In the past three decades, historians of global Chinese indentured migration have done an excellent job of portraying the trade in Chinese indentured labourers to Latin America, their experiences and the international effort to halt their trafficking. Surprisingly, even though the international trafficking of Chinese children, women and male labourers were run by the same networks of human traffickers, the victims of the Chinese indenture are still perceived as eminently male and adult. Furthermore, the profits these trades generated and their beneficiaries remain understudied. To untangle the interconnection between these trades, this project focuses on the role of intermediaries such as Chinese local officials, consular officers, immigration agents, companies, brokers, ship owners, and captains in the south China coast and overseas, as well as on the international strategies which the nations involved implemented through legislation to promote or obstruct these trades. The project plays special attention to those ports with the strongest migratory flow, namely Xiamen (also called Amoy), Macau, Shantou (or Swatow), Ningbo, Hong Kong, and Guangzhou (Canton), from the earliest indications of international female trafficking in the 1830s, to the abolitionist ordinances issued in various Southeast Asian settlements in the 1930s. A comparative study of diverse forms of trafficking through the exhaustive collection, processing, and analysis of ground-data further reveals and challenges the discursive mechanisms which produce partial depictions of Chinese human trade. Ultimately, this research sheds new light on the extent to which China’s place in global dynamics in the nineteenth century was key to the configuration and decline of the colonial world, as it establishes new links between the circulation of Chinese population and the economic and political crisis which resulted in the colonial decline.
This project’s work has aimed towards the following research objectives (RO):
RO1. To unveil how the private sector and colonial states used legal, economic and political mechanisms to either promote or obstruct the commodification of Chinese labour and forced mobility.
RO2. To shed light on how transnational human-trafficking networks operated, and how they determined the circulation and exploitation of Chinese victims of human trade, using the primary sources gathered.
RO3. To problematize current conceptualizations about the coolie trade, slavery, and Chinese emigration by examining the interconnection and parallelisms between the trafficking of infants, women, and male labourers.
RO4. To uncover and make available unpublished primary sources regarding Sino-foreign relations, the organization of the trade of Chinese workers, women, and children in China, and their exploitation overseas.
