ports in Guangdong province and demand became particularly strong in Peru for workers in the silver mines and the guano collecting industry. Australia began importing workers in 1848 and the United States began using them in 1865 on the First Transcontinental Railroad construction. These workers were deceived about their terms of employment to a much greater extent than their Indian counterparts, and consequently, there was a much higher level of Chinese emigration during this period.

The trade flourished from 1847 to 1854 without incident, until reports began to surface of the mistreatment of the workers in Cuba and Peru. As the British government had political and legal responsibility for many of the ports involved, including Amoy, the trade was shut down at these places. However, the trade simply shifted to the more accommodating port in the Portuguese enclave of Macau.

Many coolies were first deceived or kidnapped and then kept in barracoons (detention centres) or loading vessels in the ports of departure, as were African slaves. In 1875, British commissioners estimated that approximately eighty percent of the workers had been abducted. Their voyages, which are sometimes called the Pacific Passage, were as inhumane and dangerous as the notorious Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade. Mortality was very high. For example, it is estimated that from 1847 to 1859, the average mortality for coolies aboard ships to Cuba was 15.2 percent, and losses among those aboard ships to Peru were 40 percent in the 1850s and 30.44 percent from 1860 to 1863.

They were sold and were taken to work in plantations or mines with very bad living and working conditions. The duration of a contract was typically five to eight years, but many coolies did not live out their term of service because of the hard labour and mistreatment. Those who did live were often forced to remain in servitude beyond the contracted period. The coolies who worked on the sugar plantations in Cuba and in the guano beds of the Chincha Islands (the islands of Hell) of Peru were treated brutally. Seventy-five percent of the Chinese coolies in Cuba died before fulfilling their contracts. More than two-thirds of the Chinese coolies who arrived in Peru between 1849 and 1874 died within the contract period. In 1860 it was calculated that of the 4000 coolies brought to the Chinchas since the trade began, not one had survived.

Because of these unbearable conditions, Chinese coolies often revolted against their Ko-Hung bosses and foreign company bosses at ports of departure, on ships, and in foreign lands. The coolies were put in the same neighbourhoods as Africans and, since most were unable to return to their homeland or have their wives come to the New World, many married African women. The coolies' interracial relationships and marriages with Africans, Europeans and Indigenous peoples, formed some of the modern world's Afro-Asian and Asian Latin American populations.

Chinese immigration to the United States was almost entirely voluntary, but working and social conditions were still harsh. In 1868, the Burlingame Treaty allowed unrestricted Chinese immigration into the country. Within a decade significant levels of anti-Chinese sentiment had built up, stoked by populists such as Denis Kearney with racist slogans - "To an American, death is preferable to life on a par with the Chinese."

Although Chinese workers contributed to the building of the first Transcontinental Railroad in the United States and of the Canadian Pacific Railway in western Canada, Chinese settlement was discouraged after completion of the construction. California's Anti-Coolie Act of 1862 and the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 contributed to the curtailment of Chinese immigration to the United States.

Notwithstanding such attempts to restrict the influx of cheap labour from China, beginning in the 1870s Chinese workers helped construct a vast network of levees in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. These levees made thousands of acres of fertile marshlands available for agricultural production.

The 1879 Constitution of the State of California declared that "Asiatic coolieism is a form of human slavery, and is forever prohibited in this State, and all contracts for coolie labour shall be void."

Colonos asiáticos is a Spanish term for coolies. The Spanish colony of Cuba feared slavery uprisings such as those that took place in Haiti and used coolies as a transition between slaves and free labor. They were neither free nor slaves. Indentured Chinese servants also labored in the sugarcane fields of Cuba well after the 1884 abolition of slavery in that country. Two scholars of Chinese labor in Cuba, Juan Pastrana and Juan Perez de la Riva, substantiated horrific conditions of Chinese coolies in Cuba and stated that coolies were slaves in all but name. Denise Helly is one researcher who believes that despite their slave-like treatment, the free and legal status of the Asian laborers in Cuba separated them from slaves. The coolies could challenge their superiors, run away, petition government officials, and rebel according to Rodriguez Pastor and Trazegnies Granda. Once they had fulfilled their contracts the colonos asiáticos integrated into the countries of Peru, The Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Cuba. They adopted cultural traditions from the natives and also welcomed in non-Chinese to experience and participate into their own traditions. Before the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Havana had Latin America's largest Chinatown.

In South America, Chinese indentured labourers worked in Peru's silver mines and coastal industries (i.e., guano, sugar, and cotton) from the early 1850s to the mid-1870s; about 100,000 people immigrated as indentured workers. They participated in the War of the Pacific, looting and burning down the haciendas where they worked, after the capture of Lima by the invading Chilean army in January 1880. Some 2000 coolies even joined the Chilean Army in Peru, taking care of the wounded and burying the dead. Others were sent by Chileans to work in the newly conquered nitrate fields.

The Chinese Engineering and Mining Corporation, of which later U.S. president Herbert Hoover was a director, was instrumental in supplying Chinese coolie labour to South African mines from c.1902 to c.1910 at the request of mine owners, who considered such labour cheaper than native African and white labour. The horrendous conditions suffered by the coolie labourers led to questions in the British parliament as recorded in Hansard.

In 1866, the British, French and Chinese governments agreed to mitigate the abuse by requiring all traders to pay for the return of all workers after their contract ended. The employers in the British West Indies declined these conditions, bringing the trade there to an end. Until the trade was finally abolished in 1875, over 150,000 coolies had been sold to Cuba alone, the majority having been shipped from Macau. These labourers endured conditions far worse than those experienced by their Indian counterparts. Even after the 1866 reforms, the scale of abuse and conditions of near slavery did not get any better - if anything they deteriorated. In the early 1870s increased media exposure of the trade led to a public outcry, and the British, as well as the Qing government, put pressure on the Portuguese authorities to bring the trade at Macau to an end; this was ultimately achieved in 1874. By that time, a total of up to half a million Chinese workers had been exported.

The term coolie was also applied to Chinese workers recruited for contracts on cacao plantations in German Samoa. German planters went to great lengths to secure access to their "coolie" labour supply from China. In 1908 a Chinese commissioner, Lin Shu Fen, reported on the cruel treatment of coolie workers on German plantations in the western Samoan Islands. The trade began largely after the establishment of colonial German Samoa in 1900 and lasted until the arrival of New Zealand forces in 1914. More than 2000 Chinese "coolies" were present in the islands in 1914 and most were eventually repatriated by the New Zealand administration.

INDIAN COOLIES

By the 1820s, many Indians were voluntarily enlisting to go abroad for work, in the hopes of a better life. European merchants and businessmen quickly took advantage of this and began recruiting them for work as a cheap source of labour. The British began shipping Indians to colonies around the world, including Mauritius, Fiji, Natal, British East Africa, and British Malaya. The Dutch also shipped workers to labour on the plantations on Suriname and the Dutch East Indies. A system of agents was used to infiltrate the rural villages of India and recruit labourers. They would often deceive the credulous workers about the great opportunities that awaited them for their own material betterment abroad. The Indians primarily came from the Indo-Gangetic Plain, but also from Tamil Nadu and other areas to the south of the country.

Without permission from the British authorities, the French attempted to illegally transport Indian workers to their sugar producing colony, the Reunion Island, from as early as 1826. By 1830, over 3000 labourers had been transported. After this trade was discovered, the French successfully negotiated with the British in 1860 for permission to transport over 6,000 workers annually, on condition that the trade would be suspended if abuses were discovered to be taking place.

The British began to transport Indians to Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, starting in 1829. Slavery had been abolished with the planters receiving two million pounds sterling in compensation for the loss of their slaves. The planters turned to bringing in a large number of indentured labourers from India to work in the sugar cane fields. Between 1834 and 1921, around half a million indentured labourers were present on the island. They worked on sugar estates, factories, in transport and on construction sites.

In 1837, the Raj issued a set of regulations for the trade. The rules provided for each labourer to be personally authorised for transportation by an officer designated by the Government, it limited the length of service to five years subject to voluntary renewal, it made the contractor responsible for returning the worker after the contract elapsed and required the vessels to conform to basic health standards

Despite this, conditions on the ships were often extremely crowded, with rampant disease and malnutrition. The workers were paid a pittance for their labour, and were expected to work in often awful and harsh conditions. Although there were no large scale scandals involving coolie abuse in British colonies, workers often ended up being forced to work, and manipulated in such a way that they became dependent on the plantation owners so that in practice they remained there long after their contracts expired; possibly as little as 10% of the coolies actually returned to their original country of origin. Colonial legislation was also passed to severely limit their freedoms; in Mauritius a compulsory pass system was instituted to enable their movements to be easily tracked. Conditions were much worse in the French colonies of Reunion and Guadeloupe and Martinique, where workers were 'systematically overworked' and abnormally high mortality rates were recorded for those working in the mines.

However, there were also attempts by the British authorities to regulate and mitigate the worst abuses. Workers were regularly checked up on by health inspectors, and they were vetted before transportation to ensure that they were suitably healthy and fit to be able to endure the rigours of labour. Children under the age of 15 were not allowed to be transported from their parents under any circumstances.

The first campaign against the 'coolie' trade in England likened the system of indentured labour to the slavery of the past. In response to this pressure, the labour export was temporarily stopped in 1839 by the authorities when the scale of the abuses became known, but it was soon renewed due to its growing economic importance. A more rigorous regulatory framework was put into place and severe penalties were imposed for infractions in 1842. In that year, almost 35,000 people were shipped to Mauritius.

In 1844, the trade was expanded to the colonies in the West Indies, including Jamaica, Trinidad and Demerara, where the Asian population was soon a major component of the island demographic.

Starting in 1879, many Indians were transported to Fiji to work on the sugar cane plantations. Many of them chose to stay after their term of indenture elapsed and today they number about 40% of the total population. Indian workers were also imported into the Dutch colony of Suriname after the Dutch signed a treaty with the United Kingdom on the recruitment of contract workers in 1870. In Mauritius, the Indian population are now demographically dominant, with Indian festivals being celebrated as national holidays.

This system prevailed until the early twentieth century. Increasing focus on the brutalities and abuses of the trade by the sensationalist media of the time, incited public outrage and lead to the official ending of the coolie trade in 1916 by the British government. By that time tens of thousands of Chinese workers were being used along the Western Front by the allied forces (see Chinese Labour Corps).

SEX RATIOS AND INTERMARRIAGE AMONG COOLIES

A major difference between the Chinese coolie trade and the Indian coolie trade was that the Chinese coolies were all male, while East Indian women (from India) were brought alongside men as coolies. This led to a high rate of Chinese men marrying women of other ethnicities like Indian women and mixed race Creole women. Indian women and children were brought alongside Indian men as coolies while Chinese men made up 99% of Chinese colonies. The contrast with the female to male ratio among Indian and Chinese immigrants has been compared by historians. In Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies just 18,731 Chinese women and 92,985 Chinese men served as coolies on plantations. Chinese women migrated less than Javanese and Indian women as indentured coolies. The number of Chinese women as coolies was "very small" while Chinese men were easily taken into the coolie trade. In Cuba men made up the vast majority of Chinese indentured servants on sugar plantations and in Peru non-Chinese women married the mostly male Chinese coolies.

Chinese women were scarce in every place where Chinese indentured laborers were brought, the migration was dominated by Chinese men. Up to the 1940s men made up the vast majority of the Costa Rican Chinese community. Males made up the majority of the original Chinese community in Mexico and they married Mexican women.

In the early 1900s, the Chinese communities in Manila, Singapore, Mauritius, New Zealand, Victoria in Australia, the United States, and Victoria in British Columbia in Canada were all male dominated.

WIKIPEDIA

A coolie (alternatively spelled cooli, cooly, quli, koelie, and other such variations), during the 19th and early 20th century, was a term for a locally sourced unskilled labourer hired by a company, mainly from the Indian subcontinent or Southern China.

Today, it is used varyingly as a legal inoffensive word (for example, in India for helpers carrying luggage in railway stations) and also used as a racial slur in Africa for certain people from Asia, particularly in South Africa

ETYMOLOGY

The origins of the word are uncertain but it is thought to have originated from the name of a Gujarati sect (the Kolī, who worked as day labourers) or perhaps from the Tamil word for a payment for work, kuli (கூலி). An alternative etymological explanation is that the word came from the Urdu qulī (क़ुली, قلی), which itself could be from the Turkish word for slave, qul. The word was used in this sense for labourers from India. In 1727, Dr. Engelbert Kämpfer described "coolies" as dock labourers who would unload Dutch merchant ships at Nagasaki in Japan.

The Chinese word 苦力 (pinyin: kǔlì) literally means "bitterly hard (use of) strength", in the Mandarin pronunciation.

HISTORY OF THE COOLIE TRADE

An early trade in Asian labourers is believed to have begun sometime in or around the 16th century. Social and political pressure led to the abolition of the slave trade throughout the British Empire in 1807, with other European nations following suit. Labour-intensive industries, such as cotton and sugar plantations, mines and railway construction, in the colonies were left without a cheap source of manpower. As a consequence, a large scale slavery-like trade in Asian (primarily Indian and Chinese) indentured labourers began in the 1820s to fill this vacuum. Some of these labourers signed contracts based on misleading promises, some were kidnapped and sold into the trade, some were victims of clan violence whose captors sold them to coolie brokers, while others sold themselves to pay off gambling debts. British companies were the first to experiment with this potential new form of cheap labour in 1807, when they imported 200 Chinese men to work in Trinidad.

The coolie trade was often compared to the earlier slave trade and they accomplished very similar things.

Although there are reports of ships for Asian coolies carrying women and children, the great majority of them were men. Finally, regulations were put in place, as early as 1837 by the British authorities in India to safeguard these principles of voluntary, contractual work and safe and sanitary transportation although in practice this rarely occurred especially during examples such as the Pacific Passage or the Guano Pits of Peru. The Chinese government also made efforts to secure the well-being of their nation's workers, with representations being made to relevant governments around the world.

CHINESE COOLIES

Workers from China were mainly transported to work in Peru and Cuba, but they also worked in British colonies such as Jamaica, British Guiana (now Guyana), British Malaya, Trinidad and Tobago, British Honduras (now Belize) and in the Dutch colonies Dutch East Indies and Suriname. The first shipment of Chinese labourers was to the British colony of Trinidad in 1806.

In 1847 two ships from Cuba transported workers to Havana to work in the sugar cane fields from the port of Xiamen, one of the five Chinese treaty ports opened to the British by the Treaty of Nanking in 1842. The trade soon spread to other ports in Guangdong province and demand became particularly strong in Peru for workers in the silver mines and the guano collecting industry. Australia began importing workers in 1848 and the United States began using them in 1865 on the First Transcontinental Railroad construction. These workers were deceived about their terms of employment to a much greater extent than their Indian counterparts, and consequently, there was a much higher level of Chinese emigration during this period.

The trade flourished from 1847 to 1854 without incident, until reports began to surface of the mistreatment of the workers in Cuba and Peru. As the British government had political and legal responsibility for many of the ports involved, including Amoy, the trade was shut down at these places. However, the trade simply shifted to the more accommodating port in the Portuguese enclave of Macau.

Many coolies were first deceived or kidnapped and then kept in barracoons (detention centres) or loading vessels in the ports of departure, as were African slaves. In 1875, British commissioners estimated that approximately eighty percent of the workers had been abducted. Their voyages, which are sometimes called the Pacific Passage, were as inhumane and dangerous as the notorious Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade. Mortality was very high. For example, it is estimated that from 1847 to 1859, the average mortality for coolies aboard ships to Cuba was 15.2 percent, and losses among those aboard ships to Peru were 40 percent in the 1850s and 30.44 percent from 1860 to 1863.

They were sold and were taken to work in plantations or mines with very bad living and working conditions. The duration of a contract was typically five to eight years, but many coolies did not live out their term of service because of the hard labour and mistreatment. Those who did live were often forced to remain in servitude beyond the contracted period. The coolies who worked on the sugar plantations in Cuba and in the guano beds of the Chincha Islands (the islands of Hell) of Peru were treated brutally. Seventy-five percent of the Chinese coolies in Cuba died before fulfilling their contracts. More than two-thirds of the Chinese coolies who arrived in Peru between 1849 and 1874 died within the contract period. In 1860 it was calculated that of the 4000 coolies brought to the Chinchas since the trade began, not one had survived.

Because of these unbearable conditions, Chinese coolies often revolted against their Ko-Hung bosses and foreign company bosses at ports of departure, on ships, and in foreign lands. The coolies were put in the same neighbourhoods as Africans and, since most were unable to return to their homeland or have their wives come to the New World, many married African women. The coolies' interracial relationships and marriages with Africans, Europeans and Indigenous peoples, formed some of the modern world's Afro-Asian and Asian Latin American populations.

Chinese immigration to the United States was almost entirely voluntary, but working and social conditions were still harsh. In 1868, the Burlingame Treaty allowed unrestricted Chinese immigration into the country. Within a decade significant levels of anti-Chinese sentiment had built up, stoked by populists such as Denis Kearney with racist slogans - "To an American, death is preferable to life on a par with the Chinese."

Although Chinese workers contributed to the building of the first Transcontinental Railroad in the United States and of the Canadian Pacific Railway in western Canada, Chinese settlement was discouraged after completion of the construction. California's Anti-Coolie Act of 1862 and the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 contributed to the curtailment of Chinese immigration to the United States.

Notwithstanding such attempts to restrict the influx of cheap labour from China, beginning in the 1870s Chinese workers helped construct a vast network of levees in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. These levees made thousands of acres of fertile marshlands available for agricultural production.

The 1879 Constitution of the State of California declared that "Asiatic coolieism is a form of human slavery, and is forever prohibited in this State, and all contracts for coolie labour shall be void."

Colonos asiáticos is a Spanish term for coolies. The Spanish colony of Cuba feared slavery uprisings such as those that took place in Haiti and used coolies as a transition between slaves and free labor. They were neither free nor slaves. Indentured Chinese servants also labored in the sugarcane fields of Cuba well after the 1884 abolition of slavery in that country. Two scholars of Chinese labor in Cuba, Juan Pastrana and Juan Perez de la Riva, substantiated horrific conditions of Chinese coolies in Cuba and stated that coolies were slaves in all but name. Denise Helly is one researcher who believes that despite their slave-like treatment, the free and legal status of the Asian laborers in Cuba separated them from slaves. The coolies could challenge their superiors, run away, petition government officials, and rebel according to Rodriguez Pastor and Trazegnies Granda. Once they had fulfilled their contracts the colonos asiáticos integrated into the countries of Peru, The Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Cuba. They adopted cultural traditions from the natives and also welcomed in non-Chinese to experience and participate into their own traditions. Before the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Havana had Latin America's largest Chinatown.

In South America, Chinese indentured labourers worked in Peru's silver mines and coastal industries (i.e., guano, sugar, and cotton) from the early 1850s to the mid-1870s; about 100,000 people immigrated as indentured workers. They participated in the War of the Pacific, looting and burning down the haciendas where they worked, after the capture of Lima by the invading Chilean army in January 1880. Some 2000 coolies even joined the Chilean Army in Peru, taking care of the wounded and burying the dead. Others were sent by Chileans to work in the newly conquered nitrate fields.

The Chinese Engineering and Mining Corporation, of which later U.S. president Herbert Hoover was a director, was instrumental in supplying Chinese coolie labour to South African mines from c.1902 to c.1910 at the request of mine owners, who considered such labour cheaper than native African and white labour. The horrendous conditions suffered by the coolie labourers led to questions in the British parliament as recorded in Hansard.

In 1866, the British, French and Chinese governments agreed to mitigate the abuse by requiring all traders to pay for the return of all workers after their contract ended. The employers in the British West Indies declined these conditions, bringing the trade there to an end. Until the trade was finally abolished in 1875, over 150,000 coolies had been sold to Cuba alone, the majority having been shipped from Macau. These labourers endured conditions far worse than those experienced by their Indian counterparts. Even after the 1866 reforms, the scale of abuse and conditions of near slavery did not get any better - if anything they deteriorated. In the early 1870s increased media exposure of the trade led to a public outcry, and the British, as well as the Qing government, put pressure on the Portuguese authorities to bring the trade at Macau to an end; this was ultimately achieved in 1874. By that time, a total of up to half a million Chinese workers had been exported.

The term coolie was also applied to Chinese workers recruited for contracts on cacao plantations in German Samoa. German planters went to great lengths to secure access to their "coolie" labour supply from China. In 1908 a Chinese commissioner, Lin Shu Fen, reported on the cruel treatment of coolie workers on German plantations in the western Samoan Islands. The trade began largely after the establishment of colonial German Samoa in 1900 and lasted until the arrival of New Zealand forces in 1914. More than 2000 Chinese "coolies" were present in the islands in 1914 and most were eventually repatriated by the New Zealand administration.

INDIAN COOLIES

By the 1820s, many Indians were voluntarily enlisting to go abroad for work, in the hopes of a better life. European merchants and businessmen quickly took advantage of this and began recruiting them for work as a cheap source of labour. The British began shipping Indians to colonies around the world, including Mauritius, Fiji, Natal, British East Africa, and British Malaya. The Dutch also shipped workers to labour on the plantations on Suriname and the Dutch East Indies. A system of agents was used to infiltrate the rural villages of India and recruit labourers. They would often deceive the credulous workers about the great opportunities that awaited them for their own material betterment abroad. The Indians primarily came from the Indo-Gangetic Plain, but also from Tamil Nadu and other areas to the south of the country.

Without permission from the British authorities, the French attempted to illegally transport Indian workers to their sugar producing colony, the Reunion Island, from as early as 1826. By 1830, over 3000 labourers had been transported. After this trade was discovered, the French successfully negotiated with the British in 1860 for permission to transport over 6,000 workers annually, on condition that the trade would be suspended if abuses were discovered to be taking place.

The British began to transport Indians to Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, starting in 1829. Slavery had been abolished with the planters receiving two million pounds sterling in compensation for the loss of their slaves. The planters turned to bringing in a large number of indentured labourers from India to work in the sugar cane fields. Between 1834 and 1921, around half a million indentured labourers were present on the island. They worked on sugar estates, factories, in transport and on construction sites.

In 1837, the Raj issued a set of regulations for the trade. The rules provided for each labourer to be personally authorised for transportation by an officer designated by the Government, it limited the length of service to five years subject to voluntary renewal, it made the contractor responsible for returning the worker after the contract elapsed and required the vessels to conform to basic health standards

Despite this, conditions on the ships were often extremely crowded, with rampant disease and malnutrition. The workers were paid a pittance for their labour, and were expected to work in often awful and harsh conditions. Although there were no large scale scandals involving coolie abuse in British colonies, workers often ended up being forced to work, and manipulated in such a way that they became dependent on the plantation owners so that in practice they remained there long after their contracts expired; possibly as little as 10% of the coolies actually returned to their original country of origin. Colonial legislation was also passed to severely limit their freedoms; in Mauritius a compulsory pass system was instituted to enable their movements to be easily tracked. Conditions were much worse in the French colonies of Reunion and Guadeloupe and Martinique, where workers were 'systematically overworked' and abnormally high mortality rates were recorded for those working in the mines.

However, there were also attempts by the British authorities to regulate and mitigate the worst abuses. Workers were regularly checked up on by health inspectors, and they were vetted before transportation to ensure that they were suitably healthy and fit to be able to endure the rigours of labour. Children under the age of 15 were not allowed to be transported from their parents under any circumstances.

The first campaign against the 'coolie' trade in England likened the system of indentured labour to the slavery of the past. In response to this pressure, the labour export was temporarily stopped in 1839 by the authorities when the scale of the abuses became known, but it was soon renewed due to its growing economic importance. A more rigorous regulatory framework was put into place and severe penalties were imposed for infractions in 1842. In that year, almost 35,000 people were shipped to Mauritius.

In 1844, the trade was expanded to the colonies in the West Indies, including Jamaica, Trinidad and Demerara, where the Asian population was soon a major component of the island demographic.

Starting in 1879, many Indians were transported to Fiji to work on the sugar cane plantations. Many of them chose to stay after their term of indenture elapsed and today they number about 40% of the total population. Indian workers were also imported into the Dutch colony of Suriname after the Dutch signed a treaty with the United Kingdom on the recruitment of contract workers in 1870. In Mauritius, the Indian population are now demographically dominant, with Indian festivals being celebrated as national holidays.

This system prevailed until the early twentieth century. Increasing focus on the brutalities and abuses of the trade by the sensationalist media of the time, incited public outrage and lead to the official ending of the coolie trade in 1916 by the British government. By that time tens of thousands of Chinese workers were being used along the Western Front by the allied forces (see Chinese Labour Corps).

SEX RATIOS AND INTERMARRIAGE AMONG COOLIES

A major difference between the Chinese coolie trade and the Indian coolie trade was that the Chinese coolies were all male, while East Indian women (from India) were brought alongside men as coolies. This led to a high rate of Chinese men marrying women of other ethnicities like Indian women and mixed race Creole women. Indian women and children were brought alongside Indian men as coolies while Chinese men made up 99% of Chinese colonies. The contrast with the female to male ratio among Indian and Chinese immigrants has been compared by historians. In Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies just 18,731 Chinese women and 92,985 Chinese men served as coolies on plantations. Chinese women migrated less than Javanese and Indian women as indentured coolies. The number of Chinese women as coolies was "very small" while Chinese men were easily taken into the coolie trade. In Cuba men made up the vast majority of Chinese indentured servants on sugar plantations and in Peru non-Chinese women married the mostly male Chinese coolies.

Chinese women were scarce in every place where Chinese indentured laborers were brought, the migration was dominated by Chinese men. Up to the 1940s men made up the vast majority of the Costa Rican Chinese community. Males made up the majority of the original Chinese community in Mexico and they married Mexican women.

In the early 1900s, the Chinese communities in Manila, Singapore, Mauritius, New Zealand, Victoria in Australia, the United States, and Victoria in British Columbia in Canada were all male dominated.

WIKIPEDIA

Sad businesswoman.

Camera Nikon D2X, lens Nikkor 18/200 DX, Light Flash Bowens.

A coolie (alternatively spelled cooli, cooly, quli, koelie, and other such variations), during the 19th and early 20th century, was a term for a locally sourced unskilled labourer hired by a company, mainly from the Indian subcontinent or Southern China.

Today, it is used varyingly as a legal inoffensive word (for example, in India for helpers carrying luggage in railway stations) and also used as a racial slur in Africa for certain people from Asia, particularly in South Africa

ETYMOLOGY

The origins of the word are uncertain but it is thought to have originated from the name of a Gujarati sect (the Kolī, who worked as day labourers) or perhaps from the Tamil word for a payment for work, kuli (கூலி). An alternative etymological explanation is that the word came from the Urdu qulī (क़ुली, قلی), which itself could be from the Turkish word for slave, qul. The word was used in this sense for labourers from India. In 1727, Dr. Engelbert Kämpfer described "coolies" as dock labourers who would unload Dutch merchant ships at Nagasaki in Japan.

The Chinese word 苦力 (pinyin: kǔlì) literally means "bitterly hard (use of) strength", in the Mandarin pronunciation.

HISTORY OF THE COOLIE TRADE

An early trade in Asian labourers is believed to have begun sometime in or around the 16th century. Social and political pressure led to the abolition of the slave trade throughout the British Empire in 1807, with other European nations following suit. Labour-intensive industries, such as cotton and sugar plantations, mines and railway construction, in the colonies were left without a cheap source of manpower. As a consequence, a large scale slavery-like trade in Asian (primarily Indian and Chinese) indentured labourers began in the 1820s to fill this vacuum. Some of these labourers signed contracts based on misleading promises, some were kidnapped and sold into the trade, some were victims of clan violence whose captors sold them to coolie brokers, while others sold themselves to pay off gambling debts. British companies were the first to experiment with this potential new form of cheap labour in 1807, when they imported 200 Chinese men to work in Trinidad.

The coolie trade was often compared to the earlier slave trade and they accomplished very similar things.

Although there are reports of ships for Asian coolies carrying women and children, the great majority of them were men. Finally, regulations were put in place, as early as 1837 by the British authorities in India to safeguard these principles of voluntary, contractual work and safe and sanitary transportation although in practice this rarely occurred especially during examples such as the Pacific Passage or the Guano Pits of Peru. The Chinese government also made efforts to secure the well-being of their nation's workers, with representations being made to relevant governments around the world.

CHINESE COOLIES

Workers from China were mainly transported to work in Peru and Cuba, but they also worked in British colonies such as Jamaica, British Guiana (now Guyana), British Malaya, Trinidad and Tobago, British Honduras (now Belize) and in the Dutch colonies Dutch East Indies and Suriname. The first shipment of Chinese labourers was to the British colony of Trinidad in 1806.

In 1847 two ships from Cuba transported workers to Havana to work in the sugar cane fields from the port of Xiamen, one of the five Chinese treaty ports opened to the British by the Treaty of Nanking in 1842. The trade soon spread to other ports in Guangdong province and demand became particularly strong in Peru for workers in the silver mines and the guano collecting industry. Australia began importing workers in 1848 and the United States began using them in 1865 on the First Transcontinental Railroad construction. These workers were deceived about their terms of employment to a much greater extent than their Indian counterparts, and consequently, there was a much higher level of Chinese emigration during this period.

The trade flourished from 1847 to 1854 without incident, until reports began to surface of the mistreatment of the workers in Cuba and Peru. As the British government had political and legal responsibility for many of the ports involved, including Amoy, the trade was shut down at these places. However, the trade simply shifted to the more accommodating port in the Portuguese enclave of Macau.

Many coolies were first deceived or kidnapped and then kept in barracoons (detention centres) or loading vessels in the ports of departure, as were African slaves. In 1875, British commissioners estimated that approximately eighty percent of the workers had been abducted. Their voyages, which are sometimes called the Pacific Passage, were as inhumane and dangerous as the notorious Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade. Mortality was very high. For example, it is estimated that from 1847 to 1859, the average mortality for coolies aboard ships to Cuba was 15.2 percent, and losses among those aboard ships to Peru were 40 percent in the 1850s and 30.44 percent from 1860 to 1863.

They were sold and were taken to work in plantations or mines with very bad living and working conditions. The duration of a contract was typically five to eight years, but many coolies did not live out their term of service because of the hard labour and mistreatment. Those who did live were often forced to remain in servitude beyond the contracted period. The coolies who worked on the sugar plantations in Cuba and in the guano beds of the Chincha Islands (the islands of Hell) of Peru were treated brutally. Seventy-five percent of the Chinese coolies in Cuba died before fulfilling their contracts. More than two-thirds of the Chinese coolies who arrived in Peru between 1849 and 1874 died within the contract period. In 1860 it was calculated that of the 4000 coolies brought to the Chinchas since the trade began, not one had survived.

Because of these unbearable conditions, Chinese coolies often revolted against their Ko-Hung bosses and foreign company bosses at ports of departure, on ships, and in foreign lands. The coolies were put in the same neighbourhoods as Africans and, since most were unable to return to their homeland or have their wives come to the New World, many married African women. The coolies' interracial relationships and marriages with Africans, Europeans and Indigenous peoples, formed some of the modern world's Afro-Asian and Asian Latin American populations.

Chinese immigration to the United States was almost entirely voluntary, but working and social conditions were still harsh. In 1868, the Burlingame Treaty allowed unrestricted Chinese immigration into the country. Within a decade significant levels of anti-Chinese sentiment had built up, stoked by populists such as Denis Kearney with racist slogans - "To an American, death is preferable to life on a par with the Chinese."

Although Chinese workers contributed to the building of the first Transcontinental Railroad in the United States and of the Canadian Pacific Railway in western Canada, Chinese settlement was discouraged after completion of the construction. California's Anti-Coolie Act of 1862 and the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 contributed to the curtailment of Chinese immigration to the United States.

Notwithstanding such attempts to restrict the influx of cheap labour from China, beginning in the 1870s Chinese workers helped construct a vast network of levees in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. These levees made thousands of acres of fertile marshlands available for agricultural production.

The 1879 Constitution of the State of California declared that "Asiatic coolieism is a form of human slavery, and is forever prohibited in this State, and all contracts for coolie labour shall be void."

Colonos asiáticos is a Spanish term for coolies. The Spanish colony of Cuba feared slavery uprisings such as those that took place in Haiti and used coolies as a transition between slaves and free labor. They were neither free nor slaves. Indentured Chinese servants also labored in the sugarcane fields of Cuba well after the 1884 abolition of slavery in that country. Two scholars of Chinese labor in Cuba, Juan Pastrana and Juan Perez de la Riva, substantiated horrific conditions of Chinese coolies in Cuba and stated that coolies were slaves in all but name. Denise Helly is one researcher who believes that despite their slave-like treatment, the free and legal status of the Asian laborers in Cuba separated them from slaves. The coolies could challenge their superiors, run away, petition government officials, and rebel according to Rodriguez Pastor and Trazegnies Granda. Once they had fulfilled their contracts the colonos asiáticos integrated into the countries of Peru, The Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Cuba. They adopted cultural traditions from the natives and also welcomed in non-Chinese to experience and participate into their own traditions. Before the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Havana had Latin America's largest Chinatown.

In South America, Chinese indentured labourers worked in Peru's silver mines and coastal industries (i.e., guano, sugar, and cotton) from the early 1850s to the mid-1870s; about 100,000 people immigrated as indentured workers. They participated in the War of the Pacific, looting and burning down the haciendas where they worked, after the capture of Lima by the invading Chilean army in January 1880. Some 2000 coolies even joined the Chilean Army in Peru, taking care of the wounded and burying the dead. Others were sent by Chileans to work in the newly conquered nitrate fields.

The Chinese Engineering and Mining Corporation, of which later U.S. president Herbert Hoover was a director, was instrumental in supplying Chinese coolie labour to South African mines from c.1902 to c.1910 at the request of mine owners, who considered such labour cheaper than native African and white labour. The horrendous conditions suffered by the coolie labourers led to questions in the British parliament as recorded in Hansard.

In 1866, the British, French and Chinese governments agreed to mitigate the abuse by requiring all traders to pay for the return of all workers after their contract ended. The employers in the British West Indies declined these conditions, bringing the trade there to an end. Until the trade was finally abolished in 1875, over 150,000 coolies had been sold to Cuba alone, the majority having been shipped from Macau. These labourers endured conditions far worse than those experienced by their Indian counterparts. Even after the 1866 reforms, the scale of abuse and conditions of near slavery did not get any better - if anything they deteriorated. In the early 1870s increased media exposure of the trade led to a public outcry, and the British, as well as the Qing government, put pressure on the Portuguese authorities to bring the trade at Macau to an end; this was ultimately achieved in 1874. By that time, a total of up to half a million Chinese workers had been exported.

The term coolie was also applied to Chinese workers recruited for contracts on cacao plantations in German Samoa. German planters went to great lengths to secure access to their "coolie" labour supply from China. In 1908 a Chinese commissioner, Lin Shu Fen, reported on the cruel treatment of coolie workers on German plantations in the western Samoan Islands. The trade began largely after the establishment of colonial German Samoa in 1900 and lasted until the arrival of New Zealand forces in 1914. More than 2000 Chinese "coolies" were present in the islands in 1914 and most were eventually repatriated by the New Zealand administration.

INDIAN COOLIES

By the 1820s, many Indians were voluntarily enlisting to go abroad for work, in the hopes of a better life. European merchants and businessmen quickly took advantage of this and began recruiting them for work as a cheap source of labour. The British began shipping Indians to colonies around the world, including Mauritius, Fiji, Natal, British East Africa, and British Malaya. The Dutch also shipped workers to labour on the plantations on Suriname and the Dutch East Indies. A system of agents was used to infiltrate the rural villages of India and recruit labourers. They would often deceive the credulous workers about the great opportunities that awaited them for their own material betterment abroad. The Indians primarily came from the Indo-Gangetic Plain, but also from Tamil Nadu and other areas to the south of the country.

Without permission from the British authorities, the French attempted to illegally transport Indian workers to their sugar producing colony, the Reunion Island, from as early as 1826. By 1830, over 3000 labourers had been transported. After this trade was discovered, the French successfully negotiated with the British in 1860 for permission to transport over 6,000 workers annually, on condition that the trade would be suspended if abuses were discovered to be taking place.

The British began to transport Indians to Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, starting in 1829. Slavery had been abolished with the planters receiving two million pounds sterling in compensation for the loss of their slaves. The planters turned to bringing in a large number of indentured labourers from India to work in the sugar cane fields. Between 1834 and 1921, around half a million indentured labourers were present on the island. They worked on sugar estates, factories, in transport and on construction sites.

In 1837, the Raj issued a set of regulations for the trade. The rules provided for each labourer to be personally authorised for transportation by an officer designated by the Government, it limited the length of service to five years subject to voluntary renewal, it made the contractor responsible for returning the worker after the contract elapsed and required the vessels to conform to basic health standards

Despite this, conditions on the ships were often extremely crowded, with rampant disease and malnutrition. The workers were paid a pittance for their labour, and were expected to work in often awful and harsh conditions. Although there were no large scale scandals involving coolie abuse in British colonies, workers often ended up being forced to work, and manipulated in such a way that they became dependent on the plantation owners so that in practice they remained there long after their contracts expired; possibly as little as 10% of the coolies actually returned to their original country of origin. Colonial legislation was also passed to severely limit their freedoms; in Mauritius a compulsory pass system was instituted to enable their movements to be easily tracked. Conditions were much worse in the French colonies of Reunion and Guadeloupe and Martinique, where workers were 'systematically overworked' and abnormally high mortality rates were recorded for those working in the mines.

However, there were also attempts by the British authorities to regulate and mitigate the worst abuses. Workers were regularly checked up on by health inspectors, and they were vetted before transportation to ensure that they were suitably healthy and fit to be able to endure the rigours of labour. Children under the age of 15 were not allowed to be transported from their parents under any circumstances.

The first campaign against the 'coolie' trade in England likened the system of indentured labour to the slavery of the past. In response to this pressure, the labour export was temporarily stopped in 1839 by the authorities when the scale of the abuses became known, but it was soon renewed due to its growing economic importance. A more rigorous regulatory framework was put into place and severe penalties were imposed for infractions in 1842. In that year, almost 35,000 people were shipped to Mauritius.

In 1844, the trade was expanded to the colonies in the West Indies, including Jamaica, Trinidad and Demerara, where the Asian population was soon a major component of the island demographic.

Starting in 1879, many Indians were transported to Fiji to work on the sugar cane plantations. Many of them chose to stay after their term of indenture elapsed and today they number about 40% of the total population. Indian workers were also imported into the Dutch colony of Suriname after the Dutch signed a treaty with the United Kingdom on the recruitment of contract workers in 1870. In Mauritius, the Indian population are now demographically dominant, with Indian festivals being celebrated as national holidays.

This system prevailed until the early twentieth century. Increasing focus on the brutalities and abuses of the trade by the sensationalist media of the time, incited public outrage and lead to the official ending of the coolie trade in 1916 by the British government. By that time tens of thousands of Chinese workers were being used along the Western Front by the allied forces (see Chinese Labour Corps).

SEX RATIOS AND INTERMARRIAGE AMONG COOLIES

A major difference between the Chinese coolie trade and the Indian coolie trade was that the Chinese coolies were all male, while East Indian women (from India) were brought alongside men as coolies. This led to a high rate of Chinese men marrying women of other ethnicities like Indian women and mixed race Creole women. Indian women and children were brought alongside Indian men as coolies while Chinese men made up 99% of Chinese colonies. The contrast with the female to male ratio among Indian and Chinese immigrants has been compared by historians. In Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies just 18,731 Chinese women and 92,985 Chinese men served as coolies on plantations. Chinese women migrated less than Javanese and Indian women as indentured coolies. The number of Chinese women as coolies was "very small" while Chinese men were easily taken into the coolie trade. In Cuba men made up the vast majority of Chinese indentured servants on sugar plantations and in Peru non-Chinese women married the mostly male Chinese coolies.

Chinese women were scarce in every place where Chinese indentured laborers were brought, the migration was dominated by Chinese men. Up to the 1940s men made up the vast majority of the Costa Rican Chinese community. Males made up the majority of the original Chinese community in Mexico and they married Mexican women.

In the early 1900s, the Chinese communities in Manila, Singapore, Mauritius, New Zealand, Victoria in Australia, the United States, and Victoria in British Columbia in Canada were all male dominated.

WIKIPEDIA

Donkey Rides for children were a common sight on many UK beaches when I was a child & I remember the thrill & excitement of shrieking children pestering their parents for rides up & down the beach. Sadly, some of the donkeys were overworked & not very well looked after but this was corrected when animal protection organisations stepped in & rules concerning the working animals were introduced. Nowadays it is a rare sight to see donkeys working on beaches so it brought back many happy childhood memories to see these on the beach in Llanelli, Wales.

A coolie (alternatively spelled cooli, cooly, quli, koelie, and other such variations), during the 19th and early 20th century, was a term for a locally sourced unskilled labourer hired by a company, mainly from the Indian subcontinent or Southern China.

Today, it is used varyingly as a legal inoffensive word (for example, in India for helpers carrying luggage in railway stations) and also used as a racial slur in Africa for certain people from Asia, particularly in South Africa

ETYMOLOGY

The origins of the word are uncertain but it is thought to have originated from the name of a Gujarati sect (the Kolī, who worked as day labourers) or perhaps from the Tamil word for a payment for work, kuli (கூலி). An alternative etymological explanation is that the word came from the Urdu qulī (क़ुली, قلی), which itself could be from the Turkish word for slave, qul. The word was used in this sense for labourers from India. In 1727, Dr. Engelbert Kämpfer described "coolies" as dock labourers who would unload Dutch merchant ships at Nagasaki in Japan.

The Chinese word 苦力 (pinyin: kǔlì) literally means "bitterly hard (use of) strength", in the Mandarin pronunciation.

HISTORY OF THE COOLIE TRADE

An early trade in Asian labourers is believed to have begun sometime in or around the 16th century. Social and political pressure led to the abolition of the slave trade throughout the British Empire in 1807, with other European nations following suit. Labour-intensive industries, such as cotton and sugar plantations, mines and railway construction, in the colonies were left without a cheap source of manpower. As a consequence, a large scale slavery-like trade in Asian (primarily Indian and Chinese) indentured labourers began in the 1820s to fill this vacuum. Some of these labourers signed contracts based on misleading promises, some were kidnapped and sold into the trade, some were victims of clan violence whose captors sold them to coolie brokers, while others sold themselves to pay off gambling debts. British companies were the first to experiment with this potential new form of cheap labour in 1807, when they imported 200 Chinese men to work in Trinidad.

The coolie trade was often compared to the earlier slave trade and they accomplished very similar things.

Although there are reports of ships for Asian coolies carrying women and children, the great majority of them were men. Finally, regulations were put in place, as early as 1837 by the British authorities in India to safeguard these principles of voluntary, contractual work and safe and sanitary transportation although in practice this rarely occurred especially during examples such as the Pacific Passage or the Guano Pits of Peru. The Chinese government also made efforts to secure the well-being of their nation's workers, with representations being made to relevant governments around the world.

CHINESE COOLIES

Workers from China were mainly transported to work in Peru and Cuba, but they also worked in British colonies such as Jamaica, British Guiana (now Guyana), British Malaya, Trinidad and Tobago, British Honduras (now Belize) and in the Dutch colonies Dutch East Indies and Suriname. The first shipment of Chinese labourers was to the British colony of Trinidad in 1806.

In 1847 two ships from Cuba transported workers to Havana to work in the sugar cane fields from the port of Xiamen, one of the five Chinese treaty ports opened to the British by the Treaty of Nanking in 1842. The trade soon spread to other ports in Guangdong province and demand became particularly strong in Peru for workers in the silver mines and the guano collecting industry. Australia began importing workers in 1848 and the United States began using them in 1865 on the First Transcontinental Railroad construction. These workers were deceived about their terms of employment to a much greater extent than their Indian counterparts, and consequently, there was a much higher level of Chinese emigration during this period.

The trade flourished from 1847 to 1854 without incident, until reports began to surface of the mistreatment of the workers in Cuba and Peru. As the British government had political and legal responsibility for many of the ports involved, including Amoy, the trade was shut down at these places. However, the trade simply shifted to the more accommodating port in the Portuguese enclave of Macau.

Many coolies were first deceived or kidnapped and then kept in barracoons (detention centres) or loading vessels in the ports of departure, as were African slaves. In 1875, British commissioners estimated that approximately eighty percent of the workers had been abducted. Their voyages, which are sometimes called the Pacific Passage, were as inhumane and dangerous as the notorious Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade. Mortality was very high. For example, it is estimated that from 1847 to 1859, the average mortality for coolies aboard ships to Cuba was 15.2 percent, and losses among those aboard ships to Peru were 40 percent in the 1850s and 30.44 percent from 1860 to 1863.

They were sold and were taken to work in plantations or mines with very bad living and working conditions. The duration of a contract was typically five to eight years, but many coolies did not live out their term of service because of the hard labour and mistreatment. Those who did live were often forced to remain in servitude beyond the contracted period. The coolies who worked on the sugar plantations in Cuba and in the guano beds of the Chincha Islands (the islands of Hell) of Peru were treated brutally. Seventy-five percent of the Chinese coolies in Cuba died before fulfilling their contracts. More than two-thirds of the Chinese coolies who arrived in Peru between 1849 and 1874 died within the contract period. In 1860 it was calculated that of the 4000 coolies brought to the Chinchas since the trade began, not one had survived.

Because of these unbearable conditions, Chinese coolies often revolted against their Ko-Hung bosses and foreign company bosses at ports of departure, on ships, and in foreign lands. The coolies were put in the same neighbourhoods as Africans and, since most were unable to return to their homeland or have their wives come to the New World, many married African women. The coolies' interracial relationships and marriages with Africans, Europeans and Indigenous peoples, formed some of the modern world's Afro-Asian and Asian Latin American populations.

Chinese immigration to the United States was almost entirely voluntary, but working and social conditions were still harsh. In 1868, the Burlingame Treaty allowed unrestricted Chinese immigration into the country. Within a decade significant levels of anti-Chinese sentiment had built up, stoked by populists such as Denis Kearney with racist slogans - "To an American, death is preferable to life on a par with the Chinese."

Although Chinese workers contributed to the building of the first Transcontinental Railroad in the United States and of the Canadian Pacific Railway in western Canada, Chinese settlement was discouraged after completion of the construction. California's Anti-Coolie Act of 1862 and the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 contributed to the curtailment of Chinese immigration to the United States.

Notwithstanding such attempts to restrict the influx of cheap labour from China, beginning in the 1870s Chinese workers helped construct a vast network of levees in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. These levees made thousands of acres of fertile marshlands available for agricultural production.

The 1879 Constitution of the State of California declared that "Asiatic coolieism is a form of human slavery, and is forever prohibited in this State, and all contracts for coolie labour shall be void."

Colonos asiáticos is a Spanish term for coolies. The Spanish colony of Cuba feared slavery uprisings such as those that took place in Haiti and used coolies as a transition between slaves and free labor. They were neither free nor slaves. Indentured Chinese servants also labored in the sugarcane fields of Cuba well after the 1884 abolition of slavery in that country. Two scholars of Chinese labor in Cuba, Juan Pastrana and Juan Perez de la Riva, substantiated horrific conditions of Chinese coolies in Cuba and stated that coolies were slaves in all but name. Denise Helly is one researcher who believes that despite their slave-like treatment, the free and legal status of the Asian laborers in Cuba separated them from slaves. The coolies could challenge their superiors, run away, petition government officials, and rebel according to Rodriguez Pastor and Trazegnies Granda. Once they had fulfilled their contracts the colonos asiáticos integrated into the countries of Peru, The Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Cuba. They adopted cultural traditions from the natives and also welcomed in non-Chinese to experience and participate into their own traditions. Before the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Havana had Latin America's largest Chinatown.

In South America, Chinese indentured labourers worked in Peru's silver mines and coastal industries (i.e., guano, sugar, and cotton) from the early 1850s to the mid-1870s; about 100,000 people immigrated as indentured workers. They participated in the War of the Pacific, looting and burning down the haciendas where they worked, after the capture of Lima by the invading Chilean army in January 1880. Some 2000 coolies even joined the Chilean Army in Peru, taking care of the wounded and burying the dead. Others were sent by Chileans to work in the newly conquered nitrate fields.

The Chinese Engineering and Mining Corporation, of which later U.S. president Herbert Hoover was a director, was instrumental in supplying Chinese coolie labour to South African mines from c.1902 to c.1910 at the request of mine owners, who considered such labour cheaper than native African and white labour. The horrendous conditions suffered by the coolie labourers led to questions in the British parliament as recorded in Hansard.

In 1866, the British, French and Chinese governments agreed to mitigate the abuse by requiring all traders to pay for the return of all workers after their contract ended. The employers in the British West Indies declined these conditions, bringing the trade there to an end. Until the trade was finally abolished in 1875, over 150,000 coolies had been sold to Cuba alone, the majority having been shipped from Macau. These labourers endured conditions far worse than those experienced by their Indian counterparts. Even after the 1866 reforms, the scale of abuse and conditions of near slavery did not get any better - if anything they deteriorated. In the early 1870s increased media exposure of the trade led to a public outcry, and the British, as well as the Qing government, put pressure on the Portuguese authorities to bring the trade at Macau to an end; this was ultimately achieved in 1874. By that time, a total of up to half a million Chinese workers had been exported.

The term coolie was also applied to Chinese workers recruited for contracts on cacao plantations in German Samoa. German planters went to great lengths to secure access to their "coolie" labour supply from China. In 1908 a Chinese commissioner, Lin Shu Fen, reported on the cruel treatment of coolie workers on German plantations in the western Samoan Islands. The trade began largely after the establishment of colonial German Samoa in 1900 and lasted until the arrival of New Zealand forces in 1914. More than 2000 Chinese "coolies" were present in the islands in 1914 and most were eventually repatriated by the New Zealand administration.

INDIAN COOLIES

By the 1820s, many Indians were voluntarily enlisting to go abroad for work, in the hopes of a better life. European merchants and businessmen quickly took advantage of this and began recruiting them for work as a cheap source of labour. The British began shipping Indians to colonies around the world, including Mauritius, Fiji, Natal, British East Africa, and British Malaya. The Dutch also shipped workers to labour on the plantations on Suriname and the Dutch East Indies. A system of agents was used to infiltrate the rural villages of India and recruit labourers. They would often deceive the credulous workers about the great opportunities that awaited them for their own material betterment abroad. The Indians primarily came from the Indo-Gangetic Plain, but also from Tamil Nadu and other areas to the south of the country.

Without permission from the British authorities, the French attempted to illegally transport Indian workers to their sugar producing colony, the Reunion Island, from as early as 1826. By 1830, over 3000 labourers had been transported. After this trade was discovered, the French successfully negotiated with the British in 1860 for permission to transport over 6,000 workers annually, on condition that the trade would be suspended if abuses were discovered to be taking place.

The British began to transport Indians to Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, starting in 1829. Slavery had been abolished with the planters receiving two million pounds sterling in compensation for the loss of their slaves. The planters turned to bringing in a large number of indentured labourers from India to work in the sugar cane fields. Between 1834 and 1921, around half a million indentured labourers were present on the island. They worked on sugar estates, factories, in transport and on construction sites.

In 1837, the Raj issued a set of regulations for the trade. The rules provided for each labourer to be personally authorised for transportation by an officer designated by the Government, it limited the length of service to five years subject to voluntary renewal, it made the contractor responsible for returning the worker after the contract elapsed and required the vessels to conform to basic health standards

Despite this, conditions on the ships were often extremely crowded, with rampant disease and malnutrition. The workers were paid a pittance for their labour, and were expected to work in often awful and harsh conditions. Although there were no large scale scandals involving coolie abuse in British colonies, workers often ended up being forced to work, and manipulated in such a way that they became dependent on the plantation owners so that in practice they remained there long after their contracts expired; possibly as little as 10% of the coolies actually returned to their original country of origin. Colonial legislation was also passed to severely limit their freedoms; in Mauritius a compulsory pass system was instituted to enable their movements to be easily tracked. Conditions were much worse in the French colonies of Reunion and Guadeloupe and Martinique, where workers were 'systematically overworked' and abnormally high mortality rates were recorded for those working in the mines.

However, there were also attempts by the British authorities to regulate and mitigate the worst abuses. Workers were regularly checked up on by health inspectors, and they were vetted before transportation to ensure that they were suitably healthy and fit to be able to endure the rigours of labour. Children under the age of 15 were not allowed to be transported from their parents under any circumstances.

The first campaign against the 'coolie' trade in England likened the system of indentured labour to the slavery of the past. In response to this pressure, the labour export was temporarily stopped in 1839 by the authorities when the scale of the abuses became known, but it was soon renewed due to its growing economic importance. A more rigorous regulatory framework was put into place and severe penalties were imposed for infractions in 1842. In that year, almost 35,000 people were shipped to Mauritius.

In 1844, the trade was expanded to the colonies in the West Indies, including Jamaica, Trinidad and Demerara, where the Asian population was soon a major component of the island demographic.

Starting in 1879, many Indians were transported to Fiji to work on the sugar cane plantations. Many of them chose to stay after their term of indenture elapsed and today they number about 40% of the total population. Indian workers were also imported into the Dutch colony of Suriname after the Dutch signed a treaty with the United Kingdom on the recruitment of contract workers in 1870. In Mauritius, the Indian population are now demographically dominant, with Indian festivals being celebrated as national holidays.

This system prevailed until the early twentieth century. Increasing focus on the brutalities and abuses of the trade by the sensationalist media of the time, incited public outrage and lead to the official ending of the coolie trade in 1916 by the British government. By that time tens of thousands of Chinese workers were being used along the Western Front by the allied forces (see Chinese Labour Corps).

SEX RATIOS AND INTERMARRIAGE AMONG COOLIES

A major difference between the Chinese coolie trade and the Indian coolie trade was that the Chinese coolies were all male, while East Indian women (from India) were brought alongside men as coolies. This led to a high rate of Chinese men marrying women of other ethnicities like Indian women and mixed race Creole women. Indian women and children were brought alongside Indian men as coolies while Chinese men made up 99% of Chinese colonies. The contrast with the female to male ratio among Indian and Chinese immigrants has been compared by historians. In Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies just 18,731 Chinese women and 92,985 Chinese men served as coolies on plantations. Chinese women migrated less than Javanese and Indian women as indentured coolies. The number of Chinese women as coolies was "very small" while Chinese men were easily taken into the coolie trade. In Cuba men made up the vast majority of Chinese indentured servants on sugar plantations and in Peru non-Chinese women married the mostly male Chinese coolies.

Chinese women were scarce in every place where Chinese indentured laborers were brought, the migration was dominated by Chinese men. Up to the 1940s men made up the vast majority of the Costa Rican Chinese community. Males made up the majority of the original Chinese community in Mexico and they married Mexican women.

In the early 1900s, the Chinese communities in Manila, Singapore, Mauritius, New Zealand, Victoria in Australia, the United States, and Victoria in British Columbia in Canada were all male dominated.

WIKIPEDIA

She had became frustrated, upset with the unfortunate progression of her day. She could not help herself no longer, and she found herself full with rage. Her hair began to loose its place as she rose her hand, intensively clutching the overworked round of dough.

AGENDA Magazine:

SPOTLIGHT

[Photo Caption] Philip McMaster promotes sustainability, three fingers at a time

GIVE ‘EM THE FINGERS!

Philip McMaster, Founder of the World Sustainability Project

Activist Philip McMaster is giving China three fingers, and through this little gesture, he is changing the world. Agenda met with McMaster to discuss how his Peace Plus One – World Sustainability Project promotes environmental sustainability in a holistic manner.

What did you do before you started saving the world?

I am very fortunate to have “flowed’ through many interesting careers, working in television, publishing newspapers, developing satellite launch facilities, consulting on sustainable tourism in the Brazilian Amazon, running a sports-and-adventure consulting company, and teaching MBA students in Canada and Hong Kong. Life is an adventure and I’m interested in so many different things that I just allow the world to propel me along the great wave of experience.

So my life as a Sustainablist and the Peace Plus One - World Sustainability Project has been forming with every experience and every place visited on this lonely planet.

Tell us a bit about Peace Plus One.

I see China regaining its position as the “center of the world” and being the leader of what’s meaningful and important - sustainable human culture and sustainable business within a balanced and healthy environment.

We created the Peace Plus One – World Sustainability Project to achieve this.

When I was teaching business, it occurred to me that there is no such thing as corporate social responsibility (CSR). The only reality is Individual Social Responsibility (ISR). All business students know that corporations are “fictitious persons” and are limited in terms of their liability, so by definition a corporation cannot be responsible.

The only reality is that each individual within a corporation is responsible for their own actions, and responsible for the communal performance of their place of employment. So we focus on promoting sustainability at the individual level.

Our objective is not to re-invent the wheel. We support, promote and participate with all NGOs and organizations that are making an effort to train their members to be CSR and ISR. It’s all about balance, and balance lies in the decisions of the individual.

What projects have you undertaken?

Most of our projects involve communicating ideas or philosophies, building individual selfesteem, and helping other NGOs, social enterprises and LOHAS (Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability) companies to promote environmental, economic and social harmony. One project is our Three Finger Wednesday initiative, a weekly reminder to think sustainably and modify our habits in support of the planet for at least 24 hours. Participants are requested to not eat meat, and thereby stop contributing to the 20% of greenhouse gasses produced by it, and unplug unused appliances for the day.

On Wednesdays, we also have LOHAS lunch, where participating restaurants offer their delicious nonmeat dishes in special promotions.

Similarly, our LOHAS shopping expeditions introduce participants to environmentally sustainable stores.

We also have a project that involves donating goods and services to underserved communities, and matchmaking parties.

We are currently producing the Win On Wednesday TV show, which features games, fashion, interviews, social networks, and contests that promote a sustainable lifestyle. And we’re working with many open source IT professionals on online games, Three Finger phone apps, and other digital projects that share the sustainability ethic in an entertaining and engaging way.

What is the story with the three finger salute?

The Three-Finger “Peace Plus One” sustainability symbol is like a virtual seed of happiness. It makes me happy to plant it in the conscience of everyone I meet, and watch others become happier when they share it too. Our objective is to encourage millions of “Three Finger Johnny Appleseeds,” first in China, then as an open source gift from China to the world, sharing the new symbol of sustainability and its Chinese

origin. People can flash the 3 Finger symbol, or put it up as their social media avatars when they are participating in one of our initiatives.

Are Chinese people receptive to your ideas?

Chinese people from all walks of life are very receptive to these ideas, because the values are already in their DNA. The core concepts actually come from Chinese culture itself. For thousands of years, peace, harmony and balance have been at the center of Chinese thought, so now it’s time to innovate and refresh those old but valuable ideas. This is what we want to share person-to-person, sustainable values that are above language and culture, which everyone on the planet has the opportunity and responsibility to share.

My ideas are simply the application of those fundamentals to the current situation in China and the world.

Does networking play a big role in your profession?

In order to find and match talent and resources, it’s all about networking. Last year I attended over 80 conferences and meetings.

What are the three keys to getting people motivated and involved, especially Chinese people?

Every individual is motivated by slightly different things, so the first key is to ask what actually motivates them, and usually making money tops the list among Chinese people. Second are working conditions, and third might be the appreciation, recognition, praise and loyalty of the boss to the company and employees. This is quite different from my experience in Western organizations, but understandable when considering the different social safety net, or lack thereof, in China.

We don’t pay our volunteers, so we motivate them to do a good job with benefits like career development, professional success, LOHAS health, balance and energy, the opportunity to influence and experience leadership, and exclusive learning, knowledge and discovery. What we’re doing is challenging, and only the best and most passionate are up to the challenge.

How do you see the concept of sustainability evolving in China?

Sustainability is not being taken for granted as much as it has been in the past. The strange paradox is that China has continuously sustained itself for several-thousand years, but it is only in the last few years that the issue of sustainability and the conceptualization of the problem have come to the forefront. It is evolving from the perception of simply an environmental problem to the truth of it being a relationship problem between society and its values.

What are some of the least sustainable practices in China, and how do you see them changing?

The new love affair with the automobile is unsustainable. Also, the pressure on young people to make the money necessary to pay huge mortgages is unsustainable and leading to an overworked and unhappy generation.

Interview by Jennifer Thomé and Phoenix Tso

For more information, visit

www.SustainabilitySymbol.com

THU, APR 21 – WED, MAY 4 AGENDA 35

McMaster Institute for Sustainable Development in Commerce

A coolie (alternatively spelled cooli, cooly, quli, koelie, and other such variations), during the 19th and early 20th century, was a term for a locally sourced unskilled labourer hired by a company, mainly from the Indian subcontinent or Southern China.

Today, it is used varyingly as a legal inoffensive word (for example, in India for helpers carrying luggage in railway stations) and also used as a racial slur in Africa for certain people from Asia, particularly in South Africa

ETYMOLOGY

The origins of the word are uncertain but it is thought to have originated from the name of a Gujarati sect (the Kolī, who worked as day labourers) or perhaps from the Tamil word for a payment for work, kuli (கூலி). An alternative etymological explanation is that the word came from the Urdu qulī (क़ुली, قلی), which itself could be from the Turkish word for slave, qul. The word was used in this sense for labourers from India. In 1727, Dr. Engelbert Kämpfer described "coolies" as dock labourers who would unload Dutch merchant ships at Nagasaki in Japan.

The Chinese word 苦力 (pinyin: kǔlì) literally means "bitterly hard (use of) strength", in the Mandarin pronunciation.

HISTORY OF THE COOLIE TRADE

An early trade in Asian labourers is believed to have begun sometime in or around the 16th century. Social and political pressure led to the abolition of the slave trade throughout the British Empire in 1807, with other European nations following suit. Labour-intensive industries, such as cotton and sugar plantations, mines and railway construction, in the colonies were left without a cheap source of manpower. As a consequence, a large scale slavery-like trade in Asian (primarily Indian and Chinese) indentured labourers began in the 1820s to fill this vacuum. Some of these labourers signed contracts based on misleading promises, some were kidnapped and sold into the trade, some were victims of clan violence whose captors sold them to coolie brokers, while others sold themselves to pay off gambling debts. British companies were the first to experiment with this potential new form of cheap labour in 1807, when they imported 200 Chinese men to work in Trinidad.

The coolie trade was often compared to the earlier slave trade and they accomplished very similar things.

Although there are reports of ships for Asian coolies carrying women and children, the great majority of them were men. Finally, regulations were put in place, as early as 1837 by the British authorities in India to safeguard these principles of voluntary, contractual work and safe and sanitary transportation although in practice this rarely occurred especially during examples such as the Pacific Passage or the Guano Pits of Peru. The Chinese government also made efforts to secure the well-being of their nation's workers, with representations being made to relevant governments around the world.

CHINESE COOLIES

Workers from China were mainly transported to work in Peru and Cuba, but they also worked in British colonies such as Jamaica, British Guiana (now Guyana), British Malaya, Trinidad and Tobago, British Honduras (now Belize) and in the Dutch colonies Dutch East Indies and Suriname. The first shipment of Chinese labourers was to the British colony of Trinidad in 1806.

In 1847 two ships from Cuba transported workers to Havana to work in the sugar cane fields from the port of Xiamen, one of the five Chinese treaty ports opened to the British by the Treaty of Nanking in 1842. The trade soon spread to other ports in Guangdong province and demand became particularly strong in Peru for workers in the silver mines and the guano collecting industry. Australia began importing workers in 1848 and the United States began using them in 1865 on the First Transcontinental Railroad construction. These workers were deceived about their terms of employment to a much greater extent than their Indian counterparts, and consequently, there was a much higher level of Chinese emigration during this period.

The trade flourished from 1847 to 1854 without incident, until reports began to surface of the mistreatment of the workers in Cuba and Peru. As the British government had political and legal responsibility for many of the ports involved, including Amoy, the trade was shut down at these places. However, the trade simply shifted to the more accommodating port in the Portuguese enclave of Macau.

Many coolies were first deceived or kidnapped and then kept in barracoons (detention centres) or loading vessels in the ports of departure, as were African slaves. In 1875, British commissioners estimated that approximately eighty percent of the workers had been abducted. Their voyages, which are sometimes called the Pacific Passage, were as inhumane and dangerous as the notorious Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade. Mortality was very high. For example, it is estimated that from 1847 to 1859, the average mortality for coolies aboard ships to Cuba was 15.2 percent, and losses among those aboard ships to Peru were 40 percent in the 1850s and 30.44 percent from 1860 to 1863.

They were sold and were taken to work in plantations or mines with very bad living and working conditions. The duration of a contract was typically five to eight years, but many coolies did not live out their term of service because of the hard labour and mistreatment. Those who did live were often forced to remain in servitude beyond the contracted period. The coolies who worked on the sugar plantations in Cuba and in the guano beds of the Chincha Islands (the islands of Hell) of Peru were treated brutally. Seventy-five percent of the Chinese coolies in Cuba died before fulfilling their contracts. More than two-thirds of the Chinese coolies who arrived in Peru between 1849 and 1874 died within the contract period. In 1860 it was calculated that of the 4000 coolies brought to the Chinchas since the trade began, not one had survived.

Because of these unbearable conditions, Chinese coolies often revolted against their Ko-Hung bosses and foreign company bosses at ports of departure, on ships, and in foreign lands. The coolies were put in the same neighbourhoods as Africans and, since most were unable to return to their homeland or have their wives come to the New World, many married African women. The coolies' interracial relationships and marriages with Africans, Europeans and Indigenous peoples, formed some of the modern world's Afro-Asian and Asian Latin American populations.

Chinese immigration to the United States was almost entirely voluntary, but working and social conditions were still harsh. In 1868, the Burlingame Treaty allowed unrestricted Chinese immigration into the country. Within a decade significant levels of anti-Chinese sentiment had built up, stoked by populists such as Denis Kearney with racist slogans - "To an American, death is preferable to life on a par with the Chinese."

Although Chinese workers contributed to the building of the first Transcontinental Railroad in the United States and of the Canadian Pacific Railway in western Canada, Chinese settlement was discouraged after completion of the construction. California's Anti-Coolie Act of 1862 and the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 contributed to the curtailment of Chinese immigration to the United States.

Notwithstanding such attempts to restrict the influx of cheap labour from China, beginning in the 1870s Chinese workers helped construct a vast network of levees in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. These levees made thousands of acres of fertile marshlands available for agricultural production.

The 1879 Constitution of the State of California declared that "Asiatic coolieism is a form of human slavery, and is forever prohibited in this State, and all contracts for coolie labour shall be void."

Colonos asiáticos is a Spanish term for coolies. The Spanish colony of Cuba feared slavery uprisings such as those that took place in Haiti and used coolies as a transition between slaves and free labor. They were neither free nor slaves. Indentured Chinese servants also labored in the sugarcane fields of Cuba well after the 1884 abolition of slavery in that country. Two scholars of Chinese labor in Cuba, Juan Pastrana and Juan Perez de la Riva, substantiated horrific conditions of Chinese coolies in Cuba and stated that coolies were slaves in all but name. Denise Helly is one researcher who believes that despite their slave-like treatment, the free and legal status of the Asian laborers in Cuba separated them from slaves. The coolies could challenge their superiors, run away, petition government officials, and rebel according to Rodriguez Pastor and Trazegnies Granda. Once they had fulfilled their contracts the colonos asiáticos integrated into the countries of Peru, The Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Cuba. They adopted cultural traditions from the natives and also welcomed in non-Chinese to experience and participate into their own traditions. Before the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Havana had Latin America's largest Chinatown.

In South America, Chinese indentured labourers worked in Peru's silver mines and coastal industries (i.e., guano, sugar, and cotton) from the early 1850s to the mid-1870s; about 100,000 people immigrated as indentured workers. They participated in the War of the Pacific, looting and burning down the haciendas where they worked, after the capture of Lima by the invading Chilean army in January 1880. Some 2000 coolies even joined the Chilean Army in Peru, taking care of the wounded and burying the dead. Others were sent by Chileans to work in the newly conquered nitrate fields.

The Chinese Engineering and Mining Corporation, of which later U.S. president Herbert Hoover was a director, was instrumental in supplying Chinese coolie labour to South African mines from c.1902 to c.1910 at the request of mine owners, who considered such labour cheaper than native African and white labour. The horrendous conditions suffered by the coolie labourers led to questions in the British parliament as recorded in Hansard.

In 1866, the British, French and Chinese governments agreed to mitigate the abuse by requiring all traders to pay for the return of all workers after their contract ended. The employers in the British West Indies declined these conditions, bringing the trade there to an end. Until the trade was finally abolished in 1875, over 150,000 coolies had been sold to Cuba alone, the majority having been shipped from Macau. These labourers endured conditions far worse than those experienced by their Indian counterparts. Even after the 1866 reforms, the scale of abuse and conditions of near slavery did not get any better - if anything they deteriorated. In the early 1870s increased media exposure of the trade led to a public outcry, and the British, as well as the Qing government, put pressure on the Portuguese authorities to bring the trade at Macau to an end; this was ultimately achieved in 1874. By that time, a total of up to half a million Chinese workers had been exported.

The term coolie was also applied to Chinese workers recruited for contracts on cacao plantations in German Samoa. German planters went to great lengths to secure access to their "coolie" labour supply from China. In 1908 a Chinese commissioner, Lin Shu Fen, reported on the cruel treatment of coolie workers on German plantations in the western Samoan Islands. The trade began largely after the establishment of colonial German Samoa in 1900 and lasted until the arrival of New Zealand forces in 1914. More than 2000 Chinese "coolies" were present in the islands in 1914 and most were eventually repatriated by the New Zealand administration.

INDIAN COOLIES

By the 1820s, many Indians were voluntarily enlisting to go abroad for work, in the hopes of a better life. European merchants and businessmen quickly took advantage of this and began recruiting them for work as a cheap source of labour. The British began shipping Indians to colonies around the world, including Mauritius, Fiji, Natal, British East Africa, and British Malaya. The Dutch also shipped workers to labour on the plantations on Suriname and the Dutch East Indies. A system of agents was used to infiltrate the rural villages of India and recruit labourers. They would often deceive the credulous workers about the great opportunities that awaited them for their own material betterment abroad. The Indians primarily came from the Indo-Gangetic Plain, but also from Tamil Nadu and other areas to the south of the country.

Without permission from the British authorities, the French attempted to illegally transport Indian workers to their sugar producing colony, the Reunion Island, from as early as 1826. By 1830, over 3000 labourers had been transported. After this trade was discovered, the French successfully negotiated with the British in 1860 for permission to transport over 6,000 workers annually, on condition that the trade would be suspended if abuses were discovered to be taking place.

The British began to transport Indians to Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, starting in 1829. Slavery had been abolished with the planters receiving two million pounds sterling in compensation for the loss of their slaves. The planters turned to bringing in a large number of indentured labourers from India to work in the sugar cane fields. Between 1834 and 1921, around half a million indentured labourers were present on the island. They worked on sugar estates, factories, in transport and on construction sites.

In 1837, the Raj issued a set of regulations for the trade. The rules provided for each labourer to be personally authorised for transportation by an officer designated by the Government, it limited the length of service to five years subject to voluntary renewal, it made the contractor responsible for returning the worker after the contract elapsed and required the vessels to conform to basic health standards

Despite this, conditions on the ships were often extremely crowded, with rampant disease and malnutrition. The workers were paid a pittance for their labour, and were expected to work in often awful and harsh conditions. Although there were no large scale scandals involving coolie abuse in British colonies, workers often ended up being forced to work, and manipulated in such a way that they became dependent on the plantation owners so that in practice they remained there long after their contracts expired; possibly as little as 10% of the coolies actually returned to their original country of origin. Colonial legislation was also passed to severely limit their freedoms; in Mauritius a compulsory pass system was instituted to enable their movements to be easily tracked. Conditions were much worse in the French colonies of Reunion and Guadeloupe and Martinique, where workers were 'systematically overworked' and abnormally high mortality rates were recorded for those working in the mines.

However, there were also attempts by the British authorities to regulate and mitigate the worst abuses. Workers were regularly checked up on by health inspectors, and they were vetted before transportation to ensure that they were suitably healthy and fit to be able to endure the rigours of labour. Children under the age of 15 were not allowed to be transported from their parents under any circumstances.

The first campaign against the 'coolie' trade in England likened the system of indentured labour to the slavery of the past. In response to this pressure, the labour export was temporarily stopped in 1839 by the authorities when the scale of the abuses became known, but it was soon renewed due to its growing economic importance. A more rigorous regulatory framework was put into place and severe penalties were imposed for infractions in 1842. In that year, almost 35,000 people were shipped to Mauritius.

In 1844, the trade was expanded to the colonies in the West Indies, including Jamaica, Trinidad and Demerara, where the Asian population was soon a major component of the island demographic.

Starting in 1879, many Indians were transported to Fiji to work on the sugar cane plantations. Many of them chose to stay after their term of indenture elapsed and today they number about 40% of the total population. Indian workers were also imported into the Dutch colony of Suriname after the Dutch signed a treaty with the United Kingdom on the recruitment of contract workers in 1870. In Mauritius, the Indian population are now demographically dominant, with Indian festivals being celebrated as national holidays.

This system prevailed until the early twentieth century. Increasing focus on the brutalities and abuses of the trade by the sensationalist media of the time, incited public outrage and lead to the official ending of the coolie trade in 1916 by the British government. By that time tens of thousands of Chinese workers were being used along the Western Front by the allied forces (see Chinese Labour Corps).

SEX RATIOS AND INTERMARRIAGE AMONG COOLIES

A major difference between the Chinese coolie trade and the Indian coolie trade was that the Chinese coolies were all male, while East Indian women (from India) were brought alongside men as coolies. This led to a high rate of Chinese men marrying women of other ethnicities like Indian women and mixed race Creole women. Indian women and children were brought alongside Indian men as coolies while Chinese men made up 99% of Chinese colonies. The contrast with the female to male ratio among Indian and Chinese immigrants has been compared by historians. In Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies just 18,731 Chinese women and 92,985 Chinese men served as coolies on plantations. Chinese women migrated less than Javanese and Indian women as indentured coolies. The number of Chinese women as coolies was "very small" while Chinese men were easily taken into the coolie trade. In Cuba men made up the vast majority of Chinese indentured servants on sugar plantations and in Peru non-Chinese women married the mostly male Chinese coolies.

Chinese women were scarce in every place where Chinese indentured laborers were brought, the migration was dominated by Chinese men. Up to the 1940s men made up the vast majority of the Costa Rican Chinese community. Males made up the majority of the original Chinese community in Mexico and they married Mexican women.

In the early 1900s, the Chinese communities in Manila, Singapore, Mauritius, New Zealand, Victoria in Australia, the United States, and Victoria in British Columbia in Canada were all male dominated.

WIKIPEDIA

Businessman Buried in Paperwork --- Image by © Royalty-Free/Corbis

The Grumman EA-6B Prowler was developed primarily to replace older electronic warfare aircraft in US Navy service, namely the EKA-3B Skywarrior, as well as in response to the growing lethality of Eastern Bloc electronic threats. Initially, the ALQ-99 electronics suite was installed in a standard A-6 Intruder airframe as the EA-6A, but the aircraft was somewhat limited and workload was heavier for a two-man crew, especially in combat. EA-6As did see combat in Vietnam with the US Marine Corps, but something better was clearly needed. The result was the lengthened EA-6B Prowler, which upgraded the electronics suite considerably and also added two more crewmembers to reduce workload and increase effectiveness. The EA-6B first flew in May 1968, and entered US Navy and Marine service in 1971, just too late for service in Vietnam.

The ALQ-99 system is divided between several antennae on the aircraft, including the distinctive “football” antenna at the top of the tail. Most of the noise jammers are in the three or five underwing pods the Prowler almost always carries, though in the case of a three-pod arrangement, often antiradar missiles such as the AGM-88 HARM. It can also be used as an Elint aircraft.

Continually updated over its life, the EA-6B saw action in both Gulf Wars, Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Kosovo; in service over the Middle East, the Prowler proved effective in jamming IED detonation signals. With the retirement of the USAF’s EF-111 Ravens, the EA-6B is now the sole ECM aircraft in US service, further contributing to the overwork of the aircraft, and has often been the only ECM aircraft available in NATO operations as well. The last of the A-6 family in service, the Prowlers were replaced by the EF-18G Growler, and the last was retired around 2016.

Dad took this picture of 160433, a VAQ-130 ("Zappers") EA-6B off USS Forrestal at the Malmstrom AFB 1977 airshow. This view shows the various antennas and bulges of the ALQ-99 ECM system. At the time, the US Navy was still using the Vietnam-era light gray over white scheme. This aircraft was later transferred to the Marines and served last with VMAQ-1 before it was retired in 2011. The "Pride" hangar in the background was a Malmstrom AFB icon until it was torn down in the late 1990s.

One of my favourite bars in Tokyo, Bar Hermit.

The barman is hard at work serving up drinks for overworked business men while they let their hair down in the evening.

.

~ Photo Series ~ Nahannni - River of Quest and Legend ~

There will be another photo tomorrow, which will wrap up this photo series. I do have other photos of this trip, which will be posted from time to time at a later date.

The Nahanni Wilderness Experience !

Moose Ponds * Mount Wilson * Rock Gardens

Island Lakes * Moore's Hot Springs * Broken Skull River

Cirque of the Unclimbables * Glacier Lake * Ragged Range

Rabbitkettle Lake * Tufa Mounds * Sunblood Range

Virginia Falls * Painted Canyon * Hell's Gate

Third Canyon * The Gate * Pulpit Rock

Funeral Range * Second Canyon * Deadmen Valley

Headless Range * Prairie Creek * Dry Canyon

George's Riffle * First Canyon * Lafferty Canyon

Kraus Hot Springs * The Splits * Nahanni Butte

** Moose Ponds, Mount Wilson, Rock Gardens, Island Lakes, Moore's Hot Springs, Broken Skull River, Cirque of the Unclimables, Glacier Lake, and Ragged Range are not visited on the two week trip.

Remembering…..

(Something I wrote a few weeks after my return to "the real world." Some references will only make sense to those who were there.)

The Fort Simpson airport and the meeting of strangers. Beautiful downtown Fort Simpson. South Nahanni Air, Rabbitkettle Lake, Emerald Lake, the Tufa Mounds hike, the Ragged Range, and Ranger Carl. The first portage, and the Rabbitkettle campsite. Storing the "smelly stuff". Ferrying the Nahanni for the first time (gee, this river is swifter than I expected). Rain and sun and rain and sun. Repeat. Hell-Roaring Creek. Jill and Curly (Diane) and Mo. (and Kathy too). Deadheads and strainers and sweepers (oh my). Dall sheep and bald eagles in the distance. Anyone seen the "Northern Lights" yet? (I think I did, but I'm not sure).

Oxbow Lake, the roar of the falls, Virginia Falls (bring your own firewood) and the brief encounters with civilization. "Nahanni" Neil Hartling and his homemade libations. The pesky camp critters. More food than we knew what to do with (anyone for thirds)? The Honeymooners (James & Lillian). John's unmistakable laugh. The sluice box hike, and the hikes up Sunblood Mountain or to Last Chance Harbor. The portage around Virginia Falls (there's more up there?) Outfit of the day: Polypro, wetsuits, and raingear. Painted Canyon (Fourth Canyon) and Matt and Duke in the canoe that refused to float, with Jed and Diane's fate tied to ours. The legend of the "cursed white canoe". (aka the canoe that refused to float). Third Canyon and the Figure Eight Rapids.

The crowd at Pulpit Rock. Sunset high above the Rock. "Father Abraham" and "Barbie Girl", a match made who knows where. "Wally's World", maybe? Nope, not there. The Funeral Range, the Burial Range, Second Canyon and Deadmen Valley. Jill's perfect pancakes. The carved paddles in the Ranger's Station. George's Riffle, and the moose in the rapids. Other occasional wildlife sightings, but none of the elusive narwhal. Yet. A slow drift through First Canyon and the long lunch at the springs (no filtering needed). Our guides haven't moved in over an hour. OH NO, we've overworked them. One last rapids called Lafferty's.

Kraus' Hot Springs (let's stay in all night), the "price of admission", the Northern Lights watch, and Mo's hole. The "Splits", Twisted Mountain, and leaving the park behind. "Mosquito Beach". Lunch on the river (grilled ham & cheese), a short trip to Nahanni Butte, and the first real civilization (sort of) in a week and a half. The weather goes really bad, for the first time on the trip. Rain and wind. Leave the Nahanni behind for the Liard River. Our last lunch on the river at Blackstone, where we try to finish off our food. We fail this task again.

The final leg to Lindberg's (Edwin, Sue, and Anna too). Group pictures in full river regalia. A HOT shower and home made dinner. Jim on piano and guitar. The first beer in two weeks (one to a customer, please). Trade the sleeping bag for a mattress. The last breakfast, and the long drive back to Fort Simpson. Arrival at the airport (where is everybody)? and the return to civilization. There are no strangers here this time.

Thanks for visiting!

Top 25 Viewed & Other Collections @ Flickr

A coolie (alternatively spelled cooli, cooly, quli, koelie, and other such variations), during the 19th and early 20th century, was a term for a locally sourced unskilled labourer hired by a company, mainly from the Indian subcontinent or Southern China.

Today, it is used varyingly as a legal inoffensive word (for example, in India for helpers carrying luggage in railway stations) and also used as a racial slur in Africa for certain people from Asia, particularly in South Africa

ETYMOLOGY

The origins of the word are uncertain but it is thought to have originated from the name of a Gujarati sect (the Kolī, who worked as day labourers) or perhaps from the Tamil word for a payment for work, kuli (கூலி). An alternative etymological explanation is that the word came from the Urdu qulī (क़ुली, قلی), which itself could be from the Turkish word for slave, qul. The word was used in this sense for labourers from India. In 1727, Dr. Engelbert Kämpfer described "coolies" as dock labourers who would unload Dutch merchant ships at Nagasaki in Japan.

The Chinese word 苦力 (pinyin: kǔlì) literally means "bitterly hard (use of) strength", in the Mandarin pronunciation.

HISTORY OF THE COOLIE TRADE

An early trade in Asian labourers is believed to have begun sometime in or around the 16th century. Social and political pressure led to the abolition of the slave trade throughout the British Empire in 1807, with other European nations following suit. Labour-intensive industries, such as cotton and sugar plantations, mines and railway construction, in the colonies were left without a cheap source of manpower. As a consequence, a large scale slavery-like trade in Asian (primarily Indian and Chinese) indentured labourers began in the 1820s to fill this vacuum. Some of these labourers signed contracts based on misleading promises, some were kidnapped and sold into the trade, some were victims of clan violence whose captors sold them to coolie brokers, while others sold themselves to pay off gambling debts. British companies were the first to experiment with this potential new form of cheap labour in 1807, when they imported 200 Chinese men to work in Trinidad.

The coolie trade was often compared to the earlier slave trade and they accomplished very similar things.

Although there are reports of ships for Asian coolies carrying women and children, the great majority of them were men. Finally, regulations were put in place, as early as 1837 by the British authorities in India to safeguard these principles of voluntary, contractual work and safe and sanitary transportation although in practice this rarely occurred especially during examples such as the Pacific Passage or the Guano Pits of Peru. The Chinese government also made efforts to secure the well-being of their nation's workers, with representations being made to relevant governments around the world.

CHINESE COOLIES

Workers from China were mainly transported to work in Peru and Cuba, but they also worked in British colonies such as Jamaica, British Guiana (now Guyana), British Malaya, Trinidad and Tobago, British Honduras (now Belize) and in the Dutch colonies Dutch East Indies and Suriname. The first shipment of Chinese labourers was to the British colony of Trinidad in 1806.

In 1847 two ships from Cuba transported workers to Havana to work in the sugar cane fields from the port of Xiamen, one of the five Chinese treaty ports opened to the British by the Treaty of Nanking in 1842. The trade soon spread to other ports in Guangdong province and demand became particularly strong in Peru for workers in the silver mines and the guano collecting industry. Australia began importing workers in 1848 and the United States began using them in 1865 on the First Transcontinental Railroad construction. These workers were deceived about their terms of employment to a much greater extent than their Indian counterparts, and consequently, there was a much higher level of Chinese emigration during this period.

The trade flourished from 1847 to 1854 without incident, until reports began to surface of the mistreatment of the workers in Cuba and Peru. As the British government had political and legal responsibility for many of the ports involved, including Amoy, the trade was shut down at these places. However, the trade simply shifted to the more accommodating port in the Portuguese enclave of Macau.

Many coolies were first deceived or kidnapped and then kept in barracoons (detention centres) or loading vessels in the ports of departure, as were African slaves. In 1875, British commissioners estimated that approximately eighty percent of the workers had been abducted. Their voyages, which are sometimes called the Pacific Passage, were as inhumane and dangerous as the notorious Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade. Mortality was very high. For example, it is estimated that from 1847 to 1859, the average mortality for coolies aboard ships to Cuba was 15.2 percent, and losses among those aboard ships to Peru were 40 percent in the 1850s and 30.44 percent from 1860 to 1863.

They were sold and were taken to work in plantations or mines with very bad living and working conditions. The duration of a contract was typically five to eight years, but many coolies did not live out their term of service because of the hard labour and mistreatment. Those who did live were often forced to remain in servitude beyond the contracted period. The coolies who worked on the sugar plantations in Cuba and in the guano beds of the Chincha Islands (the islands of Hell) of Peru were treated brutally. Seventy-five percent of the Chinese coolies in Cuba died before fulfilling their contracts. More than two-thirds of the Chinese coolies who arrived in Peru between 1849 and 1874 died within the contract period. In 1860 it was calculated that of the 4000 coolies brought to the Chinchas since the trade began, not one had survived.

Because of these unbearable conditions, Chinese coolies often revolted against their Ko-Hung bosses and foreign company bosses at ports of departure, on ships, and in foreign lands. The coolies were put in the same neighbourhoods as Africans and, since most were unable to return to their homeland or have their wives come to the New World, many married African women. The coolies' interracial relationships and marriages with Africans, Europeans and Indigenous peoples, formed some of the modern world's Afro-Asian and Asian Latin American populations.

Chinese immigration to the United States was almost entirely voluntary, but working and social conditions were still harsh. In 1868, the Burlingame Treaty allowed unrestricted Chinese immigration into the country. Within a decade significant levels of anti-Chinese sentiment had built up, stoked by populists such as Denis Kearney with racist slogans - "To an American, death is preferable to life on a par with the Chinese."

Although Chinese workers contributed to the building of the first Transcontinental Railroad in the United States and of the Canadian Pacific Railway in western Canada, Chinese settlement was discouraged after completion of the construction. California's Anti-Coolie Act of 1862 and the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 contributed to the curtailment of Chinese immigration to the United States.

Notwithstanding such attempts to restrict the influx of cheap labour from China, beginning in the 1870s Chinese workers helped construct a vast network of levees in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. These levees made thousands of acres of fertile marshlands available for agricultural production.

The 1879 Constitution of the State of California declared that "Asiatic coolieism is a form of human slavery, and is forever prohibited in this State, and all contracts for coolie labour shall be void."

Colonos asiáticos is a Spanish term for coolies. The Spanish colony of Cuba feared slavery uprisings such as those that took place in Haiti and used coolies as a transition between slaves and free labor. They were neither free nor slaves. Indentured Chinese servants also labored in the sugarcane fields of Cuba well after the 1884 abolition of slavery in that country. Two scholars of Chinese labor in Cuba, Juan Pastrana and Juan Perez de la Riva, substantiated horrific conditions of Chinese coolies in Cuba and stated that coolies were slaves in all but name. Denise Helly is one researcher who believes that despite their slave-like treatment, the free and legal status of the Asian laborers in Cuba separated them from slaves. The coolies could challenge their superiors, run away, petition government officials, and rebel according to Rodriguez Pastor and Trazegnies Granda. Once they had fulfilled their contracts the colonos asiáticos integrated into the countries of Peru, The Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Cuba. They adopted cultural traditions from the natives and also welcomed in non-Chinese to experience and participate into their own traditions. Before the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Havana had Latin America's largest Chinatown.

In South America, Chinese indentured labourers worked in Peru's silver mines and coastal industries (i.e., guano, sugar, and cotton) from the early 1850s to the mid-1870s; about 100,000 people immigrated as indentured workers. They participated in the War of the Pacific, looting and burning down the haciendas where they worked, after the capture of Lima by the invading Chilean army in January 1880. Some 2000 coolies even joined the Chilean Army in Peru, taking care of the wounded and burying the dead. Others were sent by Chileans to work in the newly conquered nitrate fields.

The Chinese Engineering and Mining Corporation, of which later U.S. president Herbert Hoover was a director, was instrumental in supplying Chinese coolie labour to South African mines from c.1902 to c.1910 at the request of mine owners, who considered such labour cheaper than native African and white labour. The horrendous conditions suffered by the coolie labourers led to questions in the British parliament as recorded in Hansard.

In 1866, the British, French and Chinese governments agreed to mitigate the abuse by requiring all traders to pay for the return of all workers after their contract ended. The employers in the British West Indies declined these conditions, bringing the trade there to an end. Until the trade was finally abolished in 1875, over 150,000 coolies had been sold to Cuba alone, the majority having been shipped from Macau. These labourers endured conditions far worse than those experienced by their Indian counterparts. Even after the 1866 reforms, the scale of abuse and conditions of near slavery did not get any better - if anything they deteriorated. In the early 1870s increased media exposure of the trade led to a public outcry, and the British, as well as the Qing government, put pressure on the Portuguese authorities to bring the trade at Macau to an end; this was ultimately achieved in 1874. By that time, a total of up to half a million Chinese workers had been exported.

The term coolie was also applied to Chinese workers recruited for contracts on cacao plantations in German Samoa. German planters went to great lengths to secure access to their "coolie" labour supply from China. In 1908 a Chinese commissioner, Lin Shu Fen, reported on the cruel treatment of coolie workers on German plantations in the western Samoan Islands. The trade began largely after the establishment of colonial German Samoa in 1900 and lasted until the arrival of New Zealand forces in 1914. More than 2000 Chinese "coolies" were present in the islands in 1914 and most were eventually repatriated by the New Zealand administration.

INDIAN COOLIES

By the 1820s, many Indians were voluntarily enlisting to go abroad for work, in the hopes of a better life. European merchants and businessmen quickly took advantage of this and began recruiting them for work as a cheap source of labour. The British began shipping Indians to colonies around the world, including Mauritius, Fiji, Natal, British East Africa, and British Malaya. The Dutch also shipped workers to labour on the plantations on Suriname and the Dutch East Indies. A system of agents was used to infiltrate the rural villages of India and recruit labourers. They would often deceive the credulous workers about the great opportunities that awaited them for their own material betterment abroad. The Indians primarily came from the Indo-Gangetic Plain, but also from Tamil Nadu and other areas to the south of the country.

Without permission from the British authorities, the French attempted to illegally transport Indian workers to their sugar producing colony, the Reunion Island, from as early as 1826. By 1830, over 3000 labourers had been transported. After this trade was discovered, the French successfully negotiated with the British in 1860 for permission to transport over 6,000 workers annually, on condition that the trade would be suspended if abuses were discovered to be taking place.

The British began to transport Indians to Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, starting in 1829. Slavery had been abolished with the planters receiving two million pounds sterling in compensation for the loss of their slaves. The planters turned to bringing in a large number of indentured labourers from India to work in the sugar cane fields. Between 1834 and 1921, around half a million indentured labourers were present on the island. They worked on sugar estates, factories, in transport and on construction sites.

In 1837, the Raj issued a set of regulations for the trade. The rules provided for each labourer to be personally authorised for transportation by an officer designated by the Government, it limited the length of service to five years subject to voluntary renewal, it made the contractor responsible for returning the worker after the contract elapsed and required the vessels to conform to basic health standards

Despite this, conditions on the ships were often extremely crowded, with rampant disease and malnutrition. The workers were paid a pittance for their labour, and were expected to work in often awful and harsh conditions. Although there were no large scale scandals involving coolie abuse in British colonies, workers often ended up being forced to work, and manipulated in such a way that they became dependent on the plantation owners so that in practice they remained there long after their contracts expired; possibly as little as 10% of the coolies actually returned to their original country of origin. Colonial legislation was also passed to severely limit their freedoms; in Mauritius a compulsory pass system was instituted to enable their movements to be easily tracked. Conditions were much worse in the French colonies of Reunion and Guadeloupe and Martinique, where workers were 'systematically overworked' and abnormally high mortality rates were recorded for those working in the mines.

However, there were also attempts by the British authorities to regulate and mitigate the worst abuses. Workers were regularly checked up on by health inspectors, and they were vetted before transportation to ensure that they were suitably healthy and fit to be able to endure the rigours of labour. Children under the age of 15 were not allowed to be transported from their parents under any circumstances.

The first campaign against the 'coolie' trade in England likened the system of indentured labour to the slavery of the past. In response to this pressure, the labour export was temporarily stopped in 1839 by the authorities when the scale of the abuses became known, but it was soon renewed due to its growing economic importance. A more rigorous regulatory framework was put into place and severe penalties were imposed for infractions in 1842. In that year, almost 35,000 people were shipped to Mauritius.

In 1844, the trade was expanded to the colonies in the West Indies, including Jamaica, Trinidad and Demerara, where the Asian population was soon a major component of the island demographic.

Starting in 1879, many Indians were transported to Fiji to work on the sugar cane plantations. Many of them chose to stay after their term of indenture elapsed and today they number about 40% of the total population. Indian workers were also imported into the Dutch colony of Suriname after the Dutch signed a treaty with the United Kingdom on the recruitment of contract workers in 1870. In Mauritius, the Indian population are now demographically dominant, with Indian festivals being celebrated as national holidays.

This system prevailed until the early twentieth century. Increasing focus on the brutalities and abuses of the trade by the sensationalist media of the time, incited public outrage and lead to the official ending of the coolie trade in 1916 by the British government. By that time tens of thousands of Chinese workers were being used along the Western Front by the allied forces (see Chinese Labour Corps).

SEX RATIOS AND INTERMARRIAGE AMONG COOLIES

A major difference between the Chinese coolie trade and the Indian coolie trade was that the Chinese coolies were all male, while East Indian women (from India) were brought alongside men as coolies. This led to a high rate of Chinese men marrying women of other ethnicities like Indian women and mixed race Creole women. Indian women and children were brought alongside Indian men as coolies while Chinese men made up 99% of Chinese colonies. The contrast with the female to male ratio among Indian and Chinese immigrants has been compared by historians. In Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies just 18,731 Chinese women and 92,985 Chinese men served as coolies on plantations. Chinese women migrated less than Javanese and Indian women as indentured coolies. The number of Chinese women as coolies was "very small" while Chinese men were easily taken into the coolie trade. In Cuba men made up the vast majority of Chinese indentured servants on sugar plantations and in Peru non-Chinese women married the mostly male Chinese coolies.

Chinese women were scarce in every place where Chinese indentured laborers were brought, the migration was dominated by Chinese men. Up to the 1940s men made up the vast majority of the Costa Rican Chinese community. Males made up the majority of the original Chinese community in Mexico and they married Mexican women.

In the early 1900s, the Chinese communities in Manila, Singapore, Mauritius, New Zealand, Victoria in Australia, the United States, and Victoria in British Columbia in Canada were all male dominated.

WIKIPEDIA

A coolie (alternatively spelled cooli, cooly, quli, koelie, and other such variations), during the 19th and early 20th century, was a term for a locally sourced unskilled labourer hired by a company, mainly from the Indian subcontinent or Southern China.

Today, it is used varyingly as a legal inoffensive word (for example, in India for helpers carrying luggage in railway stations) and also used as a racial slur in Africa for certain people from Asia, particularly in South Africa

ETYMOLOGY

The origins of the word are uncertain but it is thought to have originated from the name of a Gujarati sect (the Kolī, who worked as day labourers) or perhaps from the Tamil word for a payment for work, kuli (கூலி). An alternative etymological explanation is that the word came from the Urdu qulī (क़ुली, قلی), which itself could be from the Turkish word for slave, qul. The word was used in this sense for labourers from India. In 1727, Dr. Engelbert Kämpfer described "coolies" as dock labourers who would unload Dutch merchant ships at Nagasaki in Japan.

The Chinese word 苦力 (pinyin: kǔlì) literally means "bitterly hard (use of) strength", in the Mandarin pronunciation.

HISTORY OF THE COOLIE TRADE

An early trade in Asian labourers is believed to have begun sometime in or around the 16th century. Social and political pressure led to the abolition of the slave trade throughout the British Empire in 1807, with other European nations following suit. Labour-intensive industries, such as cotton and sugar plantations, mines and railway construction, in the colonies were left without a cheap source of manpower. As a consequence, a large scale slavery-like trade in Asian (primarily Indian and Chinese) indentured labourers began in the 1820s to fill this vacuum. Some of these labourers signed contracts based on misleading promises, some were kidnapped and sold into the trade, some were victims of clan violence whose captors sold them to coolie brokers, while others sold themselves to pay off gambling debts. British companies were the first to experiment with this potential new form of cheap labour in 1807, when they imported 200 Chinese men to work in Trinidad.

The coolie trade was often compared to the earlier slave trade and they accomplished very similar things.

Although there are reports of ships for Asian coolies carrying women and children, the great majority of them were men. Finally, regulations were put in place, as early as 1837 by the British authorities in India to safeguard these principles of voluntary, contractual work and safe and sanitary transportation although in practice this rarely occurred especially during examples such as the Pacific Passage or the Guano Pits of Peru. The Chinese government also made efforts to secure the well-being of their nation's workers, with representations being made to relevant governments around the world.

CHINESE COOLIES

Workers from China were mainly transported to work in Peru and Cuba, but they also worked in British colonies such as Jamaica, British Guiana (now Guyana), British Malaya, Trinidad and Tobago, British Honduras (now Belize) and in the Dutch colonies Dutch East Indies and Suriname. The first shipment of Chinese labourers was to the British colony of Trinidad in 1806.

In 1847 two ships from Cuba transported workers to Havana to work in the sugar cane fields from the port of Xiamen, one of the five Chinese treaty ports opened to the British by the Treaty of Nanking in 1842. The trade soon spread to other ports in Guangdong province and demand became particularly strong in Peru for workers in the silver mines and the guano collecting industry. Australia began importing workers in 1848 and the United States began using them in 1865 on the First Transcontinental Railroad construction. These workers were deceived about their terms of employment to a much greater extent than their Indian counterparts, and consequently, there was a much higher level of Chinese emigration during this period.

The trade flourished from 1847 to 1854 without incident, until reports began to surface of the mistreatment of the workers in Cuba and Peru. As the British government had political and legal responsibility for many of the ports involved, including Amoy, the trade was shut down at these places. However, the trade simply shifted to the more accommodating port in the Portuguese enclave of Macau.

Many coolies were first deceived or kidnapped and then kept in barracoons (detention centres) or loading vessels in the ports of departure, as were African slaves. In 1875, British commissioners estimated that approximately eighty percent of the workers had been abducted. Their voyages, which are sometimes called the Pacific Passage, were as inhumane and dangerous as the notorious Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade. Mortality was very high. For example, it is estimated that from 1847 to 1859, the average mortality for coolies aboard ships to Cuba was 15.2 percent, and losses among those aboard ships to Peru were 40 percent in the 1850s and 30.44 percent from 1860 to 1863.

They were sold and were taken to work in plantations or mines with very bad living and working conditions. The duration of a contract was typically five to eight years, but many coolies did not live out their term of service because of the hard labour and mistreatment. Those who did live were often forced to remain in servitude beyond the contracted period. The coolies who worked on the sugar plantations in Cuba and in the guano beds of the Chincha Islands (the islands of Hell) of Peru were treated brutally. Seventy-five percent of the Chinese coolies in Cuba died before fulfilling their contracts. More than two-thirds of the Chinese coolies who arrived in Peru between 1849 and 1874 died within the contract period. In 1860 it was calculated that of the 4000 coolies brought to the Chinchas since the trade began, not one had survived.

Because of these unbearable conditions, Chinese coolies often revolted against their Ko-Hung bosses and foreign company bosses at ports of departure, on ships, and in foreign lands. The coolies were put in the same neighbourhoods as Africans and, since most were unable to return to their homeland or have their wives come to the New World, many married African women. The coolies' interracial relationships and marriages with Africans, Europeans and Indigenous peoples, formed some of the modern world's Afro-Asian and Asian Latin American populations.

Chinese immigration to the United States was almost entirely voluntary, but working and social conditions were still harsh. In 1868, the Burlingame Treaty allowed unrestricted Chinese immigration into the country. Within a decade significant levels of anti-Chinese sentiment had built up, stoked by populists such as Denis Kearney with racist slogans - "To an American, death is preferable to life on a par with the Chinese."

Although Chinese workers contributed to the building of the first Transcontinental Railroad in the United States and of the Canadian Pacific Railway in western Canada, Chinese settlement was discouraged after completion of the construction. California's Anti-Coolie Act of 1862 and the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 contributed to the curtailment of Chinese immigration to the United States.

Notwithstanding such attempts to restrict the influx of cheap labour from China, beginning in the 1870s Chinese workers helped construct a vast network of levees in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. These levees made thousands of acres of fertile marshlands available for agricultural production.

The 1879 Constitution of the State of California declared that "Asiatic coolieism is a form of human slavery, and is forever prohibited in this State, and all contracts for coolie labour shall be void."

Colonos asiáticos is a Spanish term for coolies. The Spanish colony of Cuba feared slavery uprisings such as those that took place in Haiti and used coolies as a transition between slaves and free labor. They were neither free nor slaves. Indentured Chinese servants also labored in the sugarcane fields of Cuba well after the 1884 abolition of slavery in that country. Two scholars of Chinese labor in Cuba, Juan Pastrana and Juan Perez de la Riva, substantiated horrific conditions of Chinese coolies in Cuba and stated that coolies were slaves in all but name. Denise Helly is one researcher who believes that despite their slave-like treatment, the free and legal status of the Asian laborers in Cuba separated them from slaves. The coolies could challenge their superiors, run away, petition government officials, and rebel according to Rodriguez Pastor and Trazegnies Granda. Once they had fulfilled their contracts the colonos asiáticos integrated into the countries of Peru, The Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Cuba. They adopted cultural traditions from the natives and also welcomed in non-Chinese to experience and participate into their own traditions. Before the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Havana had Latin America's largest Chinatown.

In South America, Chinese indentured labourers worked in Peru's silver mines and coastal industries (i.e., guano, sugar, and cotton) from the early 1850s to the mid-1870s; about 100,000 people immigrated as indentured workers. They participated in the War of the Pacific, looting and burning down the haciendas where they worked, after the capture of Lima by the invading Chilean army in January 1880. Some 2000 coolies even joined the Chilean Army in Peru, taking care of the wounded and burying the dead. Others were sent by Chileans to work in the newly conquered nitrate fields.

The Chinese Engineering and Mining Corporation, of which later U.S. president Herbert Hoover was a director, was instrumental in supplying Chinese coolie labour to South African mines from c.1902 to c.1910 at the request of mine owners, who considered such labour cheaper than native African and white labour. The horrendous conditions suffered by the coolie labourers led to questions in the British parliament as recorded in Hansard.

In 1866, the British, French and Chinese governments agreed to mitigate the abuse by requiring all traders to pay for the return of all workers after their contract ended. The employers in the British West Indies declined these conditions, bringing the trade there to an end. Until the trade was finally abolished in 1875, over 150,000 coolies had been sold to Cuba alone, the majority having been shipped from Macau. These labourers endured conditions far worse than those experienced by their Indian counterparts. Even after the 1866 reforms, the scale of abuse and conditions of near slavery did not get any better - if anything they deteriorated. In the early 1870s increased media exposure of the trade led to a public outcry, and the British, as well as the Qing government, put pressure on the Portuguese authorities to bring the trade at Macau to an end; this was ultimately achieved in 1874. By that time, a total of up to half a million Chinese workers had been exported.

The term coolie was also applied to Chinese workers recruited for contracts on cacao plantations in German Samoa. German planters went to great lengths to secure access to their "coolie" labour supply from China. In 1908 a Chinese commissioner, Lin Shu Fen, reported on the cruel treatment of coolie workers on German plantations in the western Samoan Islands. The trade began largely after the establishment of colonial German Samoa in 1900 and lasted until the arrival of New Zealand forces in 1914. More than 2000 Chinese "coolies" were present in the islands in 1914 and most were eventually repatriated by the New Zealand administration.

INDIAN COOLIES

By the 1820s, many Indians were voluntarily enlisting to go abroad for work, in the hopes of a better life. European merchants and businessmen quickly took advantage of this and began recruiting them for work as a cheap source of labour. The British began shipping Indians to colonies around the world, including Mauritius, Fiji, Natal, British East Africa, and British Malaya. The Dutch also shipped workers to labour on the plantations on Suriname and the Dutch East Indies. A system of agents was used to infiltrate the rural villages of India and recruit labourers. They would often deceive the credulous workers about the great opportunities that awaited them for their own material betterment abroad. The Indians primarily came from the Indo-Gangetic Plain, but also from Tamil Nadu and other areas to the south of the country.

Without permission from the British authorities, the French attempted to illegally transport Indian workers to their sugar producing colony, the Reunion Island, from as early as 1826. By 1830, over 3000 labourers had been transported. After this trade was discovered, the French successfully negotiated with the British in 1860 for permission to transport over 6,000 workers annually, on condition that the trade would be suspended if abuses were discovered to be taking place.

The British began to transport Indians to Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, starting in 1829. Slavery had been abolished with the planters receiving two million pounds sterling in compensation for the loss of their slaves. The planters turned to bringing in a large number of indentured labourers from India to work in the sugar cane fields. Between 1834 and 1921, around half a million indentured labourers were present on the island. They worked on sugar estates, factories, in transport and on construction sites.

In 1837, the Raj issued a set of regulations for the trade. The rules provided for each labourer to be personally authorised for transportation by an officer designated by the Government, it limited the length of service to five years subject to voluntary renewal, it made the contractor responsible for returning the worker after the contract elapsed and required the vessels to conform to basic health standards

Despite this, conditions on the ships were often extremely crowded, with rampant disease and malnutrition. The workers were paid a pittance for their labour, and were expected to work in often awful and harsh conditions. Although there were no large scale scandals involving coolie abuse in British colonies, workers often ended up being forced to work, and manipulated in such a way that they became dependent on the plantation owners so that in practice they remained there long after their contracts expired; possibly as little as 10% of the coolies actually returned to their original country of origin. Colonial legislation was also passed to severely limit their freedoms; in Mauritius a compulsory pass system was instituted to enable their movements to be easily tracked. Conditions were much worse in the French colonies of Reunion and Guadeloupe and Martinique, where workers were 'systematically overworked' and abnormally high mortality rates were recorded for those working in the mines.

However, there were also attempts by the British authorities to regulate and mitigate the worst abuses. Workers were regularly checked up on by health inspectors, and they were vetted before transportation to ensure that they were suitably healthy and fit to be able to endure the rigours of labour. Children under the age of 15 were not allowed to be transported from their parents under any circumstances.

The first campaign against the 'coolie' trade in England likened the system of indentured labour to the slavery of the past. In response to this pressure, the labour export was temporarily stopped in 1839 by the authorities when the scale of the abuses became known, but it was soon renewed due to its growing economic importance. A more rigorous regulatory framework was put into place and severe penalties were imposed for infractions in 1842. In that year, almost 35,000 people were shipped to Mauritius.

In 1844, the trade was expanded to the colonies in the West Indies, including Jamaica, Trinidad and Demerara, where the Asian population was soon a major component of the island demographic.

Starting in 1879, many Indians were transported to Fiji to work on the sugar cane plantations. Many of them chose to stay after their term of indenture elapsed and today they number about 40% of the total population. Indian workers were also imported into the Dutch colony of Suriname after the Dutch signed a treaty with the United Kingdom on the recruitment of contract workers in 1870. In Mauritius, the Indian population are now demographically dominant, with Indian festivals being celebrated as national holidays.

This system prevailed until the early twentieth century. Increasing focus on the brutalities and abuses of the trade by the sensationalist media of the time, incited public outrage and lead to the official ending of the coolie trade in 1916 by the British government. By that time tens of thousands of Chinese workers were being used along the Western Front by the allied forces (see Chinese Labour Corps).

SEX RATIOS AND INTERMARRIAGE AMONG COOLIES

A major difference between the Chinese coolie trade and the Indian coolie trade was that the Chinese coolies were all male, while East Indian women (from India) were brought alongside men as coolies. This led to a high rate of Chinese men marrying women of other ethnicities like Indian women and mixed race Creole women. Indian women and children were brought alongside Indian men as coolies while Chinese men made up 99% of Chinese colonies. The contrast with the female to male ratio among Indian and Chinese immigrants has been compared by historians. In Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies just 18,731 Chinese women and 92,985 Chinese men served as coolies on plantations. Chinese women migrated less than Javanese and Indian women as indentured coolies. The number of Chinese women as coolies was "very small" while Chinese men were easily taken into the coolie trade. In Cuba men made up the vast majority of Chinese indentured servants on sugar plantations and in Peru non-Chinese women married the mostly male Chinese coolies.

Chinese women were scarce in every place where Chinese indentured laborers were brought, the migration was dominated by Chinese men. Up to the 1940s men made up the vast majority of the Costa Rican Chinese community. Males made up the majority of the original Chinese community in Mexico and they married Mexican women.

In the early 1900s, the Chinese communities in Manila, Singapore, Mauritius, New Zealand, Victoria in Australia, the United States, and Victoria in British Columbia in Canada were all male dominated.

WIKIPEDIA

A coolie (alternatively spelled cooli, cooly, quli, koelie, and other such variations), during the 19th and early 20th century, was a term for a locally sourced unskilled labourer hired by a company, mainly from the Indian subcontinent or Southern China.

Today, it is used varyingly as a legal inoffensive word (for example, in India for helpers carrying luggage in railway stations) and also used as a racial slur in Africa for certain people from Asia, particularly in South Africa

ETYMOLOGY

The origins of the word are uncertain but it is thought to have originated from the name of a Gujarati sect (the Kolī, who worked as day labourers) or perhaps from the Tamil word for a payment for work, kuli (கூலி). An alternative etymological explanation is that the word came from the Urdu qulī (क़ुली, قلی), which itself could be from the Turkish word for slave, qul. The word was used in this sense for labourers from India. In 1727, Dr. Engelbert Kämpfer described "coolies" as dock labourers who would unload Dutch merchant ships at Nagasaki in Japan.

The Chinese word 苦力 (pinyin: kǔlì) literally means "bitterly hard (use of) strength", in the Mandarin pronunciation.

HISTORY OF THE COOLIE TRADE

An early trade in Asian labourers is believed to have begun sometime in or around the 16th century. Social and political pressure led to the abolition of the slave trade throughout the British Empire in 1807, with other European nations following suit. Labour-intensive industries, such as cotton and sugar plantations, mines and railway construction, in the colonies were left without a cheap source of manpower. As a consequence, a large scale slavery-like trade in Asian (primarily Indian and Chinese) indentured labourers began in the 1820s to fill this vacuum. Some of these labourers signed contracts based on misleading promises, some were kidnapped and sold into the trade, some were victims of clan violence whose captors sold them to coolie brokers, while others sold themselves to pay off gambling debts. British companies were the first to experiment with this potential new form of cheap labour in 1807, when they imported 200 Chinese men to work in Trinidad.

The coolie trade was often compared to the earlier slave trade and they accomplished very similar things.

Although there are reports of ships for Asian coolies carrying women and children, the great majority of them were men. Finally, regulations were put in place, as early as 1837 by the British authorities in India to safeguard these principles of voluntary, contractual work and safe and sanitary transportation although in practice this rarely occurred especially during examples such as the Pacific Passage or the Guano Pits of Peru. The Chinese government also made efforts to secure the well-being of their nation's workers, with representations being made to relevant governments around the world.

CHINESE COOLIES

Workers from China were mainly transported to work in Peru and Cuba, but they also worked in British colonies such as Jamaica, British Guiana (now Guyana), British Malaya, Trinidad and Tobago, British Honduras (now Belize) and in the Dutch colonies Dutch East Indies and Suriname. The first shipment of Chinese labourers was to the British colony of Trinidad in 1806.

In 1847 two ships from Cuba transported workers to Havana to work in the sugar cane fields from the port of Xiamen, one of the five Chinese treaty ports opened to the British by the Treaty of Nanking in 1842. The trade soon spread to other ports in Guangdong province and demand became particularly strong in Peru for workers in the silver mines and the guano collecting industry. Australia began importing workers in 1848 and the United States began using them in 1865 on the First Transcontinental Railroad construction. These workers were deceived about their terms of employment to a much greater extent than their Indian counterparts, and consequently, there was a much higher level of Chinese emigration during this period.

The trade flourished from 1847 to 1854 without incident, until reports began to surface of the mistreatment of the workers in Cuba and Peru. As the British government had political and legal responsibility for many of the ports involved, including Amoy, the trade was shut down at these places. However, the trade simply shifted to the more accommodating port in the Portuguese enclave of Macau.

Many coolies were first deceived or kidnapped and then kept in barracoons (detention centres) or loading vessels in the ports of departure, as were African slaves. In 1875, British commissioners estimated that approximately eighty percent of the workers had been abducted. Their voyages, which are sometimes called the Pacific Passage, were as inhumane and dangerous as the notorious Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade. Mortality was very high. For example, it is estimated that from 1847 to 1859, the average mortality for coolies aboard ships to Cuba was 15.2 percent, and losses among those aboard ships to Peru were 40 percent in the 1850s and 30.44 percent from 1860 to 1863.

They were sold and were taken to work in plantations or mines with very bad living and working conditions. The duration of a contract was typically five to eight years, but many coolies did not live out their term of service because of the hard labour and mistreatment. Those who did live were often forced to remain in servitude beyond the contracted period. The coolies who worked on the sugar plantations in Cuba and in the guano beds of the Chincha Islands (the islands of Hell) of Peru were treated brutally. Seventy-five percent of the Chinese coolies in Cuba died before fulfilling their contracts. More than two-thirds of the Chinese coolies who arrived in Peru between 1849 and 1874 died within the contract period. In 1860 it was calculated that of the 4000 coolies brought to the Chinchas since the trade began, not one had survived.

Because of these unbearable conditions, Chinese coolies often revolted against their Ko-Hung bosses and foreign company bosses at ports of departure, on ships, and in foreign lands. The coolies were put in the same neighbourhoods as Africans and, since most were unable to return to their homeland or have their wives come to the New World, many married African women. The coolies' interracial relationships and marriages with Africans, Europeans and Indigenous peoples, formed some of the modern world's Afro-Asian and Asian Latin American populations.

Chinese immigration to the United States was almost entirely voluntary, but working and social conditions were still harsh. In 1868, the Burlingame Treaty allowed unrestricted Chinese immigration into the country. Within a decade significant levels of anti-Chinese sentiment had built up, stoked by populists such as Denis Kearney with racist slogans - "To an American, death is preferable to life on a par with the Chinese."

Although Chinese workers contributed to the building of the first Transcontinental Railroad in the United States and of the Canadian Pacific Railway in western Canada, Chinese settlement was discouraged after completion of the construction. California's Anti-Coolie Act of 1862 and the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 contributed to the curtailment of Chinese immigration to the United States.

Notwithstanding such attempts to restrict the influx of cheap labour from China, beginning in the 1870s Chinese workers helped construct a vast network of levees in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. These levees made thousands of acres of fertile marshlands available for agricultural production.

The 1879 Constitution of the State of California declared that "Asiatic coolieism is a form of human slavery, and is forever prohibited in this State, and all contracts for coolie labour shall be void."

Colonos asiáticos is a Spanish term for coolies. The Spanish colony of Cuba feared slavery uprisings such as those that took place in Haiti and used coolies as a transition between slaves and free labor. They were neither free nor slaves. Indentured Chinese servants also labored in the sugarcane fields of Cuba well after the 1884 abolition of slavery in that country. Two scholars of Chinese labor in Cuba, Juan Pastrana and Juan Perez de la Riva, substantiated horrific conditions of Chinese coolies in Cuba and stated that coolies were slaves in all but name. Denise Helly is one researcher who believes that despite their slave-like treatment, the free and legal status of the Asian laborers in Cuba separated them from slaves. The coolies could challenge their superiors, run away, petition government officials, and rebel according to Rodriguez Pastor and Trazegnies Granda. Once they had fulfilled their contracts the colonos asiáticos integrated into the countries of Peru, The Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Cuba. They adopted cultural traditions from the natives and also welcomed in non-Chinese to experience and participate into their own traditions. Before the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Havana had Latin America's largest Chinatown.

In South America, Chinese indentured labourers worked in Peru's silver mines and coastal industries (i.e., guano, sugar, and cotton) from the early 1850s to the mid-1870s; about 100,000 people immigrated as indentured workers. They participated in the War of the Pacific, looting and burning down the haciendas where they worked, after the capture of Lima by the invading Chilean army in January 1880. Some 2000 coolies even joined the Chilean Army in Peru, taking care of the wounded and burying the dead. Others were sent by Chileans to work in the newly conquered nitrate fields.

The Chinese Engineering and Mining Corporation, of which later U.S. president Herbert Hoover was a director, was instrumental in supplying Chinese coolie labour to South African mines from c.1902 to c.1910 at the request of mine owners, who considered such labour cheaper than native African and white labour. The horrendous conditions suffered by the coolie labourers led to questions in the British parliament as recorded in Hansard.

In 1866, the British, French and Chinese governments agreed to mitigate the abuse by requiring all traders to pay for the return of all workers after their contract ended. The employers in the British West Indies declined these conditions, bringing the trade there to an end. Until the trade was finally abolished in 1875, over 150,000 coolies had been sold to Cuba alone, the majority having been shipped from Macau. These labourers endured conditions far worse than those experienced by their Indian counterparts. Even after the 1866 reforms, the scale of abuse and conditions of near slavery did not get any better - if anything they deteriorated. In the early 1870s increased media exposure of the trade led to a public outcry, and the British, as well as the Qing government, put pressure on the Portuguese authorities to bring the trade at Macau to an end; this was ultimately achieved in 1874. By that time, a total of up to half a million Chinese workers had been exported.

The term coolie was also applied to Chinese workers recruited for contracts on cacao plantations in German Samoa. German planters went to great lengths to secure access to their "coolie" labour supply from China. In 1908 a Chinese commissioner, Lin Shu Fen, reported on the cruel treatment of coolie workers on German plantations in the western Samoan Islands. The trade began largely after the establishment of colonial German Samoa in 1900 and lasted until the arrival of New Zealand forces in 1914. More than 2000 Chinese "coolies" were present in the islands in 1914 and most were eventually repatriated by the New Zealand administration.

INDIAN COOLIES

By the 1820s, many Indians were voluntarily enlisting to go abroad for work, in the hopes of a better life. European merchants and businessmen quickly took advantage of this and began recruiting them for work as a cheap source of labour. The British began shipping Indians to colonies around the world, including Mauritius, Fiji, Natal, British East Africa, and British Malaya. The Dutch also shipped workers to labour on the plantations on Suriname and the Dutch East Indies. A system of agents was used to infiltrate the rural villages of India and recruit labourers. They would often deceive the credulous workers about the great opportunities that awaited them for their own material betterment abroad. The Indians primarily came from the Indo-Gangetic Plain, but also from Tamil Nadu and other areas to the south of the country.

Without permission from the British authorities, the French attempted to illegally transport Indian workers to their sugar producing colony, the Reunion Island, from as early as 1826. By 1830, over 3000 labourers had been transported. After this trade was discovered, the French successfully negotiated with the British in 1860 for permission to transport over 6,000 workers annually, on condition that the trade would be suspended if abuses were discovered to be taking place.

The British began to transport Indians to Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, starting in 1829. Slavery had been abolished with the planters receiving two million pounds sterling in compensation for the loss of their slaves. The planters turned to bringing in a large number of indentured labourers from India to work in the sugar cane fields. Between 1834 and 1921, around half a million indentured labourers were present on the island. They worked on sugar estates, factories, in transport and on construction sites.

In 1837, the Raj issued a set of regulations for the trade. The rules provided for each labourer to be personally authorised for transportation by an officer designated by the Government, it limited the length of service to five years subject to voluntary renewal, it made the contractor responsible for returning the worker after the contract elapsed and required the vessels to conform to basic health standards

Despite this, conditions on the ships were often extremely crowded, with rampant disease and malnutrition. The workers were paid a pittance for their labour, and were expected to work in often awful and harsh conditions. Although there were no large scale scandals involving coolie abuse in British colonies, workers often ended up being forced to work, and manipulated in such a way that they became dependent on the plantation owners so that in practice they remained there long after their contracts expired; possibly as little as 10% of the coolies actually returned to their original country of origin. Colonial legislation was also passed to severely limit their freedoms; in Mauritius a compulsory pass system was instituted to enable their movements to be easily tracked. Conditions were much worse in the French colonies of Reunion and Guadeloupe and Martinique, where workers were 'systematically overworked' and abnormally high mortality rates were recorded for those working in the mines.

However, there were also attempts by the British authorities to regulate and mitigate the worst abuses. Workers were regularly checked up on by health inspectors, and they were vetted before transportation to ensure that they were suitably healthy and fit to be able to endure the rigours of labour. Children under the age of 15 were not allowed to be transported from their parents under any circumstances.

The first campaign against the 'coolie' trade in England likened the system of indentured labour to the slavery of the past. In response to this pressure, the labour export was temporarily stopped in 1839 by the authorities when the scale of the abuses became known, but it was soon renewed due to its growing economic importance. A more rigorous regulatory framework was put into place and severe penalties were imposed for infractions in 1842. In that year, almost 35,000 people were shipped to Mauritius.

In 1844, the trade was expanded to the colonies in the West Indies, including Jamaica, Trinidad and Demerara, where the Asian population was soon a major component of the island demographic.

Starting in 1879, many Indians were transported to Fiji to work on the sugar cane plantations. Many of them chose to stay after their term of indenture elapsed and today they number about 40% of the total population. Indian workers were also imported into the Dutch colony of Suriname after the Dutch signed a treaty with the United Kingdom on the recruitment of contract workers in 1870. In Mauritius, the Indian population are now demographically dominant, with Indian festivals being celebrated as national holidays.

This system prevailed until the early twentieth century. Increasing focus on the brutalities and abuses of the trade by the sensationalist media of the time, incited public outrage and lead to the official ending of the coolie trade in 1916 by the British government. By that time tens of thousands of Chinese workers were being used along the Western Front by the allied forces (see Chinese Labour Corps).

SEX RATIOS AND INTERMARRIAGE AMONG COOLIES

A major difference between the Chinese coolie trade and the Indian coolie trade was that the Chinese coolies were all male, while East Indian women (from India) were brought alongside men as coolies. This led to a high rate of Chinese men marrying women of other ethnicities like Indian women and mixed race Creole women. Indian women and children were brought alongside Indian men as coolies while Chinese men made up 99% of Chinese colonies. The contrast with the female to male ratio among Indian and Chinese immigrants has been compared by historians. In Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies just 18,731 Chinese women and 92,985 Chinese men served as coolies on plantations. Chinese women migrated less than Javanese and Indian women as indentured coolies. The number of Chinese women as coolies was "very small" while Chinese men were easily taken into the coolie trade. In Cuba men made up the vast majority of Chinese indentured servants on sugar plantations and in Peru non-Chinese women married the mostly male Chinese coolies.

Chinese women were scarce in every place where Chinese indentured laborers were brought, the migration was dominated by Chinese men. Up to the 1940s men made up the vast majority of the Costa Rican Chinese community. Males made up the majority of the original Chinese community in Mexico and they married Mexican women.

In the early 1900s, the Chinese communities in Manila, Singapore, Mauritius, New Zealand, Victoria in Australia, the United States, and Victoria in British Columbia in Canada were all male dominated.

WIKIPEDIA

People ask me what the Falklands are like.

So I will tell you.

Imagine the Outer Hebrides had been scattered in the South Atlantic, all grass covered, eroded, wind-blown. Home to hundreds of thousands of sheep. And mines.

Most of us had not heard of the Falklands until 1982 when Argentina invaded them, despite the Government having been warned the invasion was coming. So, an armada was formed and a task force sent, and over the course of four months the islands were taken back by force.

Since the war, the old Port Stanley airfield had closed and a new airport built about a 45 minute's drive away. That is Mount Pleasant.

RAF Mount Pleasant.

MPA.

A base had been built around it.

It was grim.

And yet, was modern, heated and we had one satellite channel, which broadcast live, not two weeks behind any more. And there was a radio station, which was shared by local radio and BFBS.

Some 2,000 islanders were protected by approx 2400 servicemen and women, and was one of the few places where members of the three forces served side by side. All on a detachment that last 124 days, or four months It was an interesting mix.

Most of us lived in a long low accommodation block, 12 Facility (well, at the RAF and Navy end, the other end of a mile long corridor was the Army end. Something like 35 Facility, and like the Bronx. The Army end had a cinema, so once that finished you had to be careful on the long walk back, as ambshes and robbery were not unknown.

The islands are thousands of miles away from England, and you get there on a trooper flight. A fleet of ancient and overwork Tri-stars ferry two rotations a week, 364 days a year, taking off from RAF Brize Norton, going via Ascension Island to refuel before heading south of the equator to the Falklands.

Life at home was already difficult, so the chance of four months away was attractive, so myself a couple others from Lyneham were making fun in the departure "lounge" at Brize while everyone else was miserable.

Once the door close, you are no classed as soldiers, in that you are not trusted with anything else than cans of beer and boxes of wine Spirits were unavailable to junior ranks for the duration of your tour, as apparently, you could not be trusted. The RAF had taken on a batch of mini DVD players, so we had something to watch during the flight before the only stop at Ascension Island, Or Assi.

Assi is the top part of an old volcano formed by the mid-atlantic ridge. A massive runway had been built on the high plateau, as well as a radio and communications relay station. There is nothing, no land for thousands of miles around. So, on final approach, the plane is skipping over the wave tops until suddenly there are rocks, a cliff and you are down. as we were to be down the Falklands in winter, we were all dressed up in our winter woolies. Assi is on the equator and as warm as you would think.

Although every flight stops there, planes are almost never delayed there and the pilots would always try to press on. We stopped and whilst the plane was refueled and restocked with food, there was time for a round or two at the bar down by the "beach". After an hour we were called back, and as the plane taxied, I saw a pool of fluid underneath one of the engines. It was spotted and the plane stopped and engines powered down.

We were taken off and told to go back to the bar.

Which we did.

Hours later we were told the plane could not be fixed and we were to spend the night on Assi, we had to go and sign bedding find where we were to sleep. Our barracks were like holiday chalets, looked really cute. I went into one, turned the light on and the floor moved. Dozens of cockroaches went for cover.

Oh, this was great.

We went back to the and drank it dry. As you do, then went back to the chalet and made our beds and tried to sleep. Darkness had come suddenly, and we were so tired.

Next day we boarded the plane and all was fine, so we carried on south for hour upon hour.

Landing at MPA is always fun; there is always a side wind, just the strength is different. People come out to watch it land, because on that is not only a couple of hundreds servicemen and women, but a week's mail, newspapers and magazines as well as supplies for the NAAFI shop.

Once the plane has taxied to the terminal, the passengers have to then listen to a mine brief, and dangers of mines, not to remove or deface mine signs. Then the happiest person in the whole world is there to meet you, as you are their replacement. He takes you in a landrover to one facility or the other, then up the the four man room where he has given up his bed, got you a clean duvet and sheets. You are tired disoriented, and this is your first night of 124, and you are taken to one of the many bars and drink, hoping you can find your way back to your bed. If you're unlucky there might be an initiation to go through, nothing bad, just a little humiliation and more drinking. The next morning, the person you replaced, who slept on an armchair will catch his flight home.

You are now the FNG; the Falklands New Guy, and the butt of all jokes and japes, have to make brews and clean, and will do so until the next FNG arrives, when he will take your place.

In every section, there is a chuff chart; a board with 124 pins on it, and each pin marks a day, and first think each morning, the first person in moves the talleys you have to make in your first week forward one day. Not only does the chuff chark mark off the days to do, but also the milestones, and as time passes your ranking among your colleagues go up until you become an FOG; Falklands Old Guy.

I worked in Coates Armoury, looking after the thousands of weapons that we would use to defend the island in the event of another invasion. Every three months there was an exercise during which we would issue weapons to all service personal, then we would lock the door to the armoury and sit through the fun and games, listening to the radio or watching videos, for 12 hours until the guy doing the other 12 hour shift to take over and you go to bed.

Tis was the exciting bit.

The rest was mundane stuff, just maintaining weapons, showing people how to clean their rifles if they'd been fired, charging them s a box of tea bags of a box of fruit case slices to do it for them. So the days and weeks flew by.

Off shift, there was two things to do down there, either keep fit or drink. Some did both. I kept fit, building up what I did week on week until by the final month I was doing double boxercise twice a week, two hours four other days a week and a sports afternoon on Friday. I became a lean and mean guy and was really as fit as I have ever been before or certainly since.

Halfway along the corridor was Weavers, run by the WVRS, and offered tea, coffee, cakes and an oasis of non military stuff. That was a fine way to spend a Sunday, reading last week's apapers with a slice of date and walnut cake a a cup of fresh coffee.

The other pass time was shadying.

Shadying was the creation of souvenirs made out of scrap metal, coins and shells that people would buy off you. Each section would trade parts with each other so we could make more money. Only FOGs could shady, so you waited until one guy got posted and you took your turn, learning as you went to cut brass maps of the islands, shining them up and glueing then to wooden plaques. In a good week you could make £100, and as beer was a pund a can, really live the high life. Or you could buy phone cards to call home, at fifteen quid for ten minutes.

Ao, as the weeks went buy I worked, trained in the gym and shadied all the hours I could. As I worked near to the library, I was the room's entertainment officer, and got videos to watch each night on the room video and portable TV while we sipped brews and munch custard creams. At weekends, there would be transport into Port Stanley down the dirt track main road for an afternoon spent looking through the sparse gift shop of going to one of the bars where they would serve beers in a GLASS.

Many of the places we heard during the war were in fact just a collection of houses, sometimes as few as three, these had battles named after them, but now were all quiet again, some farms offering bed and breakfast for us to use when we had our four days R&R. We could take this whenever we wanted, and I took mine right at the end of my tour, so had four days off, one day back then fly home. Perfect.

My other hobby was taking part in the regular quizzes on the radio. BFBS held them, that went on for weeks, asking questions of what is this noise, or stuff like that, but sometimes trivia questions, which I would take part in. I won a load of stuff in my time, including on the last day when I get back from R&R, I was in work to just clear and sort out some loose ends, and the new question came up: What was the first thing Maralyn Monroe advertised?

I knew.

I said I knew but would not phone in as I had cleared and was now a non FOG. So, one of the others called in, Jelly knows they said to the DJ. SO, I was friends with the DJ, and he said put me on the phone. I went on.

So, what's the answer he asked.

Bearing in mind previous answers had been diamonds, silk dresses and so on.

Potatoes I said. For the Idaho Potato Company. It was a calendar.

Bing.

Bing.

Bing.

Bugger he said, this usually lasts weeks.

I got another bag of swag to take back home.

A coolie (alternatively spelled cooli, cooly, quli, koelie, and other such variations), during the 19th and early 20th century, was a term for a locally sourced unskilled labourer hired by a company, mainly from the Indian subcontinent or Southern China.

Today, it is used varyingly as a legal inoffensive word (for example, in India for helpers carrying luggage in railway stations) and also used as a racial slur in Africa for certain people from Asia, particularly in South Africa

ETYMOLOGY

The origins of the word are uncertain but it is thought to have originated from the name of a Gujarati sect (the Kolī, who worked as day labourers) or perhaps from the Tamil word for a payment for work, kuli (கூலி). An alternative etymological explanation is that the word came from the Urdu qulī (क़ुली, قلی), which itself could be from the Turkish word for slave, qul. The word was used in this sense for labourers from India. In 1727, Dr. Engelbert Kämpfer described "coolies" as dock labourers who would unload Dutch merchant ships at Nagasaki in Japan.

The Chinese word 苦力 (pinyin: kǔlì) literally means "bitterly hard (use of) strength", in the Mandarin pronunciation.

HISTORY OF THE COOLIE TRADE

An early trade in Asian labourers is believed to have begun sometime in or around the 16th century. Social and political pressure led to the abolition of the slave trade throughout the British Empire in 1807, with other European nations following suit. Labour-intensive industries, such as cotton and sugar plantations, mines and railway construction, in the colonies were left without a cheap source of manpower. As a consequence, a large scale slavery-like trade in Asian (primarily Indian and Chinese) indentured labourers began in the 1820s to fill this vacuum. Some of these labourers signed contracts based on misleading promises, some were kidnapped and sold into the trade, some were victims of clan violence whose captors sold them to coolie brokers, while others sold themselves to pay off gambling debts. British companies were the first to experiment with this potential new form of cheap labour in 1807, when they imported 200 Chinese men to work in Trinidad.

The coolie trade was often compared to the earlier slave trade and they accomplished very similar things.

Although there are reports of ships for Asian coolies carrying women and children, the great majority of them were men. Finally, regulations were put in place, as early as 1837 by the British authorities in India to safeguard these principles of voluntary, contractual work and safe and sanitary transportation although in practice this rarely occurred especially during examples such as the Pacific Passage or the Guano Pits of Peru. The Chinese government also made efforts to secure the well-being of their nation's workers, with representations being made to relevant governments around the world.

CHINESE COOLIES

Workers from China were mainly transported to work in Peru and Cuba, but they also worked in British colonies such as Jamaica, British Guiana (now Guyana), British Malaya, Trinidad and Tobago, British Honduras (now Belize) and in the Dutch colonies Dutch East Indies and Suriname. The first shipment of Chinese labourers was to the British colony of Trinidad in 1806.

In 1847 two ships from Cuba transported workers to Havana to work in the sugar cane fields from the port of Xiamen, one of the five Chinese treaty ports opened to the British by the Treaty of Nanking in 1842. The trade soon spread to other ports in Guangdong province and demand became particularly strong in Peru for workers in the silver mines and the guano collecting industry. Australia began importing workers in 1848 and the United States began using them in 1865 on the First Transcontinental Railroad construction. These workers were deceived about their terms of employment to a much greater extent than their Indian counterparts, and consequently, there was a much higher level of Chinese emigration during this period.

The trade flourished from 1847 to 1854 without incident, until reports began to surface of the mistreatment of the workers in Cuba and Peru. As the British government had political and legal responsibility for many of the ports involved, including Amoy, the trade was shut down at these places. However, the trade simply shifted to the more accommodating port in the Portuguese enclave of Macau.

Many coolies were first deceived or kidnapped and then kept in barracoons (detention centres) or loading vessels in the ports of departure, as were African slaves. In 1875, British commissioners estimated that approximately eighty percent of the workers had been abducted. Their voyages, which are sometimes called the Pacific Passage, were as inhumane and dangerous as the notorious Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade. Mortality was very high. For example, it is estimated that from 1847 to 1859, the average mortality for coolies aboard ships to Cuba was 15.2 percent, and losses among those aboard ships to Peru were 40 percent in the 1850s and 30.44 percent from 1860 to 1863.

They were sold and were taken to work in plantations or mines with very bad living and working conditions. The duration of a contract was typically five to eight years, but many coolies did not live out their term of service because of the hard labour and mistreatment. Those who did live were often forced to remain in servitude beyond the contracted period. The coolies who worked on the sugar plantations in Cuba and in the guano beds of the Chincha Islands (the islands of Hell) of Peru were treated brutally. Seventy-five percent of the Chinese coolies in Cuba died before fulfilling their contracts. More than two-thirds of the Chinese coolies who arrived in Peru between 1849 and 1874 died within the contract period. In 1860 it was calculated that of the 4000 coolies brought to the Chinchas since the trade began, not one had survived.

Because of these unbearable conditions, Chinese coolies often revolted against their Ko-Hung bosses and foreign company bosses at ports of departure, on ships, and in foreign lands. The coolies were put in the same neighbourhoods as Africans and, since most were unable to return to their homeland or have their wives come to the New World, many married African women. The coolies' interracial relationships and marriages with Africans, Europeans and Indigenous peoples, formed some of the modern world's Afro-Asian and Asian Latin American populations.

Chinese immigration to the United States was almost entirely voluntary, but working and social conditions were still harsh. In 1868, the Burlingame Treaty allowed unrestricted Chinese immigration into the country. Within a decade significant levels of anti-Chinese sentiment had built up, stoked by populists such as Denis Kearney with racist slogans - "To an American, death is preferable to life on a par with the Chinese."

Although Chinese workers contributed to the building of the first Transcontinental Railroad in the United States and of the Canadian Pacific Railway in western Canada, Chinese settlement was discouraged after completion of the construction. California's Anti-Coolie Act of 1862 and the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 contributed to the curtailment of Chinese immigration to the United States.

Notwithstanding such attempts to restrict the influx of cheap labour from China, beginning in the 1870s Chinese workers helped construct a vast network of levees in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. These levees made thousands of acres of fertile marshlands available for agricultural production.

The 1879 Constitution of the State of California declared that "Asiatic coolieism is a form of human slavery, and is forever prohibited in this State, and all contracts for coolie labour shall be void."

Colonos asiáticos is a Spanish term for coolies. The Spanish colony of Cuba feared slavery uprisings such as those that took place in Haiti and used coolies as a transition between slaves and free labor. They were neither free nor slaves. Indentured Chinese servants also labored in the sugarcane fields of Cuba well after the 1884 abolition of slavery in that country. Two scholars of Chinese labor in Cuba, Juan Pastrana and Juan Perez de la Riva, substantiated horrific conditions of Chinese coolies in Cuba and stated that coolies were slaves in all but name. Denise Helly is one researcher who believes that despite their slave-like treatment, the free and legal status of the Asian laborers in Cuba separated them from slaves. The coolies could challenge their superiors, run away, petition government officials, and rebel according to Rodriguez Pastor and Trazegnies Granda. Once they had fulfilled their contracts the colonos asiáticos integrated into the countries of Peru, The Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Cuba. They adopted cultural traditions from the natives and also welcomed in non-Chinese to experience and participate into their own traditions. Before the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Havana had Latin America's largest Chinatown.

In South America, Chinese indentured labourers worked in Peru's silver mines and coastal industries (i.e., guano, sugar, and cotton) from the early 1850s to the mid-1870s; about 100,000 people immigrated as indentured workers. They participated in the War of the Pacific, looting and burning down the haciendas where they worked, after the capture of Lima by the invading Chilean army in January 1880. Some 2000 coolies even joined the Chilean Army in Peru, taking care of the wounded and burying the dead. Others were sent by Chileans to work in the newly conquered nitrate fields.

The Chinese Engineering and Mining Corporation, of which later U.S. president Herbert Hoover was a director, was instrumental in supplying Chinese coolie labour to South African mines from c.1902 to c.1910 at the request of mine owners, who considered such labour cheaper than native African and white labour. The horrendous conditions suffered by the coolie labourers led to questions in the British parliament as recorded in Hansard.

In 1866, the British, French and Chinese governments agreed to mitigate the abuse by requiring all traders to pay for the return of all workers after their contract ended. The employers in the British West Indies declined these conditions, bringing the trade there to an end. Until the trade was finally abolished in 1875, over 150,000 coolies had been sold to Cuba alone, the majority having been shipped from Macau. These labourers endured conditions far worse than those experienced by their Indian counterparts. Even after the 1866 reforms, the scale of abuse and conditions of near slavery did not get any better - if anything they deteriorated. In the early 1870s increased media exposure of the trade led to a public outcry, and the British, as well as the Qing government, put pressure on the Portuguese authorities to bring the trade at Macau to an end; this was ultimately achieved in 1874. By that time, a total of up to half a million Chinese workers had been exported.

The term coolie was also applied to Chinese workers recruited for contracts on cacao plantations in German Samoa. German planters went to great lengths to secure access to their "coolie" labour supply from China. In 1908 a Chinese commissioner, Lin Shu Fen, reported on the cruel treatment of coolie workers on German plantations in the western Samoan Islands. The trade began largely after the establishment of colonial German Samoa in 1900 and lasted until the arrival of New Zealand forces in 1914. More than 2000 Chinese "coolies" were present in the islands in 1914 and most were eventually repatriated by the New Zealand administration.

INDIAN COOLIES

By the 1820s, many Indians were voluntarily enlisting to go abroad for work, in the hopes of a better life. European merchants and businessmen quickly took advantage of this and began recruiting them for work as a cheap source of labour. The British began shipping Indians to colonies around the world, including Mauritius, Fiji, Natal, British East Africa, and British Malaya. The Dutch also shipped workers to labour on the plantations on Suriname and the Dutch East Indies. A system of agents was used to infiltrate the rural villages of India and recruit labourers. They would often deceive the credulous workers about the great opportunities that awaited them for their own material betterment abroad. The Indians primarily came from the Indo-Gangetic Plain, but also from Tamil Nadu and other areas to the south of the country.

Without permission from the British authorities, the French attempted to illegally transport Indian workers to their sugar producing colony, the Reunion Island, from as early as 1826. By 1830, over 3000 labourers had been transported. After this trade was discovered, the French successfully negotiated with the British in 1860 for permission to transport over 6,000 workers annually, on condition that the trade would be suspended if abuses were discovered to be taking place.

The British began to transport Indians to Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, starting in 1829. Slavery had been abolished with the planters receiving two million pounds sterling in compensation for the loss of their slaves. The planters turned to bringing in a large number of indentured labourers from India to work in the sugar cane fields. Between 1834 and 1921, around half a million indentured labourers were present on the island. They worked on sugar estates, factories, in transport and on construction sites.

In 1837, the Raj issued a set of regulations for the trade. The rules provided for each labourer to be personally authorised for transportation by an officer designated by the Government, it limited the length of service to five years subject to voluntary renewal, it made the contractor responsible for returning the worker after the contract elapsed and required the vessels to conform to basic health standards

Despite this, conditions on the ships were often extremely crowded, with rampant disease and malnutrition. The workers were paid a pittance for their labour, and were expected to work in often awful and harsh conditions. Although there were no large scale scandals involving coolie abuse in British colonies, workers often ended up being forced to work, and manipulated in such a way that they became dependent on the plantation owners so that in practice they remained there long after their contracts expired; possibly as little as 10% of the coolies actually returned to their original country of origin. Colonial legislation was also passed to severely limit their freedoms; in Mauritius a compulsory pass system was instituted to enable their movements to be easily tracked. Conditions were much worse in the French colonies of Reunion and Guadeloupe and Martinique, where workers were 'systematically overworked' and abnormally high mortality rates were recorded for those working in the mines.

However, there were also attempts by the British authorities to regulate and mitigate the worst abuses. Workers were regularly checked up on by health inspectors, and they were vetted before transportation to ensure that they were suitably healthy and fit to be able to endure the rigours of labour. Children under the age of 15 were not allowed to be transported from their parents under any circumstances.

The first campaign against the 'coolie' trade in England likened the system of indentured labour to the slavery of the past. In response to this pressure, the labour export was temporarily stopped in 1839 by the authorities when the scale of the abuses became known, but it was soon renewed due to its growing economic importance. A more rigorous regulatory framework was put into place and severe penalties were imposed for infractions in 1842. In that year, almost 35,000 people were shipped to Mauritius.

In 1844, the trade was expanded to the colonies in the West Indies, including Jamaica, Trinidad and Demerara, where the Asian population was soon a major component of the island demographic.

Starting in 1879, many Indians were transported to Fiji to work on the sugar cane plantations. Many of them chose to stay after their term of indenture elapsed and today they number about 40% of the total population. Indian workers were also imported into the Dutch colony of Suriname after the Dutch signed a treaty with the United Kingdom on the recruitment of contract workers in 1870. In Mauritius, the Indian population are now demographically dominant, with Indian festivals being celebrated as national holidays.

This system prevailed until the early twentieth century. Increasing focus on the brutalities and abuses of the trade by the sensationalist media of the time, incited public outrage and lead to the official ending of the coolie trade in 1916 by the British government. By that time tens of thousands of Chinese workers were being used along the Western Front by the allied forces (see Chinese Labour Corps).

SEX RATIOS AND INTERMARRIAGE AMONG COOLIES

A major difference between the Chinese coolie trade and the Indian coolie trade was that the Chinese coolies were all male, while East Indian women (from India) were brought alongside men as coolies. This led to a high rate of Chinese men marrying women of other ethnicities like Indian women and mixed race Creole women. Indian women and children were brought alongside Indian men as coolies while Chinese men made up 99% of Chinese colonies. The contrast with the female to male ratio among Indian and Chinese immigrants has been compared by historians. In Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies just 18,731 Chinese women and 92,985 Chinese men served as coolies on plantations. Chinese women migrated less than Javanese and Indian women as indentured coolies. The number of Chinese women as coolies was "very small" while Chinese men were easily taken into the coolie trade. In Cuba men made up the vast majority of Chinese indentured servants on sugar plantations and in Peru non-Chinese women married the mostly male Chinese coolies.

Chinese women were scarce in every place where Chinese indentured laborers were brought, the migration was dominated by Chinese men. Up to the 1940s men made up the vast majority of the Costa Rican Chinese community. Males made up the majority of the original Chinese community in Mexico and they married Mexican women.

In the early 1900s, the Chinese communities in Manila, Singapore, Mauritius, New Zealand, Victoria in Australia, the United States, and Victoria in British Columbia in Canada were all male dominated.

WIKIPEDIA