Coolie

250px|thumb|Indian labourers in British [[Trinidad and Tobago; around 1890s]]

Coolie () is a term historically used for low-wage labourers, typically those of Indian or Chinese descent. The term was first used in the 16th century by European traders across Asia. In the 18th century, it more commonly referred to migrant Indian indentured labourers. In the 19th century, during the British colonial era, the term was adopted for the transportation and employment of Asian labourers via employment contracts on sugar plantations formerly worked by African slaves.

The word has had a variety of negative connotations. In modern-day English, it is usually regarded as offensive.

The word originated in the 17th-century Indian subcontinent and meant "day labourer"; starting in the 20th century, the word was used in British Raj India to refer to porters at railway stations. The term differs from the word "Dougla", which refers to people of mixed African and Indian ancestry. Coolie is instead used to refer to people of fully-blooded Asian (e.g. Indian) descent whose ancestors migrated to the British and Dutch (as koelie) former colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. This is particularly so in South Africa, Eastern African countries, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Suriname, Jamaica, other parts of the Caribbean, Mauritius, Fiji, and the Malay Peninsula. The word appears in classical Tamil literature, including the Thirukkural (Kural 619), where it refers to the wage or reward earned through laborious effort:<br>

"தெய்வத்தான் ஆகா தெனினும் முயற்சிதன்<br>மெய்வருத்தக் கூலி தரும்." The word is still commonly used in Tamil with the same meaning. During British colonial rule, Tamil-speaking labourers were among the first to be sent abroad as indentured workers, and the word spread to English and other Indian languages through colonial usage.

The term also appears in other Indian languages, such as Hindi and Telugu kulī, meaning "day-labourer". It is also associated with the Urdu word qulī, meaning "slave".

Another theory suggests that the Hindi word quli could have originated from the name of a tribal or caste group in Gujarat.

In Chinese, the word kǔlì (苦力), which literally means "bitter strength", is an example of phono-semantic matching. Although unrelated etymologically, the term came to be used similarly by colonial powers to describe Chinese manual labourers.

The word coolies was recorded in English as early as 1727, when Engelbert Kaempfer described dock workers unloading Dutch merchant ships in Nagasaki, Japan.

History of the coolie trade

Abolition of slavery and rise of the coolie trade

The importation of Asian labourers into European colonies occurred as early as the 17th century. However, in the 19th century, a far more robust system of trade involving coolies occurred, in direct response to the gradual abolition of both the Atlantic slave trade and slavery itself, which for centuries had served as the preferred mode of labour in European colonies in the Americas. The British were the first to experiment with coolie labour when, in 1806, two hundred Chinese labourers were transported to the colony of Trinidad to work on the plantations there. The "Trinidad experiment" was not a success, with only twenty to thirty labourers remaining in Trinidad by the 1820s.

Social and political pressure led to the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire in 1833, with other European nations eventually following suit. Labour-intensive work in European colonies, such as those involving plantations and mines, were left without a cheap source of manpower. As a consequence, a large-scale trade of primarily Indian and Chinese indentured labourers began in the 1820s to fill this need. In 1838, 396 South Asian workers arrived in British Guiana, and such a stream of migrant labour would continue until the First World War. The coolie trade, much like the slave trade, was intended to provide a labour force for colonial plantations in the Americas and the Pacific whose cash crops were in high demand across the Atlantic World. Coolies frequently worked on slave plantations which had been previously worked by African slaves, and similarly brutal treatment could be meted out by plantation overseers in response to real or perceived offences. However, other abolitionist groups and individuals – such as the British Anti-Slavery Society and the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, along with American abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison – were highly critical of coolie labour. Proslavery advocates, particularly in the Southern United States, condemned coolie labour but used it to argue against the abolition of American slavery, claiming the latter was more "humane" than the former.

In practice, however, as many opponents of the system argued, abuse and violence in the coolie trade was rampant. Some of these labourers signed employment contracts based on misleading promises, while others were kidnapped and sold into servitude; some were victims of clan violence whose captors sold them to coolie merchants, while others sold themselves to pay off gambling debts. Those who did sign on voluntarily generally had contracts of two to five years. In addition to having their passage paid for, coolies were also paid under twenty cents per day on average. However, in certain regions, roughly a dollar would be taken from coolies every month in order to pay off their debts.

Chinese coolies

In European colonies

Workers from China were mainly transported to work in Peru and Cuba. However, many Chinese labourers worked in British colonies such as Singapore, New South Wales, Jamaica, British Guiana (now Guyana), British Malaya, Trinidad and Tobago, British Honduras (now Belize), as well as in the Dutch colonies within the Dutch East Indies and Suriname. The first shipment of Chinese labourers was to the British colony of Trinidad in 1806 "in an attempt to establish a settlement of free peasant cultivators and labourers". On many of the voyages, the labourers were transported on the same vessels that had been used to transport African slaves in previous years.

The coolie slave trade run by American captains and local agents, mainly consisting of debt slavery, was called the 'pig trade' as the living conditions were not dissimilar to that of livestock; on some vessels as many as 40 per cent of the coolies died en route. The coolies were also stamped on their backs like livestock. Foreign merchants took advantage of the unequal treaties negotiated between the Qing government and Western powers after the Opium Wars, as well as the resulting political and economic instability, to broker deals for "contracted" workers. Anglophone capitalists referred to the opium trade and captive Chinese labour as "poison and pigs".

Portuguese Macao was the center of coolie slavery: it was described as "the only real business" in Macao from 1848 to 1873, generating enormous profits for the Portuguese until it was banned due to pressure from the British government. Between 1851 and 1874 approximately 215,000 Chinese were shipped from Macau overseas, primarily to Cuba and Peru, with some being shipped to Guiana, Suriname, and Costa Rica. These coolies were obtained via a variety of sources, including some who were entrapped by brokers in Macau through loans for gambling, and others who were kidnapped or coerced. Australia began importing workers in 1848. These workers were deceived about their terms of employment to a much greater extent than their Indian counterparts, and consequently, there was a much higher level of Chinese emigration during this period.

thumb|Illustration of the [[Xiamen|port of Amoy, where many Chinese labourers were shipped to foreign lands.]]

The trade flourished from 1847 to 1854 without incident, until reports began to surface of the mistreatment of the workers in Cuba and Peru. As the British government had political and legal responsibility for many of the ports involved – including Amoy – such ports were immediately closed. Despite these closures, the trade simply shifted to the more accommodating port within the Portuguese enclave of Macau. Mortality was very high; it is estimated that from 1847 to 1859, the average mortality rate for coolies aboard ships to Cuba was 15.2%, and losses among ships to Peru were as high as 40% in the 1850s, and 30.4% from 1860 to 1863.

The coolies who worked on the sugar plantations in Cuba and in the guano beds of the Chincha Islands ('the islands of Hell') of Peru were treated brutally. 75% of the Chinese coolies in Cuba died before fulfilling their contracts. More than two-thirds of the Chinese coolies who arrived in Peru between 1849 and 1874 died within the contract period. In 1860, it was calculated that of the 4,000 coolies brought to the Chinchas since the trade began, not one had survived.

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

In Spanish, coolies were referred to as ('Asian colonists'). The Spanish colony of Cuba feared slave uprisings such as those that took place in Haiti, and used coolies as a transition between slaves and free labour. They were neither free nor slaves. Indentured Chinese servants also laboured in the sugarcane fields of Cuba well after the 1884 abolition of slavery in the country. Two scholars of Chinese labour in Cuba, Juan Pastrana and Juan Pérez de la Riva, substantiated horrific conditions of Chinese coolies in Cuba and stated that coolies were slaves in all but name.

By 1870, labour contractors called enganchadores were used to manage and negotiate the contracts for Chinese Coolies in organised labour squads called Cuadrillas. "The enganchador negotiated all terms of work for his squad and handled all aspects of employment for the workers, including obtaining advances from the planters for salaries, distributing tools, arranging housing and food, and assuming responsibility for discipline, control, and supervision." (Hu-DeHart). The enganchador had flexibility in the length of the Coolies' recontract. The Coolie was also able to negotiate their wages and often had the upper hand as the employer had to yield to market forces. "Recontracting terms varied considerably. A batch of recontracts from the period 1863 to 1877 reveals great variation in the terms of the new contracts, diverging not only from the original ones, but from each other. First, most coolies signed up for only one year, at most two years, and some for as few as three and six months – all far short of another eight years. Second, the monthly wages not only varied, but were always greater than the 4 pesos in the original contracts, in some cases significantly greater. Many specified payment in "peso fuerte," that is, hard currency, not vouchers, which was often used during the eight year original indenture." (Hu-DeHart). The horrendous conditions suffered by Indian coolie labourers in South Africa led some politicians in the British Parliament to question the coolie system.

In 1866, the British, French and Chinese governments agreed to mitigate the abuse by requiring all traders to pay for the return of all workers after their contract ended. The employers in the British West Indies declined these conditions, bringing the trade there to an end. Until the trade was finally abolished in 1875, over 150,000 coolies had been sold to Cuba alone, the majority having been shipped from Macau. These labourers endured conditions far worse than those experienced by their Indian counterparts. Even after the 1866 reforms, the scale of abuse and conditions of near slavery did not get any better – if anything they deteriorated. In the early 1870s, an increased media exposure of the trade led to a public outcry, and the British, as well as the Chinese government, put pressure on the Portuguese colonial authorities in Macau to bring the trade there to an end; this was ultimately achieved in 1874. However, by 1890, there were still newspaper reports of coolie labour being used in Madagascar.

The term coolie was also applied to Chinese workers recruited for contracts on cacao plantations in German Samoa. German planters went to great lengths to secure access to their coolie labour supply from China. In 1908, a Chinese commissioner, Lin Shu Fen, reported on the cruel treatment of coolie workers on German plantations in the western Samoan Islands. The trade began largely after the establishment of colonial German Samoa in 1900 and lasted until the arrival of New Zealand forces in 1914. More than 2,000 Chinese coolies were present in the islands in 1914 and most were eventually repatriated by the New Zealand administration.

In the United States

thumb|250px|left|[[Chinese Railroad Workers|Chinese immigrant workers building the first transcontinental railroad in the US]]

Debates over coolie labour and slavery was key in shaping the history of Chinese immigrants in the US In February 1862, "An Act to Prohibit the 'Coolie Trade' by American Citizens in American vessels", also known as the Anti-Coolie Act, was signed into law by Abraham Lincoln, which prohibited any US citizens and residents from trading in Chinese subjects, known as "coolies". In one aspect, the Anti-Coolie Act was the last of the US slave trade laws, as well as the beginning of the end of slavery; in September of that year, Lincoln would also issue the Emancipation Proclamation. In another aspect, it was the beginning of Chinese exclusion in the US and the beginning of federal immigration restriction. Within a decade, significant levels of anti-Chinese sentiment had built up, stoked by populists such as Denis Kearney with racist slogans – "To an American, death is preferable to life on a par with the Chinese."

In 1868, the Burlingame Treaty would ensure certain protections for Chinese immigrants in the US and emphasise that any Chinese immigration to the US must be free and voluntary, reaffirming that "coolies", being unfree, were unwelcome and prohibited from entering the US In 1875, Congress passed the Page Act, which prohibited the bringing of any Chinese subjects without their consent in order to hold them for a term of service. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act barred the entry of any Chinese labourer to the US

Despite attempts to restrict the influx of cheap labour from China, beginning in the 1870s Chinese workers helped construct a vast network of levees in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. These levees made thousands of acres of fertile marshlands available for agricultural production. Although Chinese workers contributed to the building of the first transcontinental railroad in the United States and of the Canadian Pacific Railway in western Canada, Chinese settlement was discouraged after completion of the construction. State legislation, such as California's Foreign Miners' Tax Act of 1850 and 1852, would target Chinese immigrants in the US The 1879 Constitution of California declared that "Asiatic coolieism is a form of human slavery, and is forever prohibited in this State, and all contracts for coolie labour shall be void."

In 1938, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt used the term in one of his fireside chats (Number 13, 24 July 1938) while telling a story about "two Chinese coolies" arguing in a crowd.

In South America

In South America, Chinese indentured labourers worked in Peru's silver mines and coastal industries (i.e., guano, sugar, and cotton) from the early 1850s to the mid-1870s; about 100,000 people immigrated as indentured workers. They participated in the War of the Pacific, looting and burning down the haciendas where they worked after the capture of Lima by the invading Chilean army in January 1880. Some 2,000 coolies even joined the Chilean Army in Peru, taking care of the wounded and burying the dead. Others were sent by Chileans to work in the newly conquered nitrate fields.

Indian coolies

thumb|[[Hindu festival for the indentured Indian workers, on the French colony Réunion (19th century).]]

thumb|Indentured [[Indo-Trinidadian and Tobagonian singing and dancing on an estate in Trinidad and Tobago.]]

By the 1820s, many Indians were voluntarily enlisting to go abroad for work, in the hopes of a better life. European merchants and businessmen quickly took advantage of this and began recruiting them for work as a cheap source of labour. British merchants began transporting Indians to colonies around the world, including Mauritius, Fiji, New South Wales, Natal, Kenya, Tanganyika, Somaliland, Bechuanaland, Seychelles, Uganda, Northern Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia, Nyasaland, British Guiana, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Grenada, Saint Kitts and Nevis, British Honduras, Barbados, the rest of the British West Indies, and British Malaya. The Dutch shipped workers to labour on the plantations on Surinam, the Netherlands Antilles, and the Dutch East Indies. The French shipped labourers to Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana, the rest of the French West Indies, and Réunion.

A system of agents was used to infiltrate the rural villages of India and recruit labourers. They would often deceive the credulous workers about the great opportunities that awaited them for their own material betterment abroad. The Indians primarily came from the Indo-Gangetic Plain, but also from Tamil Nadu and other areas to the south of the country. Indians had faced a great number of social and economic disasters, causing them to be more eager than other groups to leave India. In the last part of the nineteenth century alone, there were 24 famines.

Without permission from the British colonial authorities, the French transported Indian workers to their Pacific colony, Réunion, from as early as 1826. By 1830, over 3,000 labourers had been transported. After this trade was discovered, the French successfully negotiated with the British in 1860 for permission to transport over 6,000 workers annually, on condition that the trade would be suspended if abuses were discovered to be taking place.

The British began to transport Indians to Mauritius starting in 1829. Slavery was abolished there in 1833, with Mauritian planters receiving two million pounds sterling in compensation for the loss of their slaves. The planters turned to bringing in a large number of indentured labourers from India to work in the sugar cane fields. Between 1834 and 1921, around half a million indentured labourers were present on the island. They worked on sugar estates, factories, in transport, and on construction sites.

In 1837, the British East India Company issued a set of regulations for the trade. The rules provided for each labourer to be personally authorised for transportation by an officer designated by the company, limited the length of service to five years subject to voluntary renewal, made the contractor responsible for returning the worker after the contract elapsed, and required the vessels to conform to basic health standards. The workers were paid a pittance for their labour, and were expected to work in often awful and harsh conditions. Although there were no large-scale scandals involving coolie abuse in British colonies, workers often ended up being forced to work, and manipulated in such a way that they became dependent on the plantation owners so that in practice they remained there long after their contracts expired; possibly as little as 10% of the coolies actually returned to their original country of origin. Colonial legislation was also passed to severely limit their freedoms; in Mauritius, a compulsory pass system was instituted to enable their movements to be easily tracked. Conditions were much worse in the French colonies of Réunion, Guadeloupe, and Martinique, where workers were 'systematically overworked' and abnormally high mortality rates were recorded for those working in the mines.

However, there were also attempts by the British authorities to regulate and mitigate the worst abuses. Workers were regularly checked up on by health inspectors, and they were vetted before transportation to ensure that they were suitably healthy and fit to be able to endure the rigours of labour. Children under the age of 15 were not allowed to be transported from their parents under any circumstances. In response to this pressure, the labour export was temporarily stopped in 1839 by the authorities when the scale of the abuses became known, but it was soon renewed due to its growing economic importance. A more rigorous regulatory framework was put into place and severe penalties were imposed for infractions in 1842. In that year, almost 35,000 people were shipped to Mauritius.

Sex ratios and intermarriage among coolies

A major difference between the Chinese and Indian coolie trades was that women and children were brought from India, along with men, while Chinese coolies were 99% male. Although there are reports of ships (so called 'coolie ships') for Asian coolies carrying women and children, the great majority of them carried men. This led to a high rate of Chinese men marrying women of other ethnicities, such as Indian women and mixed-race Creole women.

The contrast in the female-to-male ratio between Indian and Chinese immigrants has been compared by historians. In Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies, just 18,731 Chinese women and 92,985 Chinese men served as coolies on plantations. Chinese women migrated less than Javanese and Indian women as indentured coolies. The number of Chinese women as coolies was "very small" while Chinese men were easily taken into the coolie trade. In Cuba, men made up the vast majority of Chinese indentured servants on sugar plantations; in Peru, the male Chinese coolies intermarried with local non-Chinese women due to the lack of Chinese women. Due to the severe shortage of women compared to men among the Indian coolies, some of the women engaged in Polyandry. Between 1845 and 1917, twenty-five per cent of all Indians brought to the Caribbean were women. With women as a severe minority, their morality was questioned and the actions of men as a result of having so few women was blamed on the women. Between 1858 and 1859, laws were put into place stating that the ratio of men to women could not exceed 2:1, whereas before it was 3:1. However, there continued to be a severe shortage of women. This gave women a new sense of power when it came to choosing a partner. With a shortage of women, it became the responsibility of the male suitor to provide a hefty dowry to a woman's father, regardless of what caste she came from. Unfortunately, this also put women in a very vulnerable position, especially when alone. Rape was a common occurrence, and there were accounts of women being bound and gagged in their own homes by men. Between 1872 and 1900, it was reported that 87 women were murdered, with 65 of those being married women who were accused of being unfaithful.

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

One stark difference between Indian and Chinese coolies was the treatment of women, despite both groups having a severe shortage. Crimes against women (including murder) were far more frequent among Indian coolies. This was simply because there were so few Chinese women. However, it became common for people to instead believe that Indians murder their women while Chinese women stay alive because, unlike their Indian counterparts, they are chaste.

In the early 1900s, the Chinese communities in Manila, Singapore, Mauritius, New Zealand, Victoria in Australia, the United States, and Victoria in British Columbia in Canada were all male dominated. Though the lack of women became a problem in later years, initially women were not a high priority during coolie recruitment. Generally, it was believed that women were unwilling to perform the hard outdoor labour. Those willing to perform it were still seen as not as good as men.

Some Chinese coolies managed to avoid racial discrimination laws in Cuba and marry white women. This could be done by being listed as 'white' on their baptism certificates, as the agency that recruited them was meant for settling white people in Cuba. A Chinese coolie in Cuba also mentioned a white female master in a deposition.

Legislation

In 2000, the parliament of South Africa enacted the Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act, 2000. Section 10 covers the prohibition of hate speech terms, such as 'coolie' (koelie). The main objectives of the Act were:

Modern use

In Indonesian, kuli is most commonly for unskilled workers relying on their physical strength for transporting goods. It was previously used to refer to Indian or Chinese labourers, with a pejorative connotation.
In India, the Hindi word qūlī is now commonly used to refer to luggage porters at hotel lobbies and railway and bus stations. Nevertheless, the use of such (especially by foreigners) may still be regarded as a slur by some. The phrase 'brown coolie' is a term used for an Indian citizen who is posturing as a representative to a foreign institute.
In Malaysia, kuli is a term for manual labourers, with somewhat negative connotations.
In Thai, kuli (กุลี) still retains its original meaning as manual labourers, but is considered to be offensive. In September 2005, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra of Thailand used this term when referring to the labourers who built the new international airport. He thanked them for their hard work. Reuters, a news source from Bangkok, reported that Thai labour groups were angered by his use of the term.
In South Africa, the term coolie referred to indentured workers from India. It is no longer an accepted term, and both it and its Zulu version, amakhula, are considered extremely derogatory for people of Indian descent.
In Ethiopia, cooli are those who carry heavy loads for someone. However, the word is not a slur. It refers to Arab day-labourers who migrated to Ethiopia for labour work.
The Dutch word koelie refers to a worker who performs very hard, exacting labour. The word generally has no particular ethnic connotations among the Dutch, but it is a racial slur among Surinamese of Indian heritage.
In Vietnamese, since the French Indochina era, "cu li" or "culi", as a Vietnamese pronunciation for coolie, is still used with the offensive mearning for low-paid labourer.
In Finland, when freshmen of a technical university take care of student union club tasks (usually arranging a party or such activity), they are referred as "kuli" or performing a "kuli duty".
In Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, Suriname, Jamaica, Belize, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Grenada, French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Barbados, Virgin Islands, other parts of the Caribbean, Mauritius, South Africa, Seychelles, other parts of Southeast Africa, Fiji, Singapore, and Malaysia, coolie was used loosely to refer to anyone of Indian and South Asian descent and is considered an offensive pejorative.
In some English-speaking countries, the conical hat worn by many Asians, to protect themselves from the sun, is sometimes called a "coolie hat".
In the information technology industry, offshore workers are sometimes referred to as coolies because of their lower wages.
The term coolie appears in the Eddy Howard song, "The Rickety Rickshaw Man".
In Hungarian, kulimunka () refers to back-breaking, repetitive work.
In Sri Lanka, kuliwada is the Sinhala term for manual labour. Also, kuli (e.g. kuliyata) means working for a fee, notably instant (cash) payment (and not salaried). It is used in a derogatory or jesting manner to signify biased action or support (e.g. "Kuliyata andanawa" means "Crying for a fee", since in colonial times people would be paid to cry at funerals). Taxis are known as kuli-ratha.
In Filipino, makuli translates to "industrious", which carries connotations of slavishness.
In Greek, κούλης is used as a neutral word to mean "ship worker of Asian origin" by the Greek poet Nikos Kavvadias.
In German, a baggage cart is also known as a Kofferkuli ().

In art, entertainment, and media

Films

Deewaar (1975) is an Indian crime drama written by Salim–Javed about a dockyard coolie, Vijay Verma (Amitabh Bachchan), who turns to a life of crime and becomes a Bombay underworld smuggler, inspired by the real-life Indian mafia don Haji Mastan. Coolie (1983) is an Indian Bollywood film about a coolie, Iqbal Aslam Khan (Amitabh Bachchan), who works at a railway station; the film gained notoriety for the fact that during filming, Bachchan suffered a near-fatal injury during a fight sequence. Additional Indian films about coolies include Coolie No. 1 (1991), Coolie (1995), Coolie No. 1 (1995), Coolie (2004), Coolie No. 1 (2019), Coolie No. 1 (2020) and, Coolie (2025)

Music

The 2014 chutney song titled "Coolie Bai Dance" by the Indo-Guyanese singer Romeo "Mystic" Nermal is about the lifestyle of the traditional "coolie" (Indo-Caribbean) villagers in Guyana and the rest of the Caribbean.

Notes

References

External links

Hill Coolies
BBC documentary: Coolies: The Story of Indian Slavery
"Labour and longing" by Vinay Lal
Personal Life of a Chinese Coolie 1868–1899
Chinese Coolie treated worse than slaves
Ramya Sivaraj, "A necessary exile", The Hindu (29 April 2007)
Commemoration of indentured, Aapravasi ghat 2 November 2007.
Description of conditions aboard clipper ships transporting coolies from Swatow, China, to Peru, by George Francis Train