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The now generally considered pejorative term coolie refers to usually unskilled laborers from Asia, particularly China and India, who were sent to the United States, Canada, Australia, Peru, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Hawaii, Fiji, Mauritius, Réunion and the West Indies in the 1800s to early 1900s and, in modern India, to railway and bus station porters (*). The original use of the term usually referred to Chinese, Indian, Japanese and Korean indentured labourers. Nowadays, coolie is considered a very derogatory term however. After slavery was abolished, there was a severe lack of labour in many European colonies. Labourers were supposed to be recruited by voluntary negotiation, however it has been suggested that kidnapping and trickery were frequent. The treatment of coolies was often very harsh, and the governments involved did little to remedy their plight. Most Indian indentured labour recruited for the British colonies was organised through Kolkatta (Calcutta) and largely consisted of poor people from Bengal, Orissa and Bihar. After the end of the first Opium War (1840-1842), in or about 1845, a centre for emigration at Shantou organised a network for transporting Chinese from Guangdong who spoke the Chaozhou dialect to the Americas, especially to the silver mines in Peru and the sugar plantations of Cuba and other West Indian islands. Coolies were also sent from Amoy and Macao. Indentured labourers from Indochina were mainly recruited by the French and sent to their colonies.
Origin and general usage The word coolie can be traced back to the Hindi kûlî, qulî, which means "hired laborer." Other forms occur in the Bengali, kuli and the Tamil, kuli, "daily hire." The Chinese word 苦力 (Pinyin: kǔlì) was originally a transcription of the Hindi, and literally means "bitterly hard (use of) strength". The word coolie is also used commonly in the Hindi language to refer to porters, or people who carry your luggage at a railway station or a hotel lobby or otherwise, for a fee. In Persian the term is pronounced kow-lee, and stands for "gypsy." The following statement explains why coolie labor was imported for colonial enterprises: "In tropical countries where white labor is impossible, there arose with the abolition of slavery a need for cheap labor capable of doing the heavy tasks of plantations, factories, and shipping." In Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana and other parts of the Caribbean, as well as Sri Lanka and South Africa, the word was commonly used to denote any person of Indian origin or descent. Nowadays, it is often considered an offensive racial slur on par with nigger. Its use by non-Indians is usually seen as extremely offensive, but it may be used by people of Indian descent in a neutral or positive way. British Empire In the British Empire, a coolie was an indentured labourer with conditions often resembling slavery. The system had been inaugurated in 1834 starting in Mauritius and involved the use of licensed agents. Slavery itself had been banished from the British Empire in 1834. Thus indentureship followed closely on the heels of slavery to replace the slaves. Laborers were only slightly better off than the slaves had been. They were supposed to receive minimal wages, or some small form of payout (sometimes a small block of land or the money for their return passage) when their time of indenture was completed, and they could not be bought or sold. In India and South Africa, Mahatma Gandhi led a campaign against such indentured servitude. Many coolies who entered Africa stayed there permanently, effectively becoming immigrants. The permanent settlement of formerly indentured Indians created problems particularly in Africa. The Natal province of the Union of South Africa and Kenya amassed clusters of such immigrants. In the Transvaal, after the conclusion of the Second Boer War, the deficiency of native labor in the Rand mines led to the enactment of an ordinance in February, 1904, providing for the importation of Chinese laborers. The Boer element in the Transvaal was bitterly opposed to the ordinance as tending to introduce a new factor into the already serious racial problem of South Africa. The issue was largely responsible for the Liberal triumph in the United Kingdom general election, 1906, by which time over 50,000 Asiatic laborers had been imported. The decision to put an end to the system affected firstly Natal and Mauritius in 1910 and other places afterwards in 1917. The Americas Chinese coolies contributed to the building of the Transcontinental Railroad in the United States, as well as the Canadian Pacific Railway in Western Canada, but many of the Chinese laborers were not welcome to stay after its completion. California's Anti-Coolie Act of 1862 and Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 also contributed to the oppression of Chinese laborers in the United States. Coolies also labored in the sugarcane fields of Cuba well after the 1884 abolition of slavery in that country. Before the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Havana had Latin America's largest Chinatown. In South America, Coolies labored in Peru's silver mines and coastal industries (guano, sugar, cotton) from the early-1850s to the mid-1870s; about 100,000 came as indentured workers. They had an infamous participation in the War of the Pacific as they looted and burned down the haciendas outlying Lima where they worked right after Lima fell to the invading Chilean army in January 1880. Between 1836 and 1917, at least "238,000 Indians were introduced into British Guiana, 145,000 into Trinidad, 21,500 into Jamaica, 39,000 into Guadeloupe, 34,000 into Surinam, 1,550 into St. Lucia, 1,820 into St. Vincent, 2,570 into Grenada. In 1859, there were 6,748 Indians in Martinique." Although these were incomplete statistics, Williams believed they were "sufficient to show a total introduction of nearly half a million Indians into the Caribbean." See: Williams (1962), p. 100. Usage in other languages In Dutch, the expression to work as a coolie is used to denote very hard, extolling labour. Note that coolie is spelled koelie in Dutch. See also | ||||||||
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