Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (review)

Recently, several historians have begun to complicate where and when Asian American history begins. Most standard histories begin with the California gold rush and the beginnings of mass migration of Asians, in this case, Chinese, to the U.S. Inspired by a number of important new works, the timeline has begun to move backwards and outwards. For example, Jack Tchen has illustrated how early Americans’ Orientalist imaginings of Asia were central to the eighteenth-century culture and economy of the new republic. Moon Ho-Jung’s Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation, suggests an equally stunning departure. In his study of Chinese labor in the South after the Civil War, Jung argues that it is in the Caribbean and the American South—and not the gold fields of California—that Americans’ racialized notions of Asian labor first originated.

This point of origins is important for two reasons. First, the large-scale transport of coolies to the Caribbean was larger than the migration of free Chinese to California, and Jung reveals a fascinating transnational discourse around coolie labor connecting the American South and the Caribbean. Americans first learned about coolies beginning in the antebellum era from reports from the British West Indies and Cuba. Used as tools of both abolitionists and proslavery activists, coolies were either portrayed as an industrious labor force that would make slavery unnecessary, or as an(other) inferior race that was vulnerable to cruel exploitation, just like African American slaves. Jung’s work thus connects the history of Asian America to the Caribbean (and to African American history) in highly significant ways that are major departures from the field’s usual attention to the trans-Pacific and west-coast regions.

Jung’s insistence that we take seriously the American South in Asian American history is important for another reason. As he demonstrates, the South’s debate over coolie labor had “profound and lasting effects on the historical formations of race and nation in the nineteenth century.” (5) After emancipation, southern planters championed coolie labor in order to revitalize the southern economy and to counter the effects of black enfranchisement. Political battles between federal officials and Louisiana planters and merchants over the status of coolies erupted in the late 1860s. Americans asked themselves if coolies were enslaved laborers, brought in to the country in violation of federal laws after the abolition of slavery. Or were they free immigrants, just another wave of immigrants transforming the United States into a “nation of immigrants?” Jung demonstrates how in the age of emancipation, whiteness (new European immigrants) and blackness (free African Americans) were undergoing much redefinition. Jung writes that “the racialization of Asian workers as coolies vis-à-vis the Caribbean and the South—either as a conduit toward freedom or a throw-back to slavery—served to upset and recreate social and cultural dualisms at the heart of race (black and white), class (enslaved and free) and nation (alien and citizen, domestic and foreign) in the United States.” (9) Coolies confused and defied rigid categorizations. Americans demanded both the mass migration of Asian laborers and their exclusion. In the end, the U.S. outlawed coolie labor and U.S. involvement in the coolie trade in 1862. This overlooked legislation, Jung persuasively argues, provided the racial logic that would later justify the exclusion of Chinese laborers in 1882.

The U.S. also reaffirmed the prohibition on Chinese becoming naturalized citizens, by declining to strike the word “white” from 1790 Naturalization Law. In one of the most fascinating sections of the book, Jung demonstrates how the debate over a naturalization amendment in 1870 consolidated America’s self-image as a “nation of (European, white) immigrants.” Congress’s initial focus had been on ending corruption among New York City’s Democrats and their foreign-born Irish constituents. The debate later evolved into a discussion of the racial fitness of Chinese to U.S...