Atlantic and pacific crossings: Race, empire, and "the labor problem" in the late nineteenth century

Radical History Review

Volumn 91, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 40-61

  Guterl, Matthew ^a   Skwiot, Christine ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 76249095038     PISSN: 01636545     EISSN: 15341453     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/01636545-2005-91-40     Document Type: Article

References (139)

1. Lionel Phillips of the Transvaal Chamber of Mines, letter to the London Times, cited in Native Labour in South Africa: Two Letters to the "Times" by the Right Hon. Sir William Harcourt, M.P. (London: Liberal Publication Department, 1903), 4.
2. Thomas Naylor, Yellow Labor: The Truth about the Chinese in the Transvaal (London: Daily Chronicle Office, 1904), 1.
3. Ibid.
4. This work thus takes as one point of departure Madhavi Kales's analysis of indentured labor "not as a process or experience ... but rather as a site where hierarchies of empire were enunciated, contested, and inscribed." Kale, Fragments of Empire: Capital, Slavery, and Indian Indentured Labor Migration in the British Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 10.
5. Some historians who recently have made this their explicit task are Michael Adas, "From Settler Colony to Global Hegemon: Integrating the Exceptionalist Narrative of the American Experience into World History," American Historical Review 106 (2001): 1692-1720;
6. Ian Tyrrell, "Beyond the View from Euro-America: Environment, Settler Societies, and the Internationalization of American History," in Rethinking American History in a Global Age, ed. Thomas Bender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 168-92;
7. Paul T. Kramer, "Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule between the British and United States Empires," Journal of American History 88 (2002): 1315-53;
8. Ann Laura Stoler, "Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American and (Post) Colonial Studies," Journal of American History 88 (2001): 829-65.
9. See, of course, Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990);
10. Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pt. 3; Thomas
11. Holt, '"An Empire over the Mind': Emancipation, Race, and Ideology in the British West Indies and the American South," in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James McFherson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 283-313.
12. Persia Crawford Campbell, Chinese Coolie Emigration within the British Empire (1923; New York: Negro Universities Press, 1970);
13. Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830-1920 (London: Oxford University Press, 1974);
14. Donald Denoon, Settler Capitalism: The Dynamics of Dependent Development in the Southern Hemisphere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983);
15. and David Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
16. Robert A. Huttenback, Racism and Empire: White Settlers and Colored Immigrants in the British Self-Govcrning Colonies, 1830-1910 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976);
17. and Charles A. Price, The Great White Walls Arc Built: Restrictive Immigration to North America and Australasia, 1836-1888 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1974).
18. For some of the specific cases in question, consider Walton Look Lai, Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian Migrants to the British West Indies, 1838-1918 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993);
19. Walter Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981);
20. Alan H. Adamson, Sugar without Slaves: The Political Economy of British Guiana, 1838-1904 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972);
21. Campbell, Chinese Coolie Emigration within the British Empire;
22. Tinker, A New System of Slavery; Denoon, Settler Capitalism; and Northrup, Indentured Labor.
23. There are a few exceptions to this trend in American historiography. See, for example, David Brion Davis, Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 61-91;
24. Moon-Ho Jung, '"Coolies' and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar Production in Louisiana, 1852-1877" (PhD diss., Cornell University, 2000);
25. and the introductory essay in Lucie Cheng and Edna Bonacich, eds., Labor Immigration under Capitalism: Asian Workers in the U.S. before World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
26. A recent collection of essays on labor limits its discussion of the United States to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; see David Eltis, ed., Coerced and Free Migrations: Global Perspectives (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).
27. A related concern in the United States is the lack of formal comparative studies of race. Fewer and fewer American historians seem to be interested in the kinds of comparative questions that once motivated George Fredrickson, Carl Degler, and others to ponder the course of race relations in the United States in light of the careful study of some other place. For classic examples of this field, see Fredrickson, White Supremacy:
28. A Comparative Study in American and South African History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981);
29. Eric Foner, Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983);
30. Carl Degler, Neither White nor Black: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971);
31. and Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 19S7). More recently, see Kolchin, Sphinx on the Land: The Nineteenth-Century South in Comparative Perspective (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003).
32. "C. D.," "British Honduras," Daily Picayune, July 7, 1866.
33. John Edward Jenkins, The Coolie: His Rights and Wrongs (New York: Elibron Classics, 1871), v.
34. Lucy M. Cohen, The Chinese in the Post-Civil War South: A People without History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984);
35. James W. Loewen, The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White (1971; Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 1988), 9-31;
36. Robert Seto Quan, Lotus among the Magnolias: The Mississippi Chinese (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1982);
37. and Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (New York: Penguin, 1989), 94-95.
38. Consider the one-sentence dismissal of the American South and Brazil in Walton Look Lai, "Asian Contract and Free Migrations to the Americas," in Eltis, Coerced and Free Migrations, 232.
39. Louis A. Pérez Jr., "We Are the World: Internationalizing the National, Nationalizing the International,"journal of American History 89 (2002): 561.
40. Similarly, see Adas, "From Settler Colony to Global Hegemon," esp. 1699-1703;
41. James T. Campbell, "Beyond White Supremacy: Towards a New Agenda for the Comparative Histories of South Africa and the United States," University of London, School for Advanced Study, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, collected seminar papers, no. 49, 1997.
42. Cited in Campbell, Chinese Coolie Emigration to Countries within the British Empire, 179, 180.
43. Hiram S. Maxim, "The Chinese and the South African Labour Question," Fortnightly Review, March 1903, 507.
44. On Des Voeux, see Adamson, Sugar without Slaves, 127, 131, 264;
45. Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 179;
46. Look Lai, Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar, 134, 138-40, 174;
47. K. O. Laurence, A Question of Labour: Indentured Immigration into Trinidad and British Guiana, 1875-1917 (Kingston: Ian Randle, 1994), 15-18,132-34, 508.
48. George William Des Voeux, "Chinese Labour in the Transvaal, a Justification," Nineteenth Century, April 1906, 582;
49. Thomas Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832-1338 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992);
50. Foner, Nothing but Freedom, 48-51.
51. Des Voeux, "Chinese Labour in the Transvaal," 584.
52. On the "inter-imperial connections" among Anglo-Saxon philosophers of race and empire, see esp. Kramer, "Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons." More generally, see Melissa Johnson, "The Making of Race and Place in Nineteenth-Century British Honduras," Environmental History 8 (2003): 598-617.
53. Des Voeux, "Chinese Labour in the Transvaal," 592, 593.
54. Des Voeux, "Delusions about Tropical Cultivation," Nineteenth Century, July 1894, 40-41.
55. Indeed, proposals for expanding the use of nonwhite indentured labor in Queensland had compelled many to argue that that colony did not belong in a federated Australia. Phil Griffiths, "Towards White Australia: The Shadow of Mill and the Spectre of Slavery in the 1880s
56. Debates on Chinese Immigration" (paper presented at the eleventh biennial national conference of the Australian Historical Association, Brisbane, July 14-16, 2002), members.optusnet.com.au/-griff52/Shadow%200f%20mill.rtf.
57. Des Voeux, "Delusions about Tropical Cultivation," 51.
58. Ibid., 53.
59. Tom Mathews, cited in H. J. Simons and R. E. Simons, Class and Colour in South Africa, 1850-1950 (London: Penguin, 1969), 95.
60. Report of Mr. H. Ross Skinner furnished to the Witwatersrand Labor Association, 1903, cited in Melanie Yap and Dianne Leong Man, Colour, Confusion, and Concessions: The History of the Chinese in South Africa (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1996),
61. Also see Peter Richardson, Chinese Mine Labour in the Transvaal (London: Macmillan, 1982),
62. The comparative connection could cut both ways, though, for British and Cape liberals would note that the United States treated the Chinese humanely even after immigration restriction, refusing to limit their movements or otherwise "[deprive them] of any ordinary'civil rights." II. C. Thomson, "The Imperial Aspect of Bonded Chinese Labor," New Liberal Review (1906): 150.
63. Rosanne Currarino, "Labor Intellectuals and Labor Question: Wage Work and the Making of Consumer Society in America, 1873-1905" (PhD diss., Rutgers University, 1999), esp. chap. 4, "The Idea of Labor and Anti-Chinese Hysteria." John Kuo Wei Tchen, New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776-1882 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001);
64. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998);
65. Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti- Chinese Movement in California (1971; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995);
66. and David Roediger, Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991).
67. Currarino, "Labor Intellectuals and Labor Question," 151.
68. On similar "invasion narratives" in Australia, see Anthony Burke, in Fear of Security: Australia and the Rise of Asia, 1850-1333 (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1999);
69. and David Walker, Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia, 1850-1939 (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1999).
70. See, for instance, Chinaman or White Man, Which? A Reply to Father Buchard by Rev. O. Gibson, Delivered in Platt's Hall, San Francisco, Friday Evening, March 14,1873 (San Francisco: Alta California Printing House, 1873);
71. Currarino, "Labor Intellectuals and Labor Question"; Saxton, Indispensable Enemy;
72. and Robert G. Lee, Orientalism: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999), 15-82.
73. Najia Aarini-Heriot analyzes the connections among white attitudes, responses, and policies toward the Chinese and African Americans in Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848-1882 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003).
74. On the use of black slaves in the working-class rhetoric of the nineteenth century, see Roediger, Wages of Whiteness.
75. On the July riot and Denis Kearney, see Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy, 113-21.
76. On the role of the anti-Chinese movement in California in united white ethnics, see Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy, 17-18, 258-65;
77. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color; Michael Kazin, "The Great Exception Revisited: Organized Labor and Politics in San Francisco and Los Angeles, 1870-1940," Pacific Historical Review 55 (1986): 371-402;
78. Bruce Dancis, "Social Mobility and Class Consciousness: San Francisco's International Workingman's Association in the 1880s," Journal of Social History 11 (1987): 75-98;
79. and Lawrence M. Lipin, '"There Will Not Be a Machanic [sic] Left': The Battle against Unskilled Labor in the San Francisco Harness Trade, 1880-1890," Labor History 35 (1994): 225-26.
80. Chester H. Rowell, "Chinese and Japanese Immigrants - A Comparison," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 34 (1909): 224;
81. "General Remarks on Chinese Emigration: Report by Harry Parkes, British Interpreter, September 1852," Gt. Britain, Parliamentary Papers 1852-1853, LXVIII (1686), 23-28,
82. and "Report from Governor Barkly of British Guiana, 26 February 1853," Thirteenth General Report of the Colonial Land and Emigration Commissioners (1853), appendix no. 50, Gt. Britain, Parliamentary Papers, Emigration Series, vol. 12, both reprinted in Walton Look Lai, ed., The Chinese in the West Indies, 1806-1995: A Documentary History (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 1998), 81, 113.
83. For similar ideas about India, see Surgeon-Major D. W. D. Comins, Note on Emigration from India to British Guiana (Demerara, British Guiana: Baldwin, 1894), esp. 2-9.
84. Bayard Taylor, India, China, and Japan, 1855, in The Works of Bayard Taylor (New York: Putnam's, 1882), 7: 285;
85. "Excerpt from Ship Surgeon Dr. Ely's Journal of the Voyage of the Samuel Boddington from Amoy to Demerara, August 1852 to March 1853," Gt. Britain, Parliamentary Papers 1852-1853, LXV'III (986);
86. Governor Barkly to Duke of Newcastle, despatch no. 11, March 12, 1853, enclosure no. 2, reprinted in Lai, Documentary History of the Chinese in the West Indies, 103;
87. Menezes e Souza, Theses sǒbrc a colonizaçā do Brasil (Work on the Colonization of Brazil) (Rio de Janiero, 1875), 419-20,
88. Cited in Thomas Skidmore, Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought (1974; Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 25.
89. S. M. Gluckstein and W. C. H. Saxby, Black, White, or Yellow? The South African Labour Problem (London: African News Agency, 1904), 20.
90. The Importation of Chinese Labour in South Africa: Two Addresses by the Hon. John X. Merriman (Cape Town: Cape Times, n.d.), 2.
91. P. Leys, "South Africa: Chinese for the Rand," Nineteenth Century, February 1902, 183.
92. Cited in Gluckstein and Saxby, Black, White, or Yellow?, 32.
93. C. Kinloch Cooke, Chinese Labour (in the Transvaal): Being a Study of Its Moral, Economic, and Imperial Aspects (London: Macmillan, n.d.), 5-6.
94. Lord Milner to Bishop Hamilton Baynes, March 28, 1904, in The Milner Papers: South Africa, 1899-1905, ed. Cecil Headlam (London: Cassell, 1933), 2: 487-88.
95. I. Dobbie, "Chinese Labour (from South Africa's Point of View)," Macmillan's Magazine, August 1906, 799.
96. Cooke, Chinese Labour (in the Transvaal), 13.
97. Comins, Note on Emigration from India to British Guiana, 5.
98. Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 58-59;
99. Adamson, Sugar without Slaves, 104-59.
100. Richardson, Chinese Mine Labour in the Transvaal, 32.
101. See Sydney Charles Buxton, Chinese Labour: The Transvaal Ordinance Analysed Together with the British Guiana Ordinance (London: Liberal Publication Department, 1904);
102. The Chinese Labour Ordinance (a Speech Delivered by Lord Stanmorc in the House of Lords on February 12, 1904), in South Africa: The War of 1899-1902 and the Chinese Labour Question (East Adley, UK: Microfilm, LTD, 1983), hereafter cited as SA.
103. Edward Rose, Uncle Tom's Cabin Up-to-Datc; or, Chinese Slavery in South Africa (West Cape: South African Free Press Committee, n.d.), 2.
104. Also see Chinese Slavery, Speech of A. G. Schiell at the Labour Demonstration on "the Level," Brighton, 30th April, 1904 (n.p., 1904)
105. Herbert Hoover, Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: Years of Adventure, 1874-1920 (New York: Macmillan, 1951), 87.
106. See also Hoover, Principles of Mining (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1909).
107. As was the case with Chinese exclusion in the United States, this argument influenced Australia's establishment of itself as a white-only nation through immigration restriction, legislation originally promulgated in Natal and introduced to Australia by Joseph Chamberlain. Huttenback, Racism and Empire, 162.
108. Fredrickson, White Supremacy.
109. Ibid., 225, 228-30. Kenneth Vickery, too, writes of South Africa and the United States as if both were biracial: Vickery, "'Herrenvolk' Democracy and Egalitarianism in South Africa and the U.S. South," Comparatice Studies in Society and History 17 (1974): 309-28.
110. John Burns, "Slavery in South Africa," Independent Review (1904-5): 594;
111. Yap and Man, Colour, Confusion, and Concessions, 115.
112. British Workmen or Chinese Slaves? The Labor Problem in the Transvaal (London: New Reform Club, 1904), 19.
113. "Chairman's Speech from the Shareholder Meeting of the French Rand G. M. Co.," South African Mining journal 6 (1908): 62-63;
114. "Chairman's Speech at the Shareholder Meeting of the Princess Estate, G. M.," South African Mining journal 6 (1908): 64-65;
115. "Mining and Finance Corporation," South African Miningjournal 6 (1908): 112-14;
116. "Native Labour," South African Miningjournal 6 (1908): 175;
117. "Goerz and Co.: Extracts from Engineer's Report," South African Miningjournal 6 (1908): 232;
118. and Richardson, Chinese Mine Labour in the Transvaal. 58. Certainly in some cases, informal contracts or understandings were reached between agent and "buyer," but never quite as publicly or as severely as in South Africa. See especially Patricia Cloud and David W. Galenson, "Chinese Immigration and Contract Labor in the Late Nineteenth Century," Explorations in Economic History 24 (1987): 22-42.
119. Saxton, Indispensable Enemy; and Price, The Great White Walls Arc Built. Queensland in Australia, in contrast, followed a path in the development of its sugar industry that would have greatly pleased Des Voeux and amazed observers worldwide.
120. With the financial assistance of the Australian government, the sugar industry managed to expand and prosper by utilizing primarily white labor - as it had in the temperate zones of Australia - but this time in the heat of the tropics.
121. The government itself invested in central mills to provide white small landowners - who in turn employed indentured Melanesians - the opportunity to grow cane for those mills, with a minimum of investment by men of modest means.
122. The British government gave the Australians further impetus to invest in the whitening of the sugarcane industry when the former asked the latter to share the costs of naval patrols in the western Pacific.
123. Because oversight of the indentured labor trade constituted the primary job of the admiralty, at this juncture, Australians determined that it was economically, politically, and racially sounder to invest their tax dollars in projects that would promote the sacrosanct goal of keeping
124. Australia "white," rather than sabotage that policy by expending national monies to bring more despised nonwhite contract laborers into their commonwealth. In 1906, Queensland began to deport Melanesian workers. See Adrian Graves, Cane and Labour: The Political Economy of the Queensland Sugar Industry, 1862-1906 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), chap. 2;
125. Adrian Graves and Peter Richardson, "Plantations in the Political Economy of Sugar Production: Natal and Queensland, 1860-1914," Journal of Southern African Studies 6 (1980): 214-29;
126. Stanley L. Engernan, "Contract Labor, Sugar, and Technology in the Nineteenth Century," of Economic History 43 (1983): 635-59;
127. And Andrew Markus, Australian Race Relations, 1788-1393 (St. Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1994), 116-18.
128. A Member of Winchester College, "The Labour Problem in South Africa," National Review, Jul)-1906, 855.
129. Lionel Phillips, Transvaal Problems: Some Notes on Current Politics (London: John Murray, 1905), 108, 106-7.
130. Gluckstein and Saxby, Black, White, or Yellow
131. Lionel Phillips to Frederick Eckstein (partner in the mining firm of wernher, Beit, and Company of London), March 5, 1905, in All that Glittered: Selected Correspondence of Lionel Phillips, 1830-1324, ed.
132. Maryna Eraser and Alan Jeeves (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1977), 129.
133. Des Voeux, "Chinese Labour in the Transvaal," 584.
134. Alan Jeeves, "Het Volk and the Gold Mines: The Debate on Labour Policy, 1905-1910" (paper presented at the African Studies Seminar, African Studies Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, 1980);
135. N. G. Garson, '"Het Volk': The Botha-Smuts Party in the Transvaal, 1904-1911," Historical Journal 9 (1966): 103.
136. D. J. N. Denoon, "The Transvaal Labour Crisis, 1901-1906," Journal of African History 8 (1967): 489.
137. Also see Richardson, Chinese Mine Labour in the Transvaal.
138. Phillips, Transvaal Problems, 64.
139. Benjamin Disraeli, Tancred (London: Frederick Warne, 1868), 106.