Journal of Chinese Overseas 5 (2009) 28-54 brill.

nl/jco

Asian Diasporas and Tropical Migration in the

Age of Empire: A Comparative Overview

Walton Look Lai

Abstract
he age of the industrial revolution gave a tremendous stimulus to global production, creating
multiple boom scenarios not only in the industrializing heartlands, but also in what was to
become the tropical food producing and raw materials sector for the industrialized world. Britain
and the United States were the principal beneficiaries of this process, the former through its
global Empire outreach, and the latter through its continental westward expansion. In both
cases, immigration became the indispensable factor. he economist W. Arthur Lewis (1978)
spoke of the century’s global development as being powered by two vast streams of international
migration: 50 million people leaving Europe for the temperate settlements, and another esti-
mated 50 million people leaving India and China to work in the tropics on plantations, in mines,
and in construction projects.
he European migrations, whether to the industrial centers or to the non-industrial settler
peripheries, have been studied in depth. Less studied have been the global pan-Asian migrations
as an indispensable complement to the pan-European migrations. Asian diaspora scholars are
generally more familiar with specific migration destinations, but these tend to be studied in
isolation and generally without a sense of connection with the rest of the diaspora. A case can be
made that there is still a need to see the migrations whole, to understand the connections between
these multiple movements, and against the background of the growth of Western industry and
empire, the principal motors of 19th-century economic growth. his article is a small attempt
toward this goal.

he central driving factor of global history in the 19th century was the way in
which the industrial revolution worked to transform, not only economic
structures and social relations within the countries where the process was tak-
ing place, but also the momentum of global migration and the course of
empire throughout the century. Operating from different but related axes, the
British and American industrialization processes were at the heart of this
dynamic, and consequently impacted on global movements of people and
territorial expansion of empire more comprehensively than other Western

Walton Look Lai is Lecturer in the History Department, University of the West Indies at St
Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago. His email address is [email protected].
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2009 DOI: 10.1163/179325409X434496
Also available online – brill.nl/jco
 W. L. Lai / Journal of Chinese Overseas 5 (2009) 28-54 29

powers influenced by the same dynamism. he economist W. Arthur Lewis

spoke of the century’s global development as being powered by two vast
streams of international migration: 50 million people leaving Europe for the
temperate settlements, and another estimated 50 million people leaving India
and China to work in the tropics on plantations, in mines, and in construc-
tion projects (Lewis 1978). he stimulus given to global production in the
age of the industrial revolution created local boom scenarios not only in the
industrial heartlands, but also in what was to become the tropical food pro-
ducing and raw materials sector for the industrialized world. his interna-
tional division of labor either took place within the political framework of
expanding Empire — whether British, Dutch, French or later in the century,
American — or evolved within the framework of what later came to be called
neo-colonialism, as it did with the newly independent Latin American repub-
lics. Moreover, in the United States of America, this process occurred for much
of the century not via traditional colonial expansion, but via relentless inland
and westward expansion (internal colonialism).
Because of the widespread demand for labor in all sectors of the global
economy in this period, and because of the racialized thinking of the empire-
builders, migration tended to adopt the racial and ethnic character that Lewis
spoke about: the Europeans went largely to the industrializing and modern-
izing (and temperate) sector, and the non-Whites, principally from East and
South Asia, went mainly to the tropical food producing and raw materials sec-
tor. here was some overlap at the edges of this development. Some White
labor immigration (mainly of Southern Europeans) flowed to the non-industrial
plantation tropics, such as post-slavery Brazil and Cuba,1 and even territories
as far apart as British Guiana and Hawaii, while a smaller migration of non-
White (Chinese and Indian) labor took place headed for the fringe areas of the
emergent industrial economy, mainly the American and Canadian West Coasts
(400,000 Chinese, 7,000 Indians). But by and large this international racial
division of labor was the standard pattern of 19th-century migrations.
here is some uncertainty about the numbers of people who actually
migrated out of East and South Asia. Lewis’ 50 million may have been an
overestimate. here was a tradition of seasonal and return migration among
the Indians to the South Asian region which may have made the final numbers
difficult to estimate. As late as 1910, a British Commission of Enquiry into
the status of Indian indentured immigration within the British Empire said
about Ceylon:

1
Subtropical and temperate Argentina and Uruguay, which developed into Latin versions of
temperate food producing countries like Canada, Australia and New Zealand, also attracted mil-
lions of mainly Southern European rural immigrants.
30 W. L. Lai / Journal of Chinese Overseas 5 (2009) 28-54

So far we have dealt only with the case of immigrants coming over as agricul-
tural laborers. he immigrants coming annually from India for other purposes
somewhat exceed these in number, being estimated at an average of 102,000 per
annum during the last four years as against a yearly average of 98,000 agricultural
immigrants.2

One author has suggested that as many as 30 million Indians emigrated, and
that just fewer than 24 million returned to India, principally from Ceylon,
Burma and Malaya, leaving a net global migration of roughly 6.3 million Indians,
5 million in South and Southeast Asia, and about 1.3 million in the larger
diaspora (Jain 1989: 157). Chinese migrations added another 7.5 million —
6.5 million of these within Southeast Asia alone (Northrup 1995).3 In addition,
there were at least another 200,000 Javanese, Japanese, and Pacific Islanders
joining the migrant stream during this century of global labor mobility.
Much of the seasonal and long-term migration within South and Southeast
Asia was not new, and indeed its origins preceded the arrival of the West in
this region by several centuries. While not always formally acknowledged or
encouraged by the imperial authorities, coastal and maritime China had
carried on a distinctive and vigorous tradition dating back as far as the Tang
(618-907 A.D.), and possibly the Han (206 B.C.-A.D. 220), periods. Chinese
Buddhist travelers had reported encountering colonies of Chinese merchant
settlers in Sumatra and Java as early as the 4th century A.D. Indian traders and
sailors from the province of Gujarat as well as the Malabar and Coromandel
coasts of Southern India had, along with the Arabs, dominated the maritime
trade between the Indian Ocean, Southeast Asia and the Red Sea at least from
the first century A.D. hey had even helped transfer Hindu, Buddhist, and
eventually Muslim, religious and cultural influences to Southeast Asia by the
7th century A.D. However, large-scale migration and settlement of unskilled
manual laborers in search of economic opportunity was not a feature of this
early period.
It took the arrival of the European colonizers in the 16th century to inject
new vigor into the traditional maritime networks of the Asian regional econ-
omy. First the Portuguese and Spanish, then the Dutch, British and French
injected themselves into the regional trade networks, and their activities even-
tually helped to integrate the region more closely into the dynamic Atlantic
“world economy.” Between the 16th and the 19th centuries, this was relatively

2
Report of the Committee on Emigration from India to the Crown Colonies and Protector-
ates (Sanderson Committee): Gt. Britain, Parliamentary Papers 1910, XXVII, Cmd. 5192-94,
paragraph 129 (hereafter, Sanderson Committee Report 1910).
3
his applies to the period after the mid-1870s. he Straits Settlements Chinese population
was 50,000 in 1860, just under half of the total population (Chen 1923: 82).
 W. L. Lai / Journal of Chinese Overseas 5 (2009) 28-54 31

small-scale and gradual, since the Europeans operated out of coastal trading
enclaves and forts rather than engaging in territorial and inland colonization.
Still, in response to this early regional stimulus, spontaneous Chinese migra-
tions of traders and artisans to hailand and the Philippines, and to Indonesia
and the Malayan Straits gave rise to a Chinese middleman sector within these
local economies well before the century of the industrial revolution. Overseas
Indian trader communities were smaller in number, despite their domination
of the maritime trade routes, and up to the beginning of the 19th century
their numbers were no more than a few thousand within the whole maritime
network from the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea (Brij Lal 2006: 58).
However, as early as the 17th century, there was an active trade in Indian
slave labor, carried out primarily by the Portuguese, French and Dutch from
their coastal enclaves. Several thousand Indian slaves were transported by
them to places like Dutch-held Ceylon and Southeast Asia, as well as Cape
Colony in Southern Africa, and the Indian Ocean islands of Mauritius and
French Reunion (Brij Lal 2006: 41-43). hus, well before the introduction of
indentured labor in the 19th century, there was the forced migration of Indian
slaves, and even some voluntary free labor, to the Indian Ocean colonies, in
response to labor demands created by limited colonization, mainly in domes-
tic, shipping and construction activity.4 Additionally, from the late 18th to the
mid-19th century, the British East India Company made substantial use of
several thousand Indian convict laborers transferred to prisons in Bencoolen
(Sumatra), the Andaman islands, the Straits Settlements (Penang, Malacca
and Singapore), Mauritius (British after 1815), and Burma for jungle clearing,
road construction and other public works infrastructural activities (Yang 2003;
Brij Lal 2006: 44).

Characteristics of 19th-Century Asian Migration

It was the 19th-century global economy, powered to a large extent by the

industrial revolutions in both Britain and the USA, and by the active and
unchallenged territorial expansion of the British Empire in Asia and elsewhere
after 1815, which introduced a qualitatively and quantitatively new dimension
into this situation. For the Chinese and the Indians, in particular, it was
the stimulation of new economies well beyond the Asian context, and the
active thirst for labor in previously unfamiliar destinations, combined with the

4
As many as 20,000 to Mauritius and Reunion over the century, according to one account,
representing 13 percent of the servile population of these islands (Brij Lal 2006: 43).
32 W. L. Lai / Journal of Chinese Overseas 5 (2009) 28-54

century’s faster and more efficient shipping, which eventually embroiled both
groups in migration beyond their traditional orbits. Roughly two million of
them ventured beyond Asia, mainly to the tropical colonies and dependencies
in the Caribbean, Latin America, the Indian Ocean, Africa and the Pacific, but
a little less than half a million also moved on the fringes of the great European
migrations to the USA, Canada and Australia. Other Asians and Pacific Island-
ers also followed in their wake to some tropical destinations, but this move-
ment was dominated by Chinese and Indians.
It is worthwhile to remember that, despite the broadening of the Asian
diaspora in tandem with the continued expansion of the global economy,
Asian skilled and unskilled labor migrants continued to make the South
and Southeast Asian region their primary destination. As mentioned earlier,
6.5 million of the 7.5 million Chinese, and 5 million of the 6.3 million
Indians — 80 percent of the century’s expanded Asian migration — continued
to remain on traditional terrain, as these regional economies were themselves
further transformed by territorial inland occupation by the colonial powers,
led above all by the example of the British in India.
In the midst of this broad picture, a noticeable feature of the 19th-century
tropical migrations was the different orbits within which these two Asian
groups largely traveled.5 While the Chinese migrations were directed to a vari-
ety of countries operating under a wide variety of political jurisdictions and
widely divergent legal and labor traditions — American, British, Spanish
as well as the newly independent Latin American republics of Peru and
Mexico — the overwhelming majority of the Indian labor migrations went
primarily to the tropical regions of the British Empire (British Caribbean,
Mauritius, Natal, and after 1870, Fiji and East Africa) and only exceptionally
elsewhere.6 his applied even within South and Southeast Asia itself, where
the largest numbers went to Ceylon, Burma and Malaya (all British), while the
Chinese continued to migrate as traders and workers to their (by now) famil-
iar destinations — hailand and the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaya.

5
he laborers, if not the traders.
6
he main exceptions were the three French Caribbean territories and Reunion in the Indian
Ocean (154,000); Dutch Suriname, which had a brief arrangement with the British after 1873
to import laborers from British India (34,000); and the United States, where the push/pull fac-
tors as well as the origins of the migrants were unique, and which did not follow the orthodox
pattern, for reasons which are discussed later. he Spanish made abortive attempts to acquire
Indian labor for Cuba in the 1880s (Tinker 1974: 274). Even Louisiana sugar planters with
French Caribbean connections toyed with the idea of importing Indians in the 1860s (Cohen
1984: 48-49). here were also some small voluntary post-indenture Indian migrations to the
Latin countries: Jamaica to Cuba and Central America, Trinidad to Venezuela (Look Lai 1993:
148-51; I.M.Cumpston 1953: 43-45; Sarusky 1989: 73-78).
 W. L. Lai / Journal of Chinese Overseas 5 (2009) 28-54 33

he modern Indian labor diaspora was thus directly connected to the expan-
sion of the tropical regions of the British Empire in the century after 1815.
he removal of the French from the imperial race after 1815 paved the way for
the unchallenged acquisition of a number of tropical and temperate island and
mainland colonies in the middle of the century, and the peopling of these
new acquisitions with fresh injections of colonists and laborers. All the new
colonies added to the large food producing and raw materials sector of the
Empire, but the emigration was racially divided into one of British settlers and
colonists in the temperate zones (Canada, Australia and New Zealand) and
Asian unskilled laborers in the tropical zones. With the exception of Malaya,
which was the primary Chinese tropical destination in the 19th century (more
than 6 million), the majority of the migrants to the tropical British Empire
was Indian.
Given the different experiences of Western domination experienced by
China and India, it is perhaps not surprising that the emigration patterns and
destinations of these two countries tended to diverge somewhat. However,
despite the destination differences, it is noticeable how many of the labor
migrants of both countries were imported into tropical territories which
needed workers for the still expanding sugar industry: the Chinese in Cuba,
Peru (partially), Hawaii, plus the British, Dutch and French Caribbean, the
French island of Reunion, and even tropical Queensland in Australia; the
Indians everywhere beyond South and Southeast Asia (except East Africa,
where they were engaged mainly in railroad building). he total number of
Chinese laborers involved in producing sugar, mostly for the US market, was
around 300,000, i.e. slightly less than the number of their countrymen who
migrated to the United States; their Indian counterparts, producing mainly
for the British Empire, numbered most of the 1.3 million who traveled beyond
South and Southeast Asia, plus a large number (perhaps another 150,000)
involved in the sugar industry of Malaya itself.
he overwhelming majority of these tropical sugar workers, regardless of
origin or destination, were recruited under some form of the indentured labor
system. In fact, the revival of the indenture system in the 19th century seems
to have been connected primarily with the expansion of the global sugar
industry. A recent study of 19th-century indenture (Northrup 1995) hardly
mentions any other industry in its overview of how this institution functioned
during the period. he author identifies the revival of this modified form of
coerced labor with the end of African slavery in the British Empire, and with
the sugar planters’ need to find alternative sources of labor when problems
with the traditional labor supply began to arise in the post-Emancipation
period. In fact, while this was largely correct, indenture was also used in
34 W. L. Lai / Journal of Chinese Overseas 5 (2009) 28-54

several sugar destinations which had never experienced slavery. Such was the
case with Hawaii, not to mention British Empire destinations like Natal in
South Africa, Fiji, and Malaya, and even tropical Queensland7 in Australia,
which used the indentured labor of Pacific islanders, Indians, Chinese and,
according to one author, even Italians (Gabaccia 2000: 66). Moreover, Cuba
was unique in the sense that its overheated sugar industry used Chinese
indentured labor, not after the end of African slavery, but side by side with it.8
here were numerous Cuban plantations which used slave and indentured
labor simultaneously.9
It should also be mentioned that while sugar was the main global industry
employing imported indentured labor, not all large sugar-producing countries
resorted to it, nor in fact was sugar the only plantation enterprise utilizing
indentured labor. Java and the Philippines relied primarily on domestic labor.10
Brazil11 relied solely on its Black laborers, slave and ex-slave. In the Caribbean
region, mid-sized producers Puerto Rico and Barbados relied mainly on their
own workers (white campesinos and Black ex-slaves in the case of the former,
ex-slaves in the case of the latter). Outside of sugar, moreover, coffee and rub-
ber plantations in Malaya, cocoa in Trinidad, and bananas in Jamaica all used
the indentured labor of Indians, alongside free and post-indentured laborers.
he guano deposits in Peru (Chinese), and the mines and railways of the Brit-
ish Empire (Chinese in Transvaal gold mines; Indians in Uganda/Kenya rail-
road construction), even cotton in French Tahiti or coffee and pineapples in
Hawaii (both Chinese), became destinations for Asian indentured laborers.12
In Singapore and the rest of Malaya, many South Indian indentured laborers
worked in public works projects, opening up the interior and building the
infrastructure (roads, railways, bridges, canals and wharves) until 1913, when
indenture was officially ended.
Both groups of Asians went to countries where they formed part of a mul-
tiracial labor force — occasionally with each other, but more often with oth-
ers. hey also went to countries where they were the dominant element in the
plantation workforce. In Cuba, Chinese worked alongside African slaves; in
7
Until 1859, a part of New South Wales.
8
Cuban slavery ended in 1886, while its Chinese indenture period lasted from 1847 to
1874.
9
“Flor de Cuba plantation had 409 Negroes and 170 Chinese; San Martin 452 Negroes and
125 Chinese; Santa Susana 632 Negroes and 200 Chinese” (Williams 1970: 349).
10
In 1894 Java produced 552,667 tons of sugar — twice as much as the British West Indies
combined (278,559 tons) — while the Philippines produced over 191,277 tons.
11
275,000 tons in 1894.
12
Between 1880 and 1902, the Brazilian government recruited thousands of indentured Ital-
ians on six-year contracts for the coffee plantations of Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina,
until it was stopped by the Italian government (Gabaccia 2000: 66).
 W. L. Lai / Journal of Chinese Overseas 5 (2009) 28-54 35

the British West Indies, alongside Indians and Portuguese immigrants from
Madeira; in Hawaii, alongside native Hawaiians as well as other migrants from
the Phillipines or Japan; in Peru up to the 1880s as a majority workforce.
Indians were generally part of a mixed workforce in Trinidad and Guiana dur-
ing the 1860s, but by the late 1870s and after they were the majority (and
often the only) group on the plantations. hey were also the principal work-
force on the plantations of Mauritius, Natal, and post-1890s Fiji. In Fiji before
the 1890s, they worked alongside Pacific Islanders, and in Dutch Suriname
after the 1890s, they shared the plantations with Indonesians from Java. By
contrast, in the Windward Islands of Grenada, St Vincent and St Lucia, as well
as Jamaica, and even the French West Indian islands of Martinique and Gua-
deloupe, they labored as a minority group in a workforce still made up of
mainly African ex-slaves. It was only in the Caribbean (British, French and
Dutch), in the Indian Ocean islands of Mauritius and Reunion, and in Malaya,
that Chinese and Indian laborers actually worked together under similar con-
ditions of indenture.
If sugar and indenture played such a large role in the making of the two
million-strong Asian diaspora beyond South and Southeast Asia, this did not
apply to the Chinese and Indian migrations to the temperate mainland coun-
tries, or to the mainstream migrations to tropical South and Southeast Asia.
his observation, however, needs to be immediately qualified. Firstly, it should
be remembered that the Southern planters in the USA, who included the
sugar growers of Louisiana, as well as others who wanted Chinese labor for
cotton in Arkansas and Mississippi, or railway construction in Alabama
and Texas, were not too far removed in their thinking and practice from the
broad imperial preference for non-white tropical workers which was the main
feature of the century. hey certainly referenced the same networks and used
the same racial justifications as their planter counterparts elsewhere.13 Sec-
ondly, a large number of both groups who went to Southeast Asia, especially
Malaya, went under a version of the indenture arrangement. About 250,000
Indians (Brij Lal 2006: 158) and 750,000 Chinese (Chen 1923: 84-85)
worked under indenture on the Malayan sugar and rubber plantations, as well
as the tin mines (mainly Chinese). hirdly, about 5,000 Chinese in the 1850s
and 3,000 Indians between 1862 and 1886 worked as indentureds on the
sugar plantations of tropical Queensland in Australia (Northrup 1995: 156;
Brij Lal 2006: 384).

13
See Moon-Ho Jung, Coolies and Cane (Baltimore, 2006). Two thousand Chinese worked in
the South in the early 1870s, brought from California, Cuba, and 400 in at least two vessels
directly from China. Intense labor conflicts and court battles led to an abandonment of the
experiment before the decade came to an end.
36 W. L. Lai / Journal of Chinese Overseas 5 (2009) 28-54

hat having been said, it remains true that the 400,000 Chinese and 7,000
Indians14 who went to the USA and Canada went under different circum-
stances, and were largely self-driven and self-organized, if not quite as “free” as
most of their European counterparts, most of whom came either as paying
passengers, or were at least under no legal obligations to repay any assisted
passages, whether the assistance came from state bodies, private sector sources
or religious and philanthropic organizations. At that level the Asians were a
marginal non-white version of the large transatlantic European movements,
motivated by the same overall expectations if not necessarily destined for the
same fates.15 In North America, the Chinese were miners, railway workers,
agricultural workers, laundrymen, restaurateurs and merchants; the Indians
worked in lumber mills, forestry, railroads and agriculture. While the Chinese
who went to the USA and Canada were of the same provincial origins (Guang-
dong and Fujian) as the rest of the global Chinese diaspora, the same cannot

14
here were 5,000 in Canada in 1908, reduced to 700 by 1918 because of Canadian restric-
tions. Most relocated to the USA (Brij Lal 2006: 328). he US Census recorded 2,050 in 1900,
and between 1905 and 1915, 6,359 were recorded as entering the USA (Daniels 1993: 440). See
also Mazumdar (1985: 549-78).
15
he discrimination, hostility and at best ambivalence from all social classes which greeted
them in these White settler temperate destinations illustrated very forcefully that this migration
was not designed to be a part of the global division of labor acceptable to the metropolitan think-
ing of the 19th century. In stark contrast, none of these negative responses greeted Asians in the
tropical agricultural “periphery” destinations, where their industry and work habits were always
highly praised, and often contrasted with the “laziness” of the “native” inhabitants, whether in
Southeast Asia, Hawaii, the Caribbean or Africa. (Spanish-speaking America, which formed part
of the global “periphery” but was nevertheless also a settler society of Southern Europeans, dis-
played the same cruel prejudices of the “core” white settler countries, although post-Indepen-
dence Cuba did develop a favorable image of the Chinese, mainly because of their participation
in the Independence movement.) Many negative judgments made by the White press and White
labor on the West Coast against the Asians’ lifestyles and culture were disregarded in Trinidad
and British Guiana when raised by the African laborers.
his “double face” of Western capitalism — anti-Asian in the temperate settler countries
(where Asian labor was not really needed, and entered largely of its own accord) and pro-Asian
in the tropical plantation countries (where Asian labor was badly needed, and actively recruited)
became a constant in the history of 19th-century Asian immigration. Writing in the 1920s, Brit-
ish economic historian Lillian Knowles commented on “the thorny question of the exclusion of
Japanese, Chinese and Indians” as being “one of the great links between Canada, Australia, and
South and East Africa.” At the same time, she acknowledged that “most people are aware of the
emigration from the United Kingdom which gave an English impress to parts of three conti-
nents. Few people, however, seem to realize how important a part both Indian and Chinese
emigrants have played in the development of the Empire, although the King rules over a minia-
ture Chinese Empire in Malaya and a miniature Indian Empire in the West Indies. here have
been, in fact, in the past century three mother countries of the British Empire, i.e. the United
Kingdom, India and China, but the story of the latter two is at present buried in numerous
reports” (Knowles 1925: viii, 50).
 W. L. Lai / Journal of Chinese Overseas 5 (2009) 28-54 37

be said of the unique Indian migration to the West Coast. he 7,000 Indians
who found themselves in British Columbia, Washington, Oregon and Cali-
fornia in the early 1900s were Sikhs from the northwestern province of Pun-
jab,16 and distinct from the rest of the Indian diaspora17 who were generally
either Tamil and Telugu-speakers from southern Madras or Bhojpuri and
Urdu-speakers from the northern United Provinces, Bihar and Bengal.18
he Punjabis who migrated to North America were motivated to do so, not
by British imperial design, as was the case almost everywhere else in the
Indian diaspora, but by network knowledge gained from fellow Punjabis who
were stationed in British Hong Kong, primarily as soldiers and security per-
sonnel. Hong Kong was the main emigration port for most of the Chinese
diaspora, including the voluntary North American migrations. Most of the
Punjabis who migrated to North America did so from Hong Kong (Brij Lal
2006: 328).19
For the mainstream Indian migrants, the push factors are more recogniz-
able. British direct rule in India, and the land, taxation, and trade policies
introduced in its wake, were largely responsible for generating disruptive push
factors in the Indian countryside, which in turn created the large pool of float-
ing labor directed toward domestic destinations like Bengal or Assam, or to
foreign destinations like Ceylon or the sugar colonies. Natural (drought and
famine) and demographic (rural overpopulation) factors exacerbated the liv-
ing conditions, and the southern Tamils had an independent tradition of sea-
sonal migration to Ceylon, but the role of colonialism in disrupting the
traditional economy while harnessing it to the needs of the distant British
industrial revolution has been well documented (Dutt 1970; Charlesworth
1982; Dharma Kumar 1984). Chinese push factors, on the other hand, were
more complex, attributable to a combination of domestically self-generated
economic decline and political crisis in mid-century (the Taiping and other
rebellions), and externally induced crisis (the opium wars and unequal treaties
imposed by the West). In both countries, however, it is noteworthy that the
migrations were confined to specific sending provinces and districts, and were
proportionately quite small compared to their respective populations.

16
he Americans called them all “Hindus,” which they were not.
17
Except East Africa in the 1890s, where the 38,000 Kampala-Nairobi railway construction
and service workers (80 percent of whom later returned to India) also came from the Punjab,
recruited by the British (Brij Lal 2006: 255).
18
he larger diaspora also contained small numbers of Punjabis, many of them Sikhs.
19
he Sikh migrants who went to the West Coasts of Canada and USA were so atypical that
modern analysts of the 19th-century Indian global diaspora like Hugh Tinker and Steven Vert-
ovec do not refer to them at all.
38 W. L. Lai / Journal of Chinese Overseas 5 (2009) 28-54

Origins of the Migrants

he majority of China’s migrants historically came from two southern coastal

provinces, Fujian and Guangdong. his has been a tradition going as far back
as the 7th century. Port cities like Quanzhou (Chuanchow) in Fujian and
Guangzhou (Canton) in southern Guangdong had established seafaring and
overseas connections long before the arrival of the Western traders. Between
the 7th and 15th centuries Formosa (Taiwan) was gradually colonized by Fuji-
anese and northeastern Guangdongese seeking a base for trade with the main-
land as well as Southeast Asia. Moreover, the Philippines had made direct and
prolonged contacts with migrants from Fujian since the 1560s, stimulated by
the newly established Manila-Acapulco connection. he Macau-Canton axis
had also been an international enclave since the 16th century. he intensified
foreign intrusions of the 19th century in the aftermath of the two Opium Wars
(1839-42 and 1856-60) only served to heighten the activities and migratory
movements traditionally associated with these provinces. Within these broad
regions, moreover, there were often several clearly identifiable micro-districts
or counties with long traditions of migratory dispersal at the center of their
social and community life. Zhangzhou (Changchow), Quanzhou (Chuanchow),
Jinjiang in south Fujian, Fuzhou (Foochow) in eastern Fujian, Chaozhou
(Teochiu) and Jieyang (Chia-ying) in northeast Guangdong, had intimate
links with the Southeast Asian nexus before the 19th century migrations began.
Interestingly, the relative importance of these two sending regions was not
the same to all destinations. Most Fujianese over time migrated mainly to
Southeast Asia, whereas most American-bound 19th-century migrations orig-
inated from Guangdong. he Guangdongese are themselves subdivided into
the northeastern Teochiu speakers emigrating from the port city of Shantou
(Swatow) and surrounding districts, and the Cantonese emigrating from the
Pearl River delta region via Guangzhou (Canton), Hong Kong, and Macau.
Interspersed among these groups were those in the Hakka dialect group, who
lived dispersed in both provinces, but were especially concentrated in the bor-
der regions of Western Fujian and northeast Guangdong. hey emigrated out
of all the sending ports.20
One fact which bears noting is that a number of destinations initially
received indentured and contract migrants not directly from China, but via
20
As late as the 1950s Fujianese constituted 50 percent of the Chinese population of
Indonesia, 40 percent of that of Malaysia, and as many as 82 percent of that of the Philippines.
By contrast, more than 90 percent of the pan-American and Hawaii Chinese before the 1970s
were Cantonese. According to the Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas (Pan 1998), up to the
1950s, Guangdongese (northeast and southern) constituted 68 percent of the world’s overseas
Chinese communities.
 W. L. Lai / Journal of Chinese Overseas 5 (2009) 28-54 39

other regional or colonial connections: for example, from Malaya to Trinidad

and Reunion, from Java to Suriname, from Singapore to Mauritius, from
Panama to Jamaica, and from Cuba and California to Louisiana.21 Two of the
three French vessels which sailed to Martinique and Guadeloupe in the 1860s
also recruited their passengers from Shanghai, rather than Guangdong or
Fujian (Cardin 2006: 179).
he links between sending and receiving regions for Indian labor migration
also exhibited systematic patterns. Globally, South Indians, particularly Tam-
ils, were the majority of the emigrants. hey predominated in South and
Southeast Asia, South Africa (Natal) and all the French sugar colonies, while
North Indians were the majority in the British and Dutch West Indies,
Mauritius and Fiji. Railway workers in East Africa were mainly Punjabis.
However, Indians from the North and the South as well as other regions were
present in most destinations. Two British Indian administrators, J. Geoghegan
and George Grierson, who wrote comprehensive accounts of the origins of
the Indian indentured migrants going to the sugar colonies in the 1870s
and 1880s (Geoghegan 1874; Grierson 1883), noted that the Bhojpuri-
dialect region in northern India, for example, which the British artificially
divided in the late 18th century into Bihar (westernmost Bengal) on the
one hand, and eastern United Provinces on the other, was one major send-
ing region (Hill 1995). Within the northern region, specific districts provided
most of the recruits for both domestic seasonal and overseas indentured migra-
tions. By 1910 the Sanderson Committee of Enquiry into Indian Emigration
was stating that most of the migrants to the sugar colonies were recruited in
three districts of the eastern United Provinces — Fyzabad, Basti, and Gonda —
and that 80 percent were born in 21 districts of Bengal and the United Prov-
inces, with a combined total area of 55,000 square miles and a population
of 34 million.22
Of the Tamil and Telugu-speaking Southern Indian migrants, the Encyclo-
pedia of the Indian Diaspora states as follows:

Malaya and Ceylon drew most of their Indian labor from Tamil Nadu, while
Burma drew a large part of its supplies from Vizagapatnam, Coimbatore, Tanjore,
Trichinopoly, Malabar and Chingleput. From 1842 to 1870, Godavari, Ganjam,
Madras, Chingleput, Tanjore, South Arcot, and Rajahmundry, were the principal

21
A vessel sailing from Hong Kong to Louisiana with 210 migrants in 1870 also picked up
an extra 17 Chinese in Martinique (Cohen 1984: 107; Jung 2006: 123).
22
Sanderson Committee Report 1910, paragraphs 68 and 77. A sizable minority also came
from the outlying western regions of the United Provinces, Bengal proper and smaller surround-
ing states. In the initial years of the migration to the British sugar colonies (1840s and 1850s),
most of the recruits were tribals from the Chota Nagpur district of southern Bihar.
40 W. L. Lai / Journal of Chinese Overseas 5 (2009) 28-54

recruiting grounds, and from 1870 to 1899 North Arcot, Vizagapatnam, Trichi-
nopoly, Chingleput and Madras gained primacy (Brij Lal 2006: 52).

Labor Arrangements: Free or Unfree?

he mainstream migrations of both groups displayed a mixture of organized

free migration with several types of labor arrangement which hovered between
free and unfree. hroughout the 19th century, the line between the two condi-
tions was often hard to draw, even for European labor.23 he global European
migrations, however, were largely free and voluntary, while both Asian migra-
tions took place under various forms of hybrid and semi-free arrangements,
including some which were not far removed from the African slave trade.
Legitimate questions arise about the precise ratios of coercion to freedom
under all these labor arrangements.
A close look at the various mechanisms involved reveals a complex picture,
even when the migrations were conducted under the supervision of the met-
ropolitan power (USA or Britain). One thing they all seemed to share in com-
mon was the fact that the passage expenses were paid for by a third party
intermediary or labor broker, and the essence of the future labor arrangement
revolved around the issue of how, when and to whom these passage moneys
would be repaid, in cash or in kind, and whether these arrangements were
recognized by the laws of the receiving countries. his applied whether the
arrangements were, in the case of the Chinese, the “credit ticket” system,
the indenture system, or — on the US Southern plantations — a contract
arrangement just short of indenture (Federal law having prohibited contract
labor immigration on US soil since 1868).24 It also applied to the Indians
whether they traveled under indenture or under what was called in South and
Southeast Asia the kangani 25 recruitment arrangement (to be discussed later).

23
Slavery itself did not come to a decisive end until 1886 in Cuba and 1888 in Brazil. Penal
sanctions for work offenses also existed in 19th-century Britain, under an Act of 1823 which
amended older master-servant legislation, but it was ended in the 1870s, whereas colonial inden-
ture penal sanctions continued until the demise of indenture in 1917. See Holdsworth 1956:
19-20. For a discussion on the thin line between free and coerced labor in different traditions,
especially in Britain and the USA, see Steinfeld and Engerman (1997: 107-26). See also the
volume of essays edited by David Eltis (2002).
24
Reinforced by the Foran Act of 1885 (Alien Contract Labor Law). However, contract labor
was widely used in practice, even for Europeans. Unlike formal indenture, laborers were not
physically bound to their places of work on pain of imprisonment, but their wages and property
were often withheld pending repayment of their passage debts.
25
Maistry in Burma. he term kangani meant overseer or foreman, maistry meant supervisor.
Both terms are derived from Tamil.
 W. L. Lai / Journal of Chinese Overseas 5 (2009) 28-54 41

he key questions to be answered in deciding how free the particular migra-

tion was can be summarized as follows:

• How were the migrants recruited, and who paid for and arranged their
passages?
• How voluntary and legal was the recruitment and transportation process?
• How, to whom, and when were the migrants expected to repay their
debts, in cash or in equivalent labor services?
• How was the enforcement of debt or contract obligations organized? Did
the law and the local courts play a part in the process, or was enforcement
extralegal and/or communal, or even illegal?
• Did breaches of the formal or informal arrangements take place, at what
points in the whole process, and what were the consequences, civil, crim-
inal or other?

A close examination of the immigration process reveals that there were several
kinds of arrangements simultaneously at work. here were actually two kinds
of “credit ticket” arrangement, one in the temperate destinations (USA, Can-
ada and Australia) and another in Southeast Asia. here were also two kinds of
indenture arrangement, that organized by the British, and that organized by
other nationalities, especially the Spanish (Cuba) and formerly Spanish (Peru).
Another distinction was that between those arrangements which were techni-
cally enforceable in the local court system and those which operated beyond
the law in a communal/community setting, sometimes questioned, often tac-
itly endorsed or even ignored by the local legal system.
Both versions of the Chinese “credit ticket” system were examples of a com-
munity-based arrangement. In both cases, the immigrant’s ticket was paid for
by a labor broker based in China or the destination country. he broker recov-
ered his debt (with interest) in one of several ways. he laborer could either
accept responsibility for the debt personally26 or he could “contract” himself to
an employer who would assume his debt and reimburse himself from the
laborer’s wages. In both North American destinations, an overall supervision
was organized by a federation of Guangdong district association bodies27
to assist migrants in finding jobs, to look after their welfare (and that of
their home-based families) in case of death or indigence, and to make sure that
they eventually repaid their debts from their earnings in the new society. Elab-
orate supervision was organized to ensure that the migrant did not abscond.

26
One writer states specifically that in the USA the debt in the 1850s was usually for $40 in
gold, and the repayment period was five years at four to eight percent interest (Chang 2003: 32).
27
he Six Companies in the USA.
42 W. L. Lai / Journal of Chinese Overseas 5 (2009) 28-54

For example, he could not embark on a return ship to China without being
able to produce documentation of his debt repayment. he potential for abuse
was always present, which was why the US immigration authorities often con-
ducted investigations to determine whether this was indeed a “voluntary” arrange-
ment. Immigrants had to convince them that it was, but the authorities were
not always convinced, hence the cloud of suspicion which always hung over
the whole process. Some writers interpret the second option described above
(self-contracting to an employer who assumed the debt on the migrant’s
behalf ) as a form of indenture. Another area in which abuse could take place
was the potential for enforcement of debt repayment by illegal (including
violent) means, since these debts were not recoverable in the local court system.
Whether or how often this occurred is a matter of conjecture. he question
applies also where a laborer might have wished to find alternative employment
against the wishes of his employer or the district association umbrella body.
In Southeast Asia, especially before the 1870s,28 the overarching supervision
of a recognized community body did not exist. In fact, the influence of the
illegal secret societies was all pervasive in this environment, and abuse was
rampant. he brokers and their agents were paid for the individual laborers
right at the destination port by the future employers, similar to the second
US option discussed above.29 here was no supervision over the subsequent
fate of the migrants or their working conditions. Most of them ended up in
the Chinese owned gambier, pepper or tapioca plantations, or in the tin mines
of Malaya. Where a migrant failed to find an employer at the port, the agents
would take it upon themselves to arrange for him to be employed at another
destination, regardless of his wishes. Many migrants to Penang or Singapore
would find themselves sold off to tobacco planters and others in Dutch Suma-
tra under this arrangement. At all stages of this process, the migrants were
guarded closely by secret society gang members, to ensure against their run-
ning away (Campbell 1923: 4-8). So ethnically self-contained was this immi-
gration that when the Straits Settlement became a Crown colony in 1867, a
government official reported that

he government knows little or nothing of the Chinese who form the indus-
trial backbone of these settlements (Campbell 1923: 9).

When they finally intervened in the 1870s, the Commissioners actually rec-
ommended adopting a version of the British indenture system as an improve-

28
he Straits Settlements was not made a Crown Colony until 1867. Prior to that it was
administered from India.
29
And similar to the privately run Cuban and Peruvian indenture schemes.
 W. L. Lai / Journal of Chinese Overseas 5 (2009) 28-54 43

ment on this secret society-controlled “credit ticket” arrangement. his was

enforced from the 1880s to 1913, when indenture was ended in Malaya.30
One source states that the number of labor contracts signed by Chinese
migrants to the Straits Settlements between 1883 and 1913 was on average
25,047 annually i.e. one contract for every seven migrants (Chen 1923: 85).31
he same source also notes that a significant number who came as free pas-
sengers voluntarily chose to sign labor contracts along with those whose pas-
sages had been paid for by labor brokers, i.e. about 300,000 out of 750,000.
he main differences between the “credit ticket” arrangements and the
indentured immigration lay firstly, in who controlled the operations (native
Chinese intermediaries or Western recruiting agents, private or official), and
secondly, in the nature of the reciprocal obligations incurred on either side.
Instead of the passage debt being voluntarily repaid by the laborer after arrival,
under the watchful supervision of a legitimate community body, the obliga-
tions were usually rigorously spelt out in the formal laws of the host country,
and the supervisory functions were assumed by the local immigration and
court system. Both the written indentured contracts and the local laws stipu-
lated that the passage was free, but repayable in kind, i.e. by obligatory labor
over a fixed period (which could range from one to eight years, depending on
the recruiting destinations). In addition to promising a stated monthly wage,
they also promised further benefits, such as free housing and medical care, as
well as food and clothing supplies; some of the British indenture contracts
even promised small land grants.32 In return, the laborer was bound to a
specific plantation for a fixed term of years, his freedom of movement severely
curtailed, and breaches of work regulations (desertion, absenteeism, unsatis-
factory work performance, insolence toward superiors among them) punish-
able by fine and/or imprisonment.
here were often enough ambiguities on the ground to make the distinc-
tion between the two forms questionable, but the technical distinctions were
at least clear. In addition, for the Chinese, there were important differences

30
Copies of Malayan contracts can be seen in Chen 1923: 180-81.
31
Most went to the plantations and mines, and there was a category called “general unskilled
labor,” but there were also some minor categories: sawyers, timber and firewood cutters; mechan-
ics and artisans; domestic and shop coolies; sailors, fishermen, etc; and “miscellaneous” (Chen
1923: 85). When indenture came to an end in 1913, there were about 100,000 Indians and
45,700 Chinese on the rubber estates alone (Chen 1923: 93). As late as 1938, (free) Chinese still
made up 17 percent of the rubber plantation workforce (28,925) of the Federated Malay States
(Brij Lal 2006: 159).
32
In the case of the Indians (though not in Malaya), a free return passage home was also
provided, subject to certain conditions which varied over time.
44 W. L. Lai / Journal of Chinese Overseas 5 (2009) 28-54

between the state-subsidized and state-supervised system of indentured

immigration typical of the British system, operating mainly out of Hong Kong
and Canton, where all recruiting and immigration personnel at both ends
were paid government officials, and the infamous private enterprise-operated
Latin American indenture systems of Cuba and Peru, operating out of Portu-
guese Macau. In fact, the manner in which the Latin Americans, with collu-
sion from local thug elements at the China end, recruited, transported and
resold their passengers (not to mention the laborer’s subsequent work experi-
ences) made that exercise almost indistinguishable from slavery itself. Despite
the existence of a body of formal laws theoretically regulating the Spanish
“coolie” trade, the corrupt Spanish system virtually ignored the provisions of
the law and kept condoning its numerous violations by recruiters (Chinese),
shippers (of all nationalities), planters and their agents. Whether this kind of
violation was inherent in the indenture system itself, or whether this illus-
trated the important role played by the culture of labor relations in the host
countries, is a matter of opinion. he British indenture system was itself often
described as a “new system of slavery,” testifying to its many contradictions
and weaknesses, but there was nothing in the British Empire labor tradition to
compare with what was standard practice in Cuba or Peru.
he official Chinese commission of enquiry which visited Cuba in 1873
to examine the conditions under which the Chinese lived and worked con-
cluded that

he distinction between a hired laborer and the slave can only exist when the
former accepts, of his own free will, the conditions tendered, and performs in
a like manner the work assigned to him; but the lawless method in which the
Chinese were — in the great majority of cases — introduced into Cuba, the con-
tempt there evinced for them, the disregard of contracts, the indifference as to the
tasks enforced, and the unrestrained infliction of wrong, constitute a treatment
which is that of “a slave, not of a man who has consented to be bound by a con-
tract.” Men who are disposed of in Havana, who are afterwards constantly, like
merchandise, transferred from one establishment to another, and who, on the
completion of their first agreements, are compelled to enter into fresh ones, who
are detained in depots and delivered over to new masters, whose successive peri-
ods of toil are endless, and to whom are open no means of escape, cannot be
regarded as occupying a position different from that of the negroes whose servi-
tude has so long existed in the island, and who are liable to be hired out or sold at
the will of their owner (Denise Helly 1993: 88-89).

Indian migrations were usually governed either by the British version of the
indenture system used in all the sugar colonies or by the arrangement known
as kangani recruitment in South and Southeast Asia (defined below). Malaya
 W. L. Lai / Journal of Chinese Overseas 5 (2009) 28-54 45

utilized both forms of arrangement, employing mainly Tamils as indentureds

in the sugar and coffee sectors between 1840 and 1910, and recruiting them
under the kangani system for the rubber plantations from 1910 to 1938.
Between 1844 and 1938 when the kangani system was terminated, 62.2 per-
cent of the total Indian migration to Malaya was kangani-assisted, and
13 percent (250,000) were of indentureds. However, as late as 1905, 40 per-
cent of the immigration was of indentured laborers (Brij Lal 2006: 158).
here were some important differences between the indenture arrange-
ments of the sugar colonies and those in Malaya. Firstly, before the 1870s,
recruitment in Malaya did not follow the state-assisted and state-regulated
pattern of the other British colonies, but was done on a private basis via spec-
ulators or via the employers and their own or private agents in India. During
this period, moreover, the transportation was often handled by Indian-owned
small shippers, somewhat similar to the Chinese private junk transport of
Chinese laborers to Malaya during the same period (minus the secret society
supervision). Secondly, the term of service was usually for one to three years,
instead of five. hirdly, the passage was not free, as it was to all the other sugar
colonies, but the contract laborer was expected to repay all his original passage
debts before he left the estate. Finally, there was no provision for a free return
passage to India at the end of the workers’ terms of service.33
he kangani recruitment arrangement was informal and community based,
and it was regarded as “free” by the colonial legal system and tacitly endorsed.
It was in fact a mild form of debt bondage. Kanganis or labor headmen were
influential immigrant workers sent by host country plantations back to their
respective Indian villages to recruit new groups of workers on a seasonal or
long-term basis. Unlike indenture, the immigrants were not bound by formal
contracts or legal process, but there was an obligation owed to the kangani or
recruiter-foreman who assumed responsibility for those recruited by him,
most of them bound by extended family ties. he obligation here was more of
a communal nature, as contrasted with the individualistic obligation of the
indentured worker.
Unlike the Chinese “credit ticket” or even the indenture arrangement, the
passage expenses and all advances were usually shouldered by the recruiting
plantations themselves through the kanganis, and there were no third party
money brokers, private or State. he Sanderson Committee Report of 1910
estimated the debt obligation of the average migrant laborer to be about ten
rupees, which it was expected he would repay within two years. But this debt
obligation was handled in a communal fashion, and not subject to legal process:
33
Ravindra Jain, “South Indian Labour in Malaya, 1840-1920,” in Saunders (1984): 161-62.
46 W. L. Lai / Journal of Chinese Overseas 5 (2009) 28-54

. . . [T]here is no obligation which can be enforced by legal process. he debt

remains a debt to the kangany, not to the estate, and the coolie is at any time free
to claim his discharge from the latter on giving a month’s notice.
. . . [T]hough each cooly’s name appears upon the estate check roll, and the pay
earned by him or her separately calculated, the earnings of the members of a fam-
ily group are held, in some sort, in common, though the women are almost
invariably given for their own use any extra pay which their diligence or skill may
have earned for them over and above the ordinary rates of wage.
Similarly, each member of such a family group considers him[self ] or herself
liable for the joint debt of the group, and in the event of the death or desertion of
one of its members the surviving or remaining members regard it as a point of
honour to accept liability for his share of the common debt. his is a practice
which is ingrained in the customs and traditions of the Tamil agricultural labour-
ers, and the acceptance of such liability is with them . . . a point of honour.34

he Committee carried the following description of the role of the kangani:

his system, commonly called the “kangany system”, is . . . of a purely patriarchal

character in its origin and principles. he kangany, or labor headman, was in the
beginning, and still is in a large number of the older and more solidly established
estates, the senior member of a family group composed of his personal relatives,
to whom may be added other families drawn from villages in Southern India from
the vicinity of which he and his relatives also come. he labour force thus formed
is subdivided into a number of smaller groups, each under its patriarch, the sub-
or silara kangany: and the family principle is further manifested in the groups
which are under these minor headmen, a man with his wife and children, and, it
may be, one or more close relations assuming joint liability for advances made to
them, and holding their earnings, in some sort, in common.
he head kangany, as patriarch of the whole labour force under his charge,
transacts or supervises all the financial affairs of the estate with his coolies, with
the exception of the payment of their wages. On a single estate there may be, and
often are, several head kanganies. Often the head kangany is the sole debtor to the
estate, he being the medium through whom all advances are made, the sub-kangany,
and, it may be, his own personal gang of labourers, owing him money, while
the remainder of his coolies are responsible for their debts, individual or collec-
tive, to the sub-kanganies. In most of the older and more firmly established estates,
the sub-kanganies and their coolies owe more money to their head kangany than
the latter owes to the estate, and in such instances the head kangany, apart from
being the head and the organiser of the labour force, actually assists the estate to
finance its coolies.35

hus, compared to the indenture contract, the kangani arrangement was

more flexible. However, from the recommendations made by the Sanderson

34
Sanderson Committee Report 1910, paragraphs 110-12.
35
Ibid., paragraph 109.
 W. L. Lai / Journal of Chinese Overseas 5 (2009) 28-54 47

Committee in 1910 for its improvement, it would appear that even this tech-
nically free labor arrangement was not without its defects. Most of these con-
cerned the possibility of abuse and corruption by the kanganis themselves, to
whom was entrusted the exclusive task of mediating between planters and
their workforce, even of disbursing workers’ payments.36 Despite its problems,
this method of recruiting migrant labor from India was preferred in South and
Southeast Asia over the indentured contract system, and was the exclusive
arrangement used after 1910 until its demise in 1938 (Malaya) and 1940
(Ceylon), when immigration from India was banned by the Indian govern-
ment due to the conditions produced by the world Depression.

Free Migration

All of the previously mentioned forms of emigration are distinguished from

late-century and turn-of-the-century voluntary migration of family, trader,
and artisan elements. Contrary to a common perception, quite a lot of the
century’s Asian migration was free, voluntary and self-financed (i.e. not bound
by any form of debt bondage arrangement). Most of the Chinese migration to
Southeast Asia after the 1870s, which included the small traders who flocked
to French Indochina, plus a minority of those who went to North America or
Australia, would seem to be in this category. In Malaya alone, free Chinese
migrants outnumbered contract migrants by six to one after the 1870s.
In addition, many of the British Empire destinations attracted a large number
of Indian merchants and other service migrants, most of them coming from
the traditional trading regions rather than from the provinces of origin of the
laborers. hus, hundreds of Gujaratis, Punjabis, Sindhis and others from
the northwestern region of India diverted older mercantile networks to the
new Empire locations in East and South Africa, as well as the Indian Ocean
sugar islands, and later, Fiji. South Indian merchant and money-lending
communities were also very active in Southeast Asia and even in French Indo-
China, numbering several thousands in a rotating cycle of migration and
remigration. In Malaya and Burma alone, some 20 percent of the Indian com-
munities in the 1930s were from the trader class. his does not include the
hundreds in South and Southeast Asia who worked as minor functionaries
within the colonial bureaucracy. In Malaya alone, it has been estimated that
between 1844 and 1931, there were 643,000 “non-labor” migrants (Brij Lal
2006: 59).

36
At least in Ceylon.
48 W. L. Lai / Journal of Chinese Overseas 5 (2009) 28-54

For the Chinese outside of Southeast Asia, late voluntary migration gener-
ally went to most of the earlier destinations to which the indentureds had
originally gone, as well as to totally new destinations within the region. hese
were often small-scale chain movements based on family, clan, and village
networks. In some destinations special local factors played a key role, such as
the increased Latin America/Caribbean inflow after the closure of destinations
like the USA following the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, or special welcom-
ing policies organized by local governments like Porfirio Diaz’s Mexico (1876-
1911). Republican Cuba also imported several thousand free Chinese and
other workers for the sugar industry during and after World War I. Most of
these workers remained in Cuba, and constituted the core of Cuba’s prosper-
ous Chinese small business community in the 1940s and 1950s. In certain
destinations, the late free migration of Chinese actually outnumbered those
who went in the original indenture phase. his was the case in destinations
like Jamaica, Panama, and Mauritius, where very few indentureds went in the
initial immigration. It was also the case in places like Mexico, Venezuela and
parts of Central America where there had been no indentured immigrants in
the first period.
he ex-indentureds of both groups also engaged in quite a lot of remigra-
tion between territories near and far. Many Indians who had returned to India
later came back voluntarily to their original plantation destinations (or often
alternative destinations) under new circumstances. hey were described in the
immigration reports as “casuals” or “passengers” (Look Lai 1993: 227). A
minority even re-indentured themselves a second time, often to new sugar
destinations. Even among those who did not return to India, there was a sig-
nificant amount of relocating from one territory to another after indenture.
Indians relocated from the smaller West Indian islands (both British and
French) to Trinidad and Guiana; they migrated to Venezuela and Guiana from
Trinidad; to Cuba, Costa Rica, and Panama from Jamaica; to Suriname and
Trinidad from Guiana. hey also moved from Mauritius and Reunion to
Madagascar or South and East Africa.
he Chinese, who did not have a right to a return passage to China, often
remigrated within their regional nexus: from Cuba, Peru and the West Indies
to the United States; from Guiana to other Caribbean territories (Suriname,
French Guiana, Trinidad, Jamaica, and Colon in Panama). In the Indian
Ocean they moved like the Indians between Reunion and Mauritius, Mauri-
tius and Seychelles, and all of these and Madagascar or South Africa. Several
small communities of ex-Cuban Chinese were already living in the East and
South of the United States before the Civil War in the 1860s. Interestingly, the
movements to the USA were not all one-way: several hundred Chinese left
 W. L. Lai / Journal of Chinese Overseas 5 (2009) 28-54 49

California and the rest of the US West after the Exclusion Act of 1882, and
headed for Mexico and several countries in Central America.

Adjustment and Assimilation across Diasporas

he Chinese and Indians evolved diverse (and divergent) models of adapting

to their new environments. he foremost issue for Chinese diaspora minori-
ties was the nature of the formal restraints on mobility in the new societies,
and the range of options allowable in any given society. he levels and expres-
sions of welcome for the Chinese migrants varied from society to society, and
indeed from period to period within any given society. hese manifested
themselves in the form of laws passed by the local legislatures, laws which
might be inspired either by elite policymaking imperatives (ranging from rac-
ism to legitimate or illegitimate elite power concerns) or by pressures emanat-
ing from below, from constituency sentiment. Local sentiment itself may be
influenced by quite different factors in different environments. he immigra-
tion exclusion laws of the USA in 1882 were concessions to the fears on the
part of white trade union elements resentful of job competition from the Chi-
nese in a period of economic contraction, as much as a reflection of an overall
racism in the white settler societies toward non-white immigration. Laws
passed in northern Mexico expelling the Chinese during and after the Mexi-
can Revolution in the early 20th century were designed to address the popular
resentment against a successful entrepreneurial and trader class perceived to be
inimical to the interests of an incipient left nationalism (Hu-de Hart 1980;
Jacques 1974). Restraints existed not only in the laws, but also in the form of
informal pressures to confine the Chinese immigrant to certain levels of
advancement, and certain physical and social spaces acceptable to the local
power elites and local public opinion. Cuban post-indenture restrictions on
mobility were not necessarily duplicated in Peru or the British West Indies;
modern post-colonial Southeast Asian societies exhibit markedly different lev-
els of tolerance toward their Chinese fellow citizens.
Other factors influencing assimilation include not just the range of concrete
options open to the migrant in any given environment, but the migrants’ own
attitudes to these options, and also the nature of the difficulties (financial,
competitive or otherwise) they faced in making the transition from laborer or
artisan to trader, in different societies. here were marked differences in levels
of wealth acquisition, social status, and acceptance for the middleman minor-
ities of Southeast Asia and Mauritius, Cuba and Trinidad. here were also
marked differences between the middleman-minority experiences of these
50 W. L. Lai / Journal of Chinese Overseas 5 (2009) 28-54

countries and the discriminatory ghetto-like minority experience in the white

majority temperate industrial societies. As Edgar Wickberg and others like
Lynn Pan have pointed out, up to the 1960s at least, the Chinese in Southeast
Asia might feel culturally vulnerable, but they could take pride in a history of
economic success and local preeminence. In North American and other met-
ropolitan societies, the Chinese were conscious of being marginal both cultur-
ally and economically (Pan 1998: 118). he tasks facing, and the options open
to, these groups in overcoming their unique local restraints were thus quite
specific. In the metropolitan white majority societies, the struggle to change
official national self-definitions from a Eurocentric model to a multicultural
model constituted the basis of one kind of challenge. In Southeast Asia and
the rest of the hird World, the need to effect some form of modus vivendi,
first with the specific European colonizers, and later with the forces of anti-
colonial nationalism and independence, constituted another. Responses to the
latter challenge have not been uniform. Some communities have chosen
assimilation, some a form of plural integration into the local elite; many have
chosen to remain a tactful and marginal petit-bourgeoisie within their host
countries, while equally many have chosen flight and remigration to more
receptive environments (which may be either regional37 or metropolitan).
Outside of the Asian region, Indian assimilation to their new host societies
over time has taken on three basic models of multicultural adjustment: where
the community is numerically large enough to create a competitive pluralism
not only in the culture but also in the politics of the host country; where Indi-
ans have remained a culturally and politically marginal minority; and where
the evolution is within a multicultural metropolitan environment with steadily
evolving policies toward racial minorities. Mauritius, Guyana, Trinidad, Suri-
name, and Fiji — all with sugar-based immigrant communities formed in the
19th century — are examples of the first type. In all of these societies Indians
form close to or more than 40 percent of the new society and their numbers
have given them constituency strength and aspirations to state power on a
scale achieved by no area of the Chinese diaspora.38 he second model is
divided between two distinct types: those societies where Indian numerical
marginality is accompanied by economic underachievement (low status
agricultural workers and peasants), and those where migrant economic
achievement is identical to the middleman minority status achieved by most
Chinese overseas communities in the tropical hird World. Jamaica, the Brit-
ish Caribbean islands of Grenada, St Lucia, and St Vincent (collectively the

37
For example, within Southeast Asia, to Singapore or Hong Kong.
38
Until the formation of Singapore in 1965 (and not counting Hong Kong). However, they
continue to play an influential role as an organized ethnic minority in post-1965 Malaysia.
 W. L. Lai / Journal of Chinese Overseas 5 (2009) 28-54 51

Windwards), also the French Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guade-

loupe, are examples of the former type of marginality.39 East Africa, where 80
percent of the indentured Sikh railway workers returned to India after their
period of service, and where later Hindu and Muslim Gujarati and Punjabi
traders came to dominate the local middle sector, represents the latter type.
he third model, a metropolitan one, is a mid-to-late 20th-century develop-
ment, since Indian migration to the temperate industrial countries — barring
the small Punjabi Sikh migration to North America mentioned before – basi-
cally started after World War II, with the migrations to Britain after the 1950s
and to North America since the 1970s.
With the exception of the third model and the East African model, all the
areas of the Indian diaspora mentioned above differ from the Chinese diaspora
in the sense that the majority of their communities have continued to remain
largely agricultural communities, often — though not everywhere — still tied
to sugar. heir economic and professional middle classes are made up of a
combination of upwardly mobile sectors of a larger community still tied to
agriculture in some form, and distinct immigrant trader groups who arrived
during and after indenture from provinces other than those from which the
indentured workers came, viz. mainly Gujarat and Punjab.40 hese latter
groups are prominent in all destinations except the Caribbean, although even
here there was the exception that proved the rule: one of the most prominent
Trinidadian Indian merchants up to the 1980s was an enterprising Sindhi
merchant who migrated to the island around 1926.41
Assimilationist challenges have not been experienced or posed in quite
the same fashion for both groups, even where both Indians and Chinese
have formed part of a vigorous expanded pluralistic entity of small and large
commercial entrepreneurs. Differing group cultural attitudes, as well as differ-
ing host society attitudes toward both groups, have played a role in this dif-
ferentiation. In the former sugar colonies, host society attitudes toward the
Indians can be influenced by a combination of related factors: local group
interactions (or the lack thereof ); international group perceptions (as received

39
Malaysia, where 80 percent of the Tamil Indian minority are also largely marginalized rural
underachievers based in the rubber and palm oil plantations, differs from the others in this
category because of the simultaneous existence of a significant trader and professional element
of Tamil and non-Tamil origins arriving in the country as free emigrants during and after the
19th century (Brij Lal 2006: 156-67).
40
he trader class in South and Southeast Asia come from a wider base, including many from
South India.
41
Murlidar “Ram” Kirpalani (1907-1957): see Brereton, Samaroo and Taitt (1998: 68). A
miniscule migration of Sindhi and Gujarati merchants to the West Indies in the 1930s and
1940s is discussed in Hanoomansingh (1996: 272-342).
52 W. L. Lai / Journal of Chinese Overseas 5 (2009) 28-54

and interpreted locally); the location of the migrants within the local social
stratification system, in the past as well as the present; but, above all, the fear
of ethnic political domination in politically insecure environments. It should
be noted, however, that throughout the hird World, including many of the
countries of Southeast Asia with its large and influential Chinese presence, the
challenges of multiculturalism are quite different from the challenges of mul-
ticulturalism posed to a metropolitan white-majority society. Fledgling nations
evolving out of colonialism often have no patience with the complexities of
multiculturalism, especially where there is disagreement on whether its recog-
nition would erode the economic and/or political aspirations of the dominant
majority. Ironically, the temperate regions which manifested the most virulent
forms of anti-Asian racism in the 19th century have since the late 20th cen-
tury largely lost their sense of racial exclusiveness, while the entire post-colonial
tropical world has seen a more problematic dynamic developing among the
multicultural successors to the departed colonialists.

Conclusion

his article has attempted to locate the worldwide movements of Asians, espe-
cially Asian labor, in the developmental stage of global capitalism in the
19th century. It has tried to distinguish between two types of labor movement
in this century: the one involving Asians moving toward the tropical planta-
tion “periphery,” where their labor was needed and actively recruited, and the
other involving those moving toward the margins of the temperate white set-
tler majority destinations, where they went largely on their own self-organized
initiative. he reception and treatment received by the Asians in both types of
destinations (at least from the host governments) differed profoundly, depend-
ing on the extent of their perceived indispensability to the local economic
environments in which they found themselves. Even within the tropical and
semi-tropical plantation destinations, however, the treatment they received
was not uniform, and the levels of labor exploitation varied widely, firstly
between those destinations where a powerful white settler minority society also
existed (e.g. Latin America or Southern Africa), and those where it did not;
secondly between those destinations where the immigration was under West-
ern control, and those where the migrant laborers were under the informal
control of their own kinfolk. Moreover, there was considerable variation
between the various Western “periphery” colonies themselves, not just because
of the relative local indispensability of Asian migrant labor or the strength of
their minority white planter class, but also because of the different pre-existing
cultural attitudes toward labor in general , and toward non-White labor in
 W. L. Lai / Journal of Chinese Overseas 5 (2009) 28-54 53

particular, within the different colonizing traditions. All of these variations

help to explain not only the different manifestations and levels of anti-Asian
racism, but also the mobility and/or assimilation opportunities available to the
Asian migrant within any given context, as well as the character of each soci-
ety’s subsequent multiculturalism.
Clearly, we have barely scratched the surface of this topic, and better disci-
plinary tools will be required to fuse this macro-historical perspective with
more sensitive understanding of micro processes. Our sole purpose in this
modest overview was to locate and connect the multiple micro-movements of
Asian labor within a larger 19th-century narrative, one that generated large-
scale movements of laboring people of many and varied origins on a scale
unprecedented before the age of industry and empire.

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