Chi tratta l'uomo quale bestia da soma o da serraglio deve

aspettarsi che esso si faccia tale per rivendicare la propria

oltraggiata dignità e libertà.

Giuseppe Lovera, “Sulla tratta dei coolies a Macao,”

Rivista Marittima V, no. 12 (1872), 567.
 CHAPTER 1:

INTRODUCTION

Between the late 1840s and 1874 more than 280,000 semi-coerced contract laborers,
commonly known as coolies, were shipped from South China to Peru, Cuba and other
Latin American countries in replacement of the declining Atlantic slave trade. By the
early 1860s the Portuguese entrepôt of Macao had emerged as the primary center of this
controversial endeavor, attracting a multi-national network of speculators and maritime
entrepreneurs allured by the perspective of huge and easy profits.
Among them, a number of Italian emigrants in Peru, almost all of Genoese or Ligurian
origins, established themselves as key players in the business of Chinese emigration,
almost dominating its Peruvian branch amidst its most flourishing years, from the mid-
1860s to 1874. Part of a wider commercial diaspora, settled in the main Latin American
ports since the last days of the Spanish colonial administration, they engaged in almost all
the segments of the trade, acting either as seamen, ship-owners, charterers, consignees or
emigration agents; Italo-Peruvian landowners also employed Chinese labor in their cotton
and sugar estates on the Peruvian coast.
The purpose of this thesis is to assess the scope and significance of this involvement,
so-far almost entirely neglected by the Italian and international historiographies. Drawing
on a broad set of primary sources from Italy, Portugal, Hong Kong and Macao, we
disclose the critical role held by these Italian merchants in the resumption and
reorganization of the coolie trade after the withdrawal of British and North American
carriers in the early 1860s, and the Spanish-Peruvian conflict of 1864-1867. The study of
a single group of traffickers, from a perspective of “history from the middle”,1 sheds light
on some hidden aspects of the organization and mechanisms of the coolie traffic at its
apex, paradoxically less studied than its earlier experimental stages.
From this standpoint, special emphasis is paid to the traffic’s maritime dimension; in
other words, we cast light on the historical experience of the transpacific passage as the
primary stage for the dramatic encounter of the entangled histories of Italian traffickers
1
I borrow the term from Lisa Rose Mar, Brokering Belonging. Chinese in Canada’s Exclusion Era, 1885-
1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 4. By “history from the middle” I intend to stress the
focus of this study on the emigration middlemen and agents rather than on the emigrants themselves, in
contrast with the approach of “history from below”, or historia de la gente sin historia (expression coined
by Pérez de La Riva), adopted in several accounts of the coolie condition in the Cuban and Peruvian
plantation systems.

1
and Chinese emigrants. In a sea-centered approach, we examine the manifestation of
agency and resistance on the high seas, addressing the bloody episodes of shipboard
revolts that marred the historical record of the coolie trade impacting and influencing the
contemporaries’ imagination.
This introductory chapter presents an overview of the main themes and questions
addressed in the thesis, drawing its conceptual foundations and establishing its theoretical
framework. First, we define the terms “coolie” and “trade/traffic” used throughout the
text, and justify the choice of Macao as the geographical core of our inquiry. The study of
this subject, besides, requires a comprehensive understanding of the mechanisms of the
nineteenth-century globalized world and its flows of commodities and people, and calls
for a reflection on the interplays between local and global levels of analysis. A second
part reviews the available historiographical literature, outlining the major themes and
debates surfaced in the past decades, with special emphasis on the Italian and Portuguese
historiographies. The chapter then concludes with a brief sketch of the structure and
contents of the thesis.

1.1 Definitions

In this work we employ the terms “coolie”, “coolie trade” and specifically “Macao
coolie trade” as conceptual anchors to circumscribe a single and coherent stream from the
composite and multifaceted Chinese emigration of the mid and late-nineteenth century. In
particular, our definition delimits the migration of:
indentured laborers, signing five or eight years contracts to work at fixed wages in
exchange of their relocation costs;
departing mainly, but not only, from Macao;
destined to Cuba, Peru and other plantation-driven Latin American economies;
limited to the 1840s-1874 timeframe.
This choice does not rest on a full historiographical consensus. In the panorama of
contemporary Chinese migration studies, for example, there are currently two main
alternative categorizations. The first model, adopted by the huaqiao shi (華 僑 史 ,
Overseas Chinese studies) and crafted by its undisputable doyen Wang Gungwu,
distinguished four classes of emigrants, separating manual and unskilled workers
(huagong, 華工) from merchants (huashang, 華商), circular “sojourners” (huaqiao, 華),

2
and second generation migrants (huayi, 華裔). 2 The present leading paradigm among
Western trained scholars, instead, divides these emigrants according to their legal status at
departure: free passengers, debt-bonded migrants—the so-called “credit-ticket” system3—
and formally indentured laborers; a classification, it should be noted, that builds upon
categories elaborated and already in use in the nineteenth century.4 In this view, contract
or indentured migrants can be distinguished from the so-called “credit-ticket” passengers
or other grey forms of debt-bonded migration—more typical of the emigration of Chinese
laborers to Southeast Asia and North America—for the specifically active role of non-
Chinese recruiting agents and the penal enforcement of the signed agreements in the host
countries.

1.1.1 What is a “coolie”?

Our definition of “coolie” is meant to further separate, for operational purposes, a

coherent geographical and chronological unity within this third group of indentured
migrants. Its character as a deeply loaded, non-neutral term, however, requires some
further disambiguation. First of all, the word “coolie” itself has carried very different
meanings in the past. The term emerged from the corruption and incorporation of South
Asian words into the languages of the Western commercial empires in the Early Modern
era. Linguists have not been able to trace unequivocally the source of this contamination,
but the current interpretation propends towards three possibilities: the Tamil expression
kuli, meaning to hire (or, by extension, hired labor), the Urdu quli, slave, or, less likely,
the name of a local tribe kuli from South-East India.5
What seems more interesting, though, are the passages that brought this word to its

2
Wang Gungwu, China and the Chinese Overseas (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1991), 3–12.
3
There have been, however, contrasting interpretations of the nature of this so-called “credit-ticket” system:
a classical view of the credit-ticket migrants as little different from formally indentured workers, defended
for example by Gunther Barth in the 1960s, has been convincingly challenged by more recent accounts
stressing the existence of a deep gulf in individual agency between them. Cf. Gunther Barth, Bitter
Strength: A History of the Chinese in the United States 1850-1870 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1964); Patricia Cloud and David W. Galenson, “Chinese Immigration and Contract Labor in the Late
Nineteenth Century,” Explorations in Economic History 24, no. 1 (1987): 22–42. More recently Elizabeth
Sinn has further questioned the opportunity of calling this method a “system”, noting the large constellation
of arrangements employed by Chinese migrants to fund their voyages; Elizabeth Sinn, Pacific Crossing:
California Gold, Chinese Migration, and the Making of Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University
Press, 2013), 337, n.25.
4
See Lynn Pan, ed., The Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1999); Lynn Pan, Sons of the Yellow Emperor. A History of the Chinese Diaspora (New York:
Kodansha Globe, 1994).
5
Lydia Potts, The World Labour Market: A History of Migration (London-New Jersey: Zed Books, 1990),
63–65; Jan Breman and E. Valentine Daniel, “Conclusion : The Making of a Coolie,” The Journal of
Peasant Studies 19, no. 3–4 (1992): 268–95.

3
modern usage. Its first known record, in the Portuguese form cule, is reported in Japan, in
a letter by the Portuguese Jesuit Luís Frois discussing the movements of a Japanese
feudal army of 10,000 soldiers and 10,000 coolies—in other words, servants or porters.6
Ostensibly, Frois had picked the term in his earlier permanence in Goa, between 1548 and
1563. The word spread into the South, Southeast and East Asian pidgins and patois in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, taking its prevalent English spelling “coolie.” It
then spread to China through the early Sino-Western commercial contacts and was
incorporated in the Chinese language in a variety of transliterations; the modern form kuli
苦力, literally “bitter work”, consolidated probably only in the Late Qing and Early
Republican periods.7 At this stage, the word “coolie” held a non-specific meaning of
hired laborer, porter, servant or menial worker, but starting with the nineteenth century it
became increasingly associated with the concept of Asian—Chinese and Indian—
immigrants abroad.
8
A specific “commercial connotation” of the term, to identify exclusively the
indentured migrants, appeared in this context, but coexisted with its alternatives. The
“coolies” were, according to this reading, only the emigrants pressed into service by
coercion—the victims, in other words, of the coolie “traffic”—and designed as a specific
class of “cargo” by the Western merchants. 9 Other terms shared this meaning: the
Cantonese chu chai (pinyin: zhuzai, 猪仔, literally “piglets”), 10 while in the Spanish and
Portuguese-speaking world their most common label was “chinos contratados” or
“colonos asiáticos”—Asian settlers: a fictional and somewhat ironic euphemisms to
describe laborers intended as temporary by the very letter of their contracts.11

6
Louis Frois, Cartas do Japão, ll. fl.4, quoted in Ibid., 269; Beatriz Basto da Silva, Emigração de cules:
dossier Macau 1851-1894 (Macau: Fundação Oriente, 1994), 27.
7
As discussed by Robert Irick, Chʼing Policy Toward the Coolie Trade, 1847-1878 (Taipei: Chinese
Materials Center, 1982), 6–8.
8
We borrow this poignant expression from Giovanni Battista Beccari, Il commercio Chinese nel 1865:
cenni geografici, statistici e commerciali (San Giovanni Valdarno, Fi: M.Righi, 1869).
9
Barth, Bitter Strength, 51.
10
According to Samuel Wells Williams, it was a reference to the way employed to catch and carry swines,
which emphasized the dehumanizing treatment they were submitted to. See “Subsídios para o estudo dos
dialectos crioulos do Extremo Oriente: Textos e notas sobre o dialecto de Macao”, in João Feliciano
Marques Pereira, Ta-Ssi-Yang-Kuo. Archivos e Annaes do Extremo Oriente Portuguez (Lisboa: Bertrand,
1901), 458. The origin however seems to have indicated the practice of feeding the emigrants from a single
long trough, according to Adam McKeown, “How the Box Became Black: Brokers and the Creation of the
Free Migrant,” Pacific Affairs 85, no. 1 (2012): 28.
11
As underlined by Lisa Yun, The Coolie Speaks : Chinese indentured laborers and African slaves in Cuba
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008), xix. It is not entirely clear whether the term “colono” was
deliberately employed to disguise the real conditions of the contract concluded with the coolies (in fact it
had no equivalent in the Chinese-language copies of the contracts, translated as worker), or rather, as it
seems more probable, it derived from the common roots that the traffic shared with the state-sponsored

4
 Another issue arises from the derogatory and racist connotation the word acquired in
the late nineteenth-century, especially in the debate over Chinese exclusionary laws in the
United States and other “White settler colonies” of the British Empire. 12 The “coolie
stereotype” will be employed to picture the Chinese communities abroad, independently
from their legal status, as alien and constitutively unfree “self-exploiting” cheap
workers.13 Recently, however, a process reappropriation of the term “coolie” as historical
category has been coherently promoted by scholars in the field of Asian American
studies, in a twofold effort to emphasize the self-identification of Chinese laborers abroad
as victims of unjust and excessive exploitation,14 and rescue their neglected experiences
of conflict and resistance from the oblivion of mainstream narratives of the Chinese
diasporic communities structured around the success-stories of merchant and
businessmen.

1.1.2 Humans as commodity

The expressions “trade”, “traffic”, “commerce” or “sale” of coolies were used by the
contemporary critics of the traffic to underline its analogies with the African slave trade.
For almost all its duration, in fact, the coolie trade was targeted by a powerful
humanitarian campaign, pivoted by the English-language global press, calling for—and
eventually influencing—a radical reform of its abusive features or its total abolition. As
explained by the Italian Navy officer Giuseppe Lovera, stationed in the China Sea in
1872, this lexicon had been explicitly adopted to separate this traffic—as practiced in
Macao—from other, more legitimate, strands of Chinese migration:

Il traffico dei Coolies, quale lo si pratica in Macao, deve a mio avviso dirsi Tratta,
giacché riflette uomini che, schiavi della miseria loro fruttata dal vizio, mancando di

“white colonization” projects devised, both in Cuba and Peru, to import European permanent settlers in the
1840s.
12
The literature about Chinese exclusion has grown exponentially in the last two decades. Fundamental
have been the works by Adam McKeown, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of
Borders (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); Erika Lee, At America’s gates: Chinese
immigration during the exclusion era, 1882-1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003);
Mar, Brokering Belonging. For an overview of this scholarship refer to the collection of essays Sucheng
Chan, ed., Chinese American Transnationalism: The Flow of People, Resources and Ideas between China
and America during the Exclusion Era (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006).
13
It is singular to observe how this meaning partly evolved out of the humanitarian campaign against the
coolie traffic, shifting from a sympathetic image of the coolie as slave – victim of coercion – to that of the
self-exploited worker, bounded to unfree labor by his inner racial, cultural and historical heritage; in Kuhn’s
words, “it was as if the evil of slavery had tainted the very people who were its victims.” Philip A. Kuhn,
Chinese Among Others: Emigration in Modern Times (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), 211; Lee,
At America’s gates, 27; Sinn, Pacific Crossing, 52.
14
Yun, The coolie speaks, xix–xx.

5
 ogni altro mezzo per soddisfarlo, cedono alle lusinghe degli agenti della Tratta […]
contro la piena rinunzia in loro favore del proprio libero arbitrio e volontà nello
impiego delle loro forze. Tale tratta è diretta verso l’Havana ed il Perù, ove i Coolies,
succedendo agli schiavi africani, sono considerati e trattati siccome tali per la durata
del loro impegno15

Excepting some inevitable exaggerations, the coverage given by these humanitarian

activists generally holds the scrutiny of a serious historical analysis. Although terms neo-
slavery, disguised slavery, semi-slavery, para-slavery have been variously employed by
historians to better contextualize the analogies and differences of the two phenomena, the
majority of the scholars approaching this field have resisted, to quote Lisa Yun, the
revisionist temptation to dismiss as pure “sensationalism” these coeval representations.16
The designation of “trade” also emphasizes one of the crucial and defining features
that distinguishes this specific migration from other flows of indentured or debt-bonded
Chinese emigrants17: the use of transferrable contracts as a means to actually buy and sell
for profit—in the fictive form of exchanging “a piece of paper”—the laborers themselves.
In the words of the Italian ambassador in China and Japan, Vittorio Sallier de La Tour,
that was the “original sin” of the traffic, the key to explain the overexploitation and the
abuses it carried in comparison with other emigration schemes:

Finché vi saranno arrolati cinesi comprati sopra un mercato per essere rivenduti in un
altro, non si potrà mai distruggere l’idea che essi non sieno uomini, ma merci, non si
potrà mai sperare che sieno trattati umanamente nei luoghi di partenza o di arrivo o a
bordo delle navi, non si potrà ottenere che i loro salarii salgano fino al livello delle
mercedi accordate agli uomini liberi18

Keeping a focus on contract migrations as a trade in laborers allows to bridge a gap

between studies of migration and the slave trade, avoiding concerns on the identities and
labor conditions of the emigrants—which have already been adequately covered—and
highlights the importance of commercial networks in influencing, shaping and organizing
contract migration flows, particularly in a stage preceding a chain-driven mass
migration.19

15
Giuseppe Lovera, “Sulla tratta dei Coolies a Macao,” Rivista Marittima V, no. 12 (1872): 566.
16
Lisa Yun, “Under the Hatches: American Coolie Ships and Nineteenth-Century Narratives of the Pacific
Passage,” Amerasia Journal 28, no. 2 (2002): 51.
17
Some scholars have argued that this feature distinguished for-profit private-run emigration schemes from
other state-supervised indenture colonization projects, like the Indian indenture for most of its course,
characterized by less exploitative intents; see Walton Look Lai, “Asian Diasporas and Tropical Migration in
the Age of Empire : A Comparative Overview,” Journal of Chinese Overseas 5 (2009): 44.
18
Vittorio Sallier de la Tour, “L’emigrazione cinese”, Bolettino Consolare, 1872, 57.
19
We refer here to the theoretical concepts of “commerce of migration” and “migration industry”
developed by studies of the brokering networks in the nineteenth century European migration and recently
readapted to modern migration flows; Cf. Robert F. Harney, “The Commerce of Migration,” Canadian

6
 This approach, historian Adam McKeown argued, has sometimes informed a tendency
to over-victimize the Chinese coolies and deny them their rightful historical agency.20 If
many of the coolies were indeed victims of kidnapping, decoy, and other questionable
recruitment methods, it would be unfair to entirely disregard the experiences of those who
consciously chose to migrate in a hope to improve their individual condition, and in a
relative understanding of the arrangements they were accepting. On the other hand, we
contend, the fact that coolies, even the voluntary ones, were considered commodities—
and treated as such—by their traffickers and employers bore very tangible and practical
consequences on their lives; it is the duty of the historian to portray also this side of the
picture. Various strategies of deprivation of individuality and sheer violence, we contend,
were deliberately and consciously pursued by traffickers and planters to subdue the
coolies to an architecture of oppression instrumental to the maximization of their profits.
The idea of the commodification of the labor force, finally, is a powerful conceptual
framework to understand the position of the coolie trade in a middle ground between
slavery and supposedly “free” labor relations. An interesting corollary can be added if we
read this process through the lenses of Karl Polanyi’s conception of the embeddedness of
labor in a network of social and cultural relations. A distinctive feature of the “great
transformation” of the long nineteenth century, Polanyi stressed, had been the processes
of disembeddedment of the so-called fictitious commodities—labor, land, money—from
their cultural and social milieu;21 in the case of labor, abstracted from the person of the
laborer, the result of this process would have been ultimately the “destruction of the
human being” 22 through its eviction from its existential social and cultural web of
support.
Extending Polanyi’s analytical framework, we may try to interpret the experience of
the coolie in the destination countries as that of people abruptly displaced and uprooted

Ethnic Studies 9, no. 1 (1977): 42–53; Fred Krissman, “Sin Coyote Ni Patrón: Why the ‘Migrant Network’
fails to Explain International Migration,” International Migration Review 39, no. 1 (2005): 4–44; Rubén
Hernández-León, “Conceptualizing the Migration Industry,” in The Migration Industry and the
Commercialization of International Migration, ed. Ninna Nyberg Sorensen and Thomas Gammeltoft-
Hansen (London: Routledge, 2012), 25–45. Cf. also the essays of Ulbe Bosma, Elise van Nederveen
Meerkerk, and Aditya Sarkar, “Mediating Labour: An Introduction,” International Review of Social History
57, no. S20 (August 2012): 1–15; Amarjit Kaur, “Labour Brokers in Migration: Understanding Historical
and Contemporary Transnational Migration Regimes in Malaya/Malaysia,” International Review of Social
History 57, no. S20 (August 2012): 225–52.
20
Adam McKeown, “The Social Life of Chinese Labor,” in Chinese Circulations: Capital, Commodities,
and Networks in Southeast Asia, ed. Eric Tagliacozzo and Wen-Chin Chang (Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 2011), 61–65.
21
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, 3rd edn
(Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 71–81.
22
Ibid., 171.

7
by a system built precisely for their oppression and exploitation. The story of the coolie
trade is also the story of the efforts these coolies had to made in order to rebuild from
scratches a survivable social environment—a “niche”, to use Kuhn’s concept 23 —in
conditions far worse than those encountered by the free or credit-ticket Chinese migrants,
whose exodus was tied in a more familiar web kinship, lineage and district-based network
of security, mutual aid and cooperation.24 This fundamental difference explains as well
their adoption of more radical and extreme expressions of resistance and agency.25

1.1.3 Macao: an emigration in-between place?

The third conceptual anchor we used to define the object of this study is geographical.
We identified a specific Macao coolie trade (emphasis mine), characterized by a coherent
historical development, clear chronological limits, and a relatively autonomous
organization. As we can see from the following chart (Fig. 1.1), based on a selection of
primary and secondary sources, the Portuguese colony concentrated three-fourths of all of
contract/indentured emigration from various Chinese ports between 1847 and 1874,
practically monopolizing the trade after the early 1860s. This largely justify its structural
association with Macao in the discourse of the anti-coolie trade humanitarian campaign of
these years, and explains the persistence of this connection in the imaginary of the
contemporaries after its ending.
The choice of Macao as the main focus of our inquiry, moreover, allows us to move
from a national to a more nuanced sub-regional perspective, diverging from a tradition of
Beijing-centric narratives which has mainly interpreted the nineteenth-century Chinese
emigration through the filter of the Qing dynasty policies and attitudes, overlooking some
of its specifically local, Cantonese, actors and features.26

23
Kuhn, Chinese Among Others, 42–43.
24
Elizabeth Sinn, “Xin Xi Guxiang: A Study of Regional Associations as a Bonding Mechanism in the
Chinese Diaspora. The Hong Kong Experience,” Modern Asian Studies 31, no. 2 (1997): 375–97. Also
Michael Williams, “Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta Qiaoxiang,” Modern Asian Studies 38, no. 2
(May 2004): 257–82.
25
See Chapter 4.3.
26
See, for example, Irick, Ch’ing Policy Toward the Coolie Trade; Ching-Hwang Yen, “Ch’ing Changing
Images of the Overseas Chinese (1644-1912),” Modern Asian Studies 15, no. 2 (1981): 261–85; Ching-
Hwang Yen, Coolies and Mandarins: China’s Protection of Overseas Chinese during the Late Ch'ing
Period (1851-1911) (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1985).

8
 30000

25000

20000

15000

10000

5000

0
1847 1849 1851 1853 1855 1857 1859 1861 1863 1865 1867 1869 1871 1873

Amoy (11.339) Canton, Whampoa, Cumsingmoon (18.377)

Swatow (24.953) Shanghai, Ningbo (512)
Hong Kong (10.934) Macao (213.233)

Fig.1.1: Annual departure of coolies from South China 1847-1874. Source: Author’s elaboration; AHU,
SEMU, DGU, Correspondência de Macau e Timor, cx. 42 (1873); BO (1851-1874), Arnold Meagher, The
Coolie Trade: The Traffic in Chinese Laborers to Latin America 1847-1874 (Philadelphia: Xlibris, 2008) 371-
406; Mario Castro de Mendoza, El Transporte Marítimo En La Inmigración China, 1849-1874 (Lima:
Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología, 1989). Data is approximated by defect and relatively inaccurate
for the earlier years.

Analyzing the competing emigration hub established in the British colony of Hong
Kong in the same years of the Macao coolie trade—but oriented principally towards
California, Australia, Canada, and Southeast Asia—historian Elizabeth Sinn has recently
introduced the concept of “in-between place” 27 in the study of human migrations, defined
as an intermediary station in the circular movement of “migrants and migrants’ things”,
acting as a node for the flow of remittances, goods, letters and people’s rests—what Kuhn
defined as “corridors” 28 —between the emigration countries and the emigrants’ native
places. According to Sinn, this concept can be appropriated and adapted to different
geographical and historical settings:

I also offer Hong Kong as in-between place to alert scholars to the possibility that in-
between places exist in other migration movements as well—although perhaps not
functioning in exactly the same ways as Hong Kong. Perhaps they could explore
other types of “inbetweenness.” […] The migration trajectory was seldom a bee-line
from point A to point B; in reality, there were many detours and delays, diversions,

27
Elizabeth Sinn, “Hong Kong as an In-between Place in the Chinese Diaspora, 1849–1939,” in Connecting
Seas and Connected Ocean Rims, Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans And China Seas Migrations from the
1830s to the 1930s, ed. Donna Gabaccia and Dirk Hoerder (Leiden: BRILL, 2011), 225–247.
28
Kuhn, Chinese Among Others, 4.

9
 and dead ends, and what lay in between inevitably affected the migration experience
in profound ways.29

Can we assume a similar paradigm to describe the peculiar case of Macao in the years
of the coolie trade? As a migratory node, Macao’s harbor saw the departure of at least
210,000 emigrants between 1851 and 1874, and the transit of a considerable number of
people, estimated in above 40,000,30 stopped from embarking to Latin America thanks to
the latest Portuguese emigration legislation’s prescriptions. In strict terms, moreover,
Macao never became a source of emigrants—at least not significantly—but kept its role
as a center of recruitment and shipment for the duration of the traffic. Most of the coolies
sent overseas from the Portuguese colony had been hired by emigration brokers in the
surrounding, densely populated, areas of the Pearl River Delta: the agricultural “four
counties”, sze yup (pinyin: siyi, 四邑) of Xinhui, Enping, Kaiping, and Xinning (later
renamed Taishan ); the manufacturing “three counties” of sam yup (sanyi, 三邑) Panyu,
Shunde, and Nanhai; or the districts of Xiangshan,31 bordering Macao to the northwest,
and Yangjiang, further south.32
On the other hand, many specificities of Macao’s traffic fail to fit properly Sinn’s
original model. The transnational links between the Portuguese entrepôt and the coolies
shipped abroad were by no means as developed as those of the British colony. In
particular, there was nothing comparable in scale to the jinshanzhuang (the Chinese
commerce with California), nor equivalent flows of returnee emigrants and remittances.
Employed mainly in rural plantations, under oppressive systems of exploitation and labor
control, coolies departed from Macao had no access to the variety of consumption choices
of corresponding emigrants in urban environments like San Francisco or Vancouver, and
were far less reachable by merchandises from China, with the notable exception of
opium. 33 This explains a higher rate of assimilation. “Chinese who had finished their
indentures”, McKeown observes, “were left isolated and impoverished, with few active
connections to China. They tended to take Spanish names, intermarry, and gradually

29
Sinn, “Hong Kong as an In-between Place...,” 247.
30
Alfredo Gomes Dias, “Do tráfico de escravos à emigração dos cules,” Revista Lusófona de Humanidades
e Tecnologias, no. 4–5 (2001): 109–17. Statistics of repatriation are available only for the years 1869-1873
(through the BO); it may be argued, however, that before the establishment of the Superintendencia in
1868, repatriations were a marginal phenomenon (see Chapter 3.3).
31
Modern-day Zhongshan (中山), renamed in 1925 in honor of Sun Yatsen (Sun Zhongshan 孫中山).
32
Sinn, Pacific Crossing, 48–49.
33
See Chapter 4.4. Also, Evelyn Hu-DeHart, “Opium and Social Control: Coolies on the Plantations of
Peru and Cuba,” Journal of Chinese Overseas 1, no. 2 (2005): 169–83. As exception to ships commonly
navigating in ballast to maximize the coolies’ numbers, at least until 1866 there was also a significant trade
in firecrackers on the return voyages of several coolie ships to Peru.

10
integrate into the […] lower classes, creating no strong transnational links” 34 in the
traditional sense. In addition, whether they managed to return to China, send remittances,
or import goods to and from their qiaoxiang—native places—they generally opted for the
better established Hong Kong channel rather than going through Macao.
From this point of view, we suggest, instead, to look at Macao and Hong Kong as part
of an integrated binary migratory system.35 The two cities were connected by continuous
flow of people, goods and information, separated by only three or four hours of
navigation by steamer, seven or eight by sail. 36 The literature on the coolie trade has
sometimes paid attention to this link, addressing the participation of Hong Kong business
firms in the Macao coolie trade and the important contribution of the British colony as a
site for outfitting or repairing coolie ships on their route to Macao.37 However, little or
nothing has been said on the services provided in the form of maritime insurance and
financial coverage, or the position of Hong Kong—and San Francisco—as ports of call in
the common coolie ship’s routes from and towards their Latin American destinations, and
other details that surface from a closer scrutiny of the primary sources.
One more key element in Sinn’s definition of in-between place is the presence of
underlying institutions aimed at facilitating and organizing emigration links. Hong Kong
affirmed itself as the main port for free emigrants from China, Sinn claims, thanks to its
capability to provide a safe atmosphere and basilar services in the field of credit,
communications and entertainment to prospective emigrants, through a synergy of
governmental initiatives and mediating civil agencies and associations.38
In sharp contrast little is known, mostly due to a chronic lack of sources, about the
social, economic and institutional infrastructures that may have sustained the exportation
of coolies in Macao, playing a comparable role as in Hong Kong or other emigration
ports. The distinctive features of the Macao emigration network, however, seems to have
been concentrated in the services and protection—notwithstanding the feeble efforts of

34
Adam McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago, Hawaii, 1900-1936
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), 68.
35
An exercise in integration of Macao and Canton into the Hong Kong emigration system, with an
economical history approach, has been suggested in Takeshi Hamashita, “From Tribute Trade to Migration
Center: The Ryukyu and Hong Kong Maritime Networks within the East and South China Seas in a Long-
Term Perspective”, in Donna Gabaccia and Dirk Hoerder, eds., Connecting Seas and Connected Ocean
Rims, Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans and China Seas Migrations from the 1830s to the 1930s
(Leiden: BRILL, 2011), 172–195.
36
These same steamers, whose line extended generally to Canton, were used as one of the main channel to
convey coolies to Macao from the inner Guangdong province. See Chapter 4.1.
37
Gov. Kennedy to Kimberly, Colonial Secretary, Hong Kong, 19 October 1872, BPP, Measures taken to
prevent the fitting out of Ships at Hong Kong for the Macao Coolie Trade, 1873.
38
Sinn, Pacific Crossing, 302.

11
the Portuguese authorities to reduce the abuses, at least in the latest years—offered to
recruiters, brokers and traffickers, rather than the emigrants; including a huge gambling
and prostitution industry that diverted a wide portion of the revenues of their human sales.
The dramatic returns of the gambling houses allowed the free port of Macao, although
deprived of the income of import or export duties, to become considerably self-sufficient,
and a relief for the passive balance of payments of the Portuguese Empire along these
years.39

1.2 Conceptual framework

In the previous paragraphs we defined the object of our research as the “Macao coolie
trade”, delimiting a conceptual perimeter through the terms “Macao”, “coolie” and
“trade”, and debated the role of Macao as migration hub in relation with the neighboring
port of Hong Kong. The ensuing pages discuss the underlying theoretical background of
this stance, periodization and positioning this research into the contemporary
historiographical literature on “world history” and the transnational history of migrations.
Therefore, a final paragraph conceptualizes the figure of the Italian coolie dealers in the
frame of the Genoese commercial diaspora of the early and mid-nineteenth century,
describing it as an example of surviving network of cross-cultural trade and family-scale
business in what has been called the “modern” age of globalization.40

1.2.1 The space: a world history approach

The approach of this thesis integrates a local focus on Macao and its complex society
with a global perspective over the multiple ties and interconnections created by the coolie
trade in a trans-national dimension. By choosing the whole globe as the perimeter of our
investigation, we posit the theoretical coordinates of this study into the domain of the so-
called “world history”, broadly defined, along Patrick Manning, as “the story of
connections within the global human community […] with a focus on connections among
historical localities, time periods, and themes of study.”41 The recent “global turn” in

39
Fernando Figueiredo, “Os vectores da economia,” in História dos Portugueses no Extremo Oriente:
Macau e Timor do Antigo Regime à Républica, ed. António H. de Oliveira Marques, vol. III (Lisboa:
Fundação Oriente, 2000), 267–273.
40
Christopher A. Bayly, “‘Archaic’ and ‘Modern’ Globalization in the Eurasian and African Arena, c.
1750–1850,” in Globalization in World History, ed. A.G. Hopkins (London: Pimlico, 2002); Christopher A.
Bayly, “From Archaic Globalization to International Networks, circa 1600–2000,” in Interactions:
Transregional Perspectives on World History, ed. Jerry H. Bentley (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,
2005).
41
Patrick Manning, Navigating World History, Historians Create a Global Past (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2003), 3.

12
historical studies evolved as a coherent trend from the late ‘80s and the ‘90s, when the
founding of institution such as the World History Association or the Journal of World
History gave it a formal reference and organizational structure. Early studies in “world
history” may be divided in two main historiographical streams. The first group, inspired
by a cross-disciplinary blend of history, economics and social sciences, focused its
attention on macro-processes of economic globalization, such as Wallersteinian’s “world
system” school and its latter epigones.42 With an eye on the evolution of early modern and
modern Chinese history, scholars following these footsteps have developed new
comparative frameworks to understand the “Great Divergence” and argued against
classical Eurocentric narratives of the rise of Western capitalism and industrialization.43 A
second strand, to which our dissertation relates more closely, sprung from a series of
studies about cross-cultural and trans-regional interactions, following the appearance of
pioneering works by Philip Curtin or William McNeill between the 1960s and 1980s.44
This tradition, which in the 1990s found theorists in scholars as Jerry Bentley, Patrick
Manning, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, 45 has stressed the importance of connections and
interactions of people and ideas distancing the field from the social sciences and
introducing micro-scale analyses of individual lives and trajectories. More recently, they
have also drawn the attention to the relations between the local and the global dimension
of the historical analysis,46 reflecting on the possibilities of this field to develop a “global

42
Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origin of the
European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974); The Modern
World-System II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600-1750 (New
York: Academic Press, 1980); The Modern World-System III: The Second Era of Great Expansion of the
Capitalist World-Economy, 1730-1840s (San Diego: Academic Press, 1989); Andre Gunder Frank,
ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
43
Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World
Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Jean-Laurent Rosenthal and R. Bin Wong, Before
and Beyond Divergence: The Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2011).
44
See, for some of the seminal contributions, William H. McNeill,The Rise of the West: A History of the
Human Community, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962); Philip D. Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade
in World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
45
Jerry H. Bentley, “Cross-Cultural Interaction and Periodization in World History,” The American
Historical Review 101, no. 3 (1996): 749–70; Patrick Manning, “The Problem of Interactions in World
History,” The American Historical Review 101, no. 3 (1996): 771–82; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Connected
Histories : Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asian Studies 31, no. 3
(1997): 735–62.
46
A.G. Hopkins, “Introduction : Interactions Between the Universal and the Local,” in Global History,
Interactions between the Universal and the Local, ed. A. G. Hopkins (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2006); Jerry H. Bentley, Renate Bridenthal, and Anand A. Yang, Interactions Transregional Perspectives
on World History (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005); Bartolomé Yun Casalilla, “‘Localism’,
Global History and Transnational History. A Reflection from the Historian of Early Modern Europe,”
Historisk Tidskrift 127, no. 4 (2007): 659–78. Some historians and scholars of contemporary globalization
have further elaborated this concept into the category of “translocality”: Ulrike Freitag and Achim Von

13
microhistory.”47
Since this thesis has been conceived and elaborated in the context of the Italian
academia, we feel compelled to spend a few words over the reception of these
historiographical trends in the Italian research environment. After a fifteen to twenty
years’ delay the international literature on world history has finally called the deserved
attention of Italian-based scholars, giving birth to a series of stimulating historical
reflections on its methodological and theoretical elements.48 Albeit limited by structural
constraints in facilities and resources, and slowed down by the natural conservatism of
conventional academic sectors and teaching curricula, there seem to be some space for
this new historiographical turn to open fresh opportunities of debate and catch up with
already established patterns of research in an international environment.
A comprehensive study of the coolie trade, indeed, is an enterprise that requires the
historian to cross different disciplinary borders and track wide-ranging connections in
distinct geographical, cultural and linguistic contexts. In fact, only through a global
overview it is possible to link together studies of overseas Chinese, economic history and
international politics, Latin American social and labor conditions, the global sugar and
cotton markets, South China society between the opium wars, and the many other issues
profoundly intertwined with its historical evolution.
Its crucial maritime component, furthermore, calls for the inclusion of the world’s
Oceans—and the decks and steerages of the ships sailing them—into the historical
narrative.49 As Marcus Rediker stressed in his recent incursions in the literature of the
Atlantic slave trade, it is necessary to emphasize and recover the often neglected maritime
dimension of history, and investigate the sea and the oceans as part of the space in which

Oppen, Translocality: the Study of Globalising Processes from a Southern Perspective (Leiden: BRILL,
2010).
47
Tonio Andrade, “A Chinese Farmer, Two African Boys, and a Warlord: Toward a Global Microhistory,”
Journal of World History 21, no. 4 (2010): 573–91.
48
A fundamental guidebook, although grossly modeled over Manning’s Navigating World History,is the
recent Laura Di Fiore and Marco Meriggi, World History: Le nuove rotte della storia (Roma-Bari: Laterza,
2011). For earlier but less systemic contributions see Giovanni Gozzini, Le migrazioni di ieri e di oggi: Una
storia comparata (Milano: Bruno Mondadori, 2005); Carlo Fumian, Verso una società planetaria. Alle
origini della globalizzazione contemporanea (Roma: Donzelli, 2003); on the field of labor relations and
exchanges, cf. Christian De Vito, “La proposta della Global labour history nell’era della ‘globalizzazione,’”
Passato e Presente, no. 85 (2012): 177–89.
49
On the connective role of ocean basins as unity of historical analysis for cross cultural interactions cf.
Jerry H. Bentley, “Sea and Ocean Basins as Frameworks of Historical Analysis,” Geographical Review 89,
no. 2 (1999): 215–24; Jerry H Bentley, Renate Bridenthal, and Karen Wigen, eds., Seascapes: Maritime
Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007).

14
the “human’s drama is played.”50 Taking Rediker’s advice, we paid special attention to
the study of the maritime passage of the coolie ships, with its dramatic corollary of
revolts, struggles and mortality. Scattered sources from Italian and Portuguese archives, in
several cases untapped, revealed a new and more nuanced picture of the interactions of
captains, sailors and emigrants, challenging consolidated assumptions about linguistic and
cultural barriers and displaying instead, amidst much violence, a handful of episodes of
collaboration, understanding and even complicity.51

1.2.2 Transnationalism in migration studies

By addressing the movement of people across borders and spaces, the history of
migrations is by definition a receptive field for research in global themes and scope. In
this sense, traditional migration studies have undergone harsh criticism for their
overreliance on binary models and simplifications, which, McKeown explains, have
tended to “a polarization between concepts like push and pull, emigration and
immigration, sending society and host society, or tradition and adaptation, which privilege
the perspectives of nations that frame the two ends of migrant journeys.”52 On one hand,
several studies have been concerned simply with the problem of assimilation and
integration of the migrants into the host society; hence revealing, McKeown continues,
“how interest in migration is usually justified by an ultimate interest in the inclusion of
migrants into a national identity.”53 On the other hand, historians of the sending countries
have often focused their attention on how original homeland’s identities and loyalties are
kept and strengthened through the migration process.
These challenges have led in the past years to what has been termed the “transnational
turn” in migration studies and migration history. In the early 1990s, anthropologist Nina
Schiller introduced for the first time the concept of transnationalism in the study of
contemporary migrations as the ensemble of “processes by which immigrants build social
fields that link together their country of origin and their country of settlement.” 54
Historical research has subsequently appropriated the concept, clearing it of its original
evolutionary frame, as a tool to underscore the non-linear character of historical
50
Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (London: Viking, 2007). On the necessity to recover a
humanistic approach to individual lives and experiences in Global history, cf. the aforementioned Andrade,
“A Chinese Farmer...,” 574.
51
See Chapter 7.1 and 7.2.
52
McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks..., 7–8.
53
Ibid.
54
Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc-Szanton, “Transnationalism: a New Analytic
Framework for Understanding Migration,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 645 (July 1992): 1.

15
migrations and bring a new and more fragmented perspective over the circulation of
peoples and a more fluid conception of the migrant’s identities and experiences.55
This thesis adopts a transnational approach in two senses: first, we follow Donna
Gabaccia’s call “to query the tyranny of the national in the discipline of history”,56 to
“track migrant streams, networks, and cultural production in a global scale”, in other
words across the national borders of the multiple States involved;57 second, we historicize
the role of nation states in the complex history of the coolie trade, framing our analysis
over a web of interconnected localities and emphasizing the interaction of localized
endogenous and exogenous forces in the construction and evolution of the traffic. In fact,
the Macao coolie trade marked one of the last phases of a globalization stage based on the
flexibility and porousness of inter-state borders, before the hardening and the organization
of stricter devices of control in the 1880s, pioneered by the anti-Chinese laws in the
United States.58 We may find a sign of this transitory process in the legal and bureaucratic
apparatus deployed by the Macao government to curtail the reports of abuses in the
emigration system and ensure the safety and “voluntariness” of the contracts signed by
the emigrants; apparatus which, deemed by many observers little more than a
smokescreen, increased its size exponentially in the last decade of the traffic.59

1.2.3 Cross-cultural trade and family business networks in the modern world

The large majority of the available studies on the coolie trade, as we will better discuss
below, approached the topic as a whole, through the model of the monographic “grand
synthesis”—either of the traffic to a single country, or globally—with the result of only
sketching in superficial ways—often employing similar and overlapping sets of sources—
its overall features. This has left unanswered many fundamental questions about its day-
to-day practices and deep mechanisms: we still lack a circumstantiated study of the roles
of different Macao administrations in covering and supporting rather than contrasting the
reported traffic’s “abuses”; a serious assessment of the relations between the traffic and

55
A brief survey in Christiane Harzig and Dirk Hoerder, What is Migration History ? (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 2009), 83–85. On transnational history sensu lato, see Ian Tyrrell, “American Exceptionalism in an
Age of International History,” The American Historical Review 96, no. 4 (1991): 1031–1055, and other
contributions in that monographic issue of the American Historical Review
56
Donna Gabaccia, “Is Everywhere Nowhere ? Nomads , Nations , and the Immigrant Paradigm of United
States History,” The Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (1999): 1116.
57
Erika Lee and Naoko Shibusawa, “Guest Editor’s Introduction: What is Transnational Asian American
History?: Recent Trends and Challenges,” Journal of Asian American Studies 8, no. 3 (2005): vii–xvii.
58
Erika Lee, “The Chinese Exclusion Example: Race, Immigration, and American Gatekeeping, 1882–
1924,” Journal of American Ethnic History, no. Spring (2002): 36–62; McKeown, Melancholy Order.
59
See Chapter 3.3.

16
Cantonese piracy; a study of the little but not insignificant return migration from both
Cuba and Peru; or of the experience of coolies in non-agricultural contexts or tasks. There
has been, moreover, a fundamental neglect of the diachronic dimension of the traffic in
Macao, whose accounts generally flattens its modes of operation through its two decades
of activities without marking out their historical evolution and their links with the broader
history of South China and the South-East Asian region in the mid-nineteenth century.
The traces of the Italian participants in the coolie trade, therefore, offer us a thread to
provide a more in-depth analysis organizing the work around a solid and coherent
documentary core. This exercise poses several questions of methodology. First of all, how
could we define this specific group of traffickers as Italian? Indeed, a criterion of national
belonging may sound quite contradictory for a study aspiring to adopt a global and trans-
national perspective. In fact we recognize behind this label a complicate mixture of local
and national identities. As many studies of the “Italian diaspora” have pointed out, Italian
migrants in the nineteenth century carried fluid transnational identities, dividing their
loyalties among their home towns and villages, regional community, and shades of
nationalist commitment towards their home and host countries.60 Almost all the Italian
coolie traffickers were natives of Genoa and its surrounding villages in the Ligurian
Riviera di Levante, areas with a longstanding tradition of circular, trade-related,
emigration. Many of them established themselves permanently in Peru, integrating in a
thick web of interpersonal ties of business with the Peruvian landowner’s elite. Their
descendants, in many cases, split themselves equally between the two nations.
We applied to these people, with some caution, the categories of “trade diaspora”,
conceptualized by Philip Curtin in regard to networks of migrants specialized in long-
range trade between distant societies and civilizations. 61 According to Curtin’s model,
trade diasporas lost their determinant role as commercial and cultural brokers in the mid-
nineteenth century, with the expansion of imperialism and of the first Western-led
structured and modern organizations of commerce. The role of Genoese merchants in the
coolie trade shows a good example, instead, of how familiar based merchants adapted to
new organizational and technological challenges—the sail-steam transition—and actually
managed to extend their operational range in the context of a growing global economy

60
There is ample scholarship on this; for an introduction, see Donna Gabaccia, Emigranti: Le diaspore
degli italiani dal Medioevo a oggi (Torino: Einaudi, 2003).
61
Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History.

17
and the expansion of imperial polities.62
Genoese and Ligurian immigrants had started to settle into the Spanish American
colonies as early as the late eighteenth century, through their links with the commercial
hub of Cadiz, in continental Spain, and its thriving community of naturalized Genoese
merchants. 63 Taking advantage from the liberalization of external trade of the Spanish
American colonies in 1812, and then of the commercial opportunities opened by the birth
of South American republican regimes, they built a transoceanic migration network,
whose fulcrums were Buenos Aires and Montevideo, but which extended through the
Pacific to Peru, Ecuador and California. These early settlements functioned as
coagulation poles for subsequent migratory movements of mid and late-nineteenth and
later for the mass migration of the early twentieth century.
This wider context is crucial to determine, in a perspective of “history from the
middle”, the achievements and success of the Italian traffickers in coolies in Peru. Trying
to reconstruct their biographies, we may observe two typical patterns: some traders
belonged to so called “maritime dynasties”,64 entrepreneurial families costumed to long-
range trade and usually only temporarily involved in the Peruvian scene; while others
fitted the description of ambitious parvenus, self-realized men coming from a lower
middle-class or poorer background, that rapidly ascended the social ladder benefiting
from favorable conditions posed by the Peruvian guano boom after the 1840s.65 Adopting
local costumes, names and citizenship, those transnational entrepreneurs invested their
guano and coolie-driven fortunes in the rising plantation sector, becoming ironically both
exporter and employer of Chinese coolies, but on the same time strengthened their
connections with their hometowns through philanthropy and land investments.

62
Other interesting example may be the Armenian and Parsee networks in Macao. Cf. Carl T. Smith and
Paul A. Van Dyke, “Armenian Footprints in Macao,” Review of Culture (International Edition), no. 8
(2003): 20–39; Guo Deyan, “The Study of Parsee Merchants in Canton, Hong Kong and Macao,” Review of
Culture (International Edition), no. 8 (2003): 51–69.
63
The Cadiz-South America link was the subject of a recent PhD dissertation in the University of Pisa by
Catia Brilli, which is completely pioneering the topic in Italian scientific literature: Catia Brilli, “La
diaspora commerciale ligure nel sistema atlantico iberico. Da Cadice a Buenos Aires (1750-1830)”,
(Unpublished Ph.D dissertation, Università di Pisa, 2008); also Brilli, “The Genoese Response to the
Collapse of the Spanish Empire in America,” Jahrbuch für Geschichte Lateinamerikas, no. 47 (2010): 247–
72. In part, the organization of archives makes difficult to further trace these networks after the
incorporation of the former Genoese State into the Kingdom of Sardinia in 1815. The period also coincides
with an overstressed disciplinary rift between early modernists and contemporary history scholars.
64
Marco Doria, “La marina mercantile a vela in Liguria dalla metà dell’Ottocento alla prima guerra
mondiale,” in A vela e a vapore. Economie, culture e istituzioni del mare nell’Italia dell’Ottocento, ed.
Paolo Frascani (Roma: Donzelli, 2001), 83–107.
65
David Hollett, More Precious than Gold : the Story of the Peruvian Guano Trade (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh
Dickinson University Press, 2008).

18
1.3 Literature review

The issue of the coolie trade has been approached from many different perspectives,
national historiographies, and disciplinary areas. The ensuing section provides a
comprehensive review of the literature produced on this subject in the past decades. For
the sake of simplicity, we will divide the review into four parts, addressing the studies
developed in various language and national historical traditions. In the first part, we
discuss the main studies developed in the English and Spanish-speaking world, including
some works not specifically dedicated to the coolie trade but bearing interesting
methodological insights and interpretations. Next, we sketch a general picture of the
achievements of the Chinese-language scholarship. A third section addresses the main
trends of the Portuguese oriented (broadly defined) literature, including general works on
Macao’s history, while the fourth and last paragraph presents a balance of the coverage of
the Italian involvement in the coolie trade in the current Italian historiography.

1.3.1 Works in English, Spanish and French

Earlier pioneering works on the coolie trade generally approached the theme from the
perspective of a single immigration country. This was the case of the work of Persia
Campbell, which in 1923 addressed the broad ensemble of Chinese immigration in the
British Empire, including indentured, credit-ticket and free immigrants. 66 In 1927,
Chinese-Cuban Antonio Chuffat Latour published the first significant account of the
Chinese immigration in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Cuba.67
In 1951 North American historian Watt Stewart published his Chinese Bondage in
Peru; a ground-breaking account of the Peruvian coolie trade based on rare Peruvian
sources. Subsequently translated in both Spanish and Chinese, this highly successful work
is still a fundamental reference for the subject, despite a tendency to over victimize the
Chinese coolies.68
The 1960s saw the emergence of a new generation of Cuban based social historians,
that approached the topic of the coolie trade focusing on the comparative aspects of
Chinese indentured labor and African slavery, whose coexistence constituted a peculiar

66
Persia Campbell, Chinese Coolie Emigration to Countries within the British Empire (London: P. S. King
and son, 1923).
67
Antonio Chuffat Latour, Apunte Histórico de los Chinos en Cuba (Habana: Molina y Cia, 1927).
68
Watt Stewart, Chinese Bondage in Peru: A History of the Chinese coolie in Peru, 1849-1874 (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1951).; translated as La servidumbre Chine en el Perú : una historia de los culies
chinos en el Perú, 1849-1874 (Lima: Mosca Azul, 1976) and Bilu hua gong shi, 1849-1874 秘魯華工史,
1849-1874 [History of the Chinese laborers in Peru] (Beijing : Haiyang chu ban she, 1985).

19
feature in the island’s history. This gave rise to various competing interpretations of the
role of the coolies, whose experience could be seen as a form of slavery under false
colors, according to the demographer Juan Pérez de La Riva;69 a transition from slavery
to free labor essential to the development of a mechanized sugar industry according to
Manuel Fraginals;70 or, on the contrary, an expedient to delay the demise of a backward
productive system, that facilitated the perpetration of slavery, as argued by Rebecca
Scott.71 In this line of inquiry, some recent studies in the field of the “global labor history”
have tried to overcome the opposition slavery – “free” labor defending a structural
continuity between slavery, indenture and wage labor as the multifaceted expression of
72
capitalist’s commodification of labor. They have argued, furthermore, for a
reconsideration of the modern Western notion of “free labor” overall, defined as a work
which the laborer has the possibility to quit, showing how the debate on indenture and
migrations contributed to its formation.73
In the mid-seventies Arnold Meagher produced the first really systematic and
comprehensive study of the coolie trade on a global scale. Meagher defended his Ph.D
dissertation, defended at the University of California at Davis in 1975. His work,
although, published only in 2008, had been until then well-known and highly regarded by
the scholarly community and represents even now an indispensable reference work for
any historian engaging with the coolie issue. 74 Through a painstaking and still
unsurpassed research over British, American and less in detail Portuguese archives,
Meagher’s successfully tied together in a coherent picture all the distinct flows of coolies
with a scope hardly followed by any of historian after him. Central in Meagher’s
interpretation is the recognition of the external causes of the coolie trade, “initiated and
sustained, not by spontaneous action of free agents, but […] by the persuasion, deceit,
and coercion of emigration brokers and recruiters in the employ of Western entrepreneurs
69
Juan Pérez de la Riva, El barracon y otres ensayos, (La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1975);
Some of his work on the coolie trade has been systemathized, edited and published posthumously: Juan
Pérez de la Riva, Los culíes chinos en Cuba, 1847-1880 : contribución al estudio de la inmigración
contratada en el Caribe (La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 2000).
70
Manuel Moreno Fraginals, El ingenio : el complejo económico social cubano del azúcar, (La Habana,
Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1978).
71
As argued, for example, by Rebecca Scott, Slave Emancipation In Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor,
1860-1899, (Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 1985).
72
Marcel van der Linden, Workers of the World: Essays towards a Global Labor History (Leiden: BRILL,
2008), 10; Yann Moulier Boutang, Dalla schiavitù al lavoro salariato (Roma: Manifestolibri, 2002)..
73
Robert J. Steinfeld, Coercion , Contract , and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001); Gunther Peck, Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and Immigrant
Workers in the North American West, 1880-1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
74
Arnold Meagher, The Coolie Trade: The Traffic in Chinese Laborers to Latin America 1847-1874
(Philadelphia: Xlibris, 2008).

20
and Western capital”,75 and its role as a pivot in the transformation of Chinese migration
from a pre-modern pattern to a mass scale stream, a quantitative and qualitative leap.
At that time, Meagher benefited from a wave of interest on the coolie trade, which
brought light to several contributions in the ensuing years. In particular, in the early ‘80s
the topic was approached by a series of thematically oriented monographs, centered on
the diplomatic aspects and the Chinese role in the demise of the trade. Robert Irick and
Yen Ching-Hwang’s innovative contributions,76 based both on Qing imperial sources in
Taiwan’s archives, argued with slightly different nuances, about the importance of the
coolie trade in a general re-orientation of Qing policies towards overseas Chinese,
underlining the active role of played by major Qing governmental officials—among
others, Prince Gong (Yixin) and Li Hongzhang—in the political campaign that obtained,
through a constant pressure over Portuguese authorities of Macao, the final demise of the
traffic in 1874.
In almost the same years, several Peruvian based scholars—Humberto Rodríguez
Pastor, Michael Gonzales and Ricardo Trazegnies Granda—advocated a new social and
anthropologic perspective in studying the daily life and working conditions of the coolies,
raising the issue of “agency” and challenging previous accounts that underestimated the
capacities of resistance and adaptation of the Chinese towards their employers.77 Pastor,
in particular, criticized the equation between coolies and slaves, arguing that the labor and
legal configuration of the contract worker enabled a middle position definable as semi-
slavery.78
Furthering this “revisionist” approach towards indenture, the prominent African and
World historian David Northrup, Indentured labor in the age of imperialism, 79 tried
instead to insert the Chinese coolie trade within a broader reflection on the international
contract labor market of nineteenth century (which also involved Indian, African and
Pacific Island’s workers) and its relations with the growth of a truly intercontinental

75
Ibid., 195.
76
Irick, Ch’ing Policy Toward the Coolie Trade; Yen, Coolies and Mandarins. By reading the introduction
of their works, it seems to notice a certain rivalry between these two researchers, each one student of a top
scholar in contemporary Chinese historiography (Irick’s advisor was John K. Fairbank, Yen’s Wang
Gungwu).
77
Humberto Rodríguez Pastor, Hijos del celeste imperio en el Peru (1850-1900): Migración, agricultura,
mentalidad y explotación (Lima: Instituto de Apoyo Agrario, 1989); Michael J. Gonzales, “Chinese
Plantation Workers and Social Conflict in Peru in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Latin American
Studies 21, no. 3 (1989): 385–424.; Fernando de Trazegnies Granda, En el país de las colinas de arena
(Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Fondo Editorial, 1994).
78
Rodríguez Pastor, Hijos del celeste imperio, 40 and passim.
79
David Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834-1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995).

21
commodity trade, replacing early modern trade in spices and other goods with high
profit/weight ratio. Basing his conclusions more on the Indian experience than the
Chinese, Northrup argued that the conditions of the coolies represented, with only a few
exceptions, an opportunity of improvement for masses of rural impoverished laborers,
and that the high transportation mortality was often the consequence of the coolies’
destitute status on departure, and the excessive length of their sea journeys.80
There is enough evidence to question this view for the Macao coolie trade. In a more
balanced account, the sinologist Philip A. Kuhn (2008), has tried to capture the right
degree of ambiguity of coolie labor in mid-nineteenth-century Latin America and
Caribbean with the term para-slavery, and the employ of two basic markers: the presence
of a transferrable contract of indenture, and the penal, extra-economic enforcement of the
contractual clauses in the countries of emigration.81
In the last fifteen or ten years Asian American studies have also surged in North
American universities as an attempt to integrate Chinese immigrant into a reassessment of
American history. However, only in a few cases these studies have addressed the Latin
American experience. Nevertheless, this fruitful environment has led to a series of
interesting publications in the last years, with an interdisciplinary approach influenced by
cultural studies. Based on the petitions of the Chinese of Cuba to the imperial commission
sent by the Qing government to assess their conditions in 1874,82 Lisa Yun produced a
remarkable path-breaking monograph in 2008, giving the first comprehensive account of
the coolies’ subjectivity and offering an insightful narrative of the inter-ethnic relations
between Chinese coolies and black slaves on the Cuban plantations system.83 Adopting a
more traditional approach, Professor Evelyn Hu-Dehart of Brown University also
published a spate of distinguished articles on various aspects of the coolie trade and of
Chinese communities in South America.84 The growth of these new currents of studies
recently resulted in a collective volume, first appeared in a special issue of the Journal of

80
Ibid., 95–99.
81
Kuhn, Chinese Among Others, 114.
82
The original text is published in Denise Helly, The Cuba Commission Report: A Hidden History of the
Chinese in Cuba. The Original English-Language Text of 1876 (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1993).
83
Yun, The coolie speaks.
84
Evelyn Hu-DeHart, “Coolies, Shopkeepers, Pioneers: The Chinese of Mexico and Peru (1849–1930),”
Amerasia Journal 15, no. 2 (1989): 91–116; “Chinese Coolie Labour in Cuba in the Nineteenth Century:
Free Labour or Neo-Slavery?,” Slavery & Abolition 14, no. 1 (1993): 67–86; “La Trata Amarilla, The
Yellow Trade and the Middle Passage, 1847-1884,” in Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the
Making of the Modern World, ed. Emma Cristopher, Cassandra Phybus, and Marcus Rediker (Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 2007), 166–203.

22
Chinese Overseas in 2009, edited by the Caribbean scholar Walton Look Lai.85
Another prolific line of investigation has excavated the case-study of some thousand
coolies introduced in the post-emancipation United States South (Louisiana),
transshipped from the Caribbean, and their role in the American anti-Chinese debate that
would culminate in the Chinese exclusion law of 1882.86
It might be noticed from these examples how the majority of studies of the coolie trade
in Western languages focused on the host societies rather than on the recruitment and
maritime transportation of the coolies. In this direction, for instance, a recent Ph.D
dissertation by Benjamin Narvaez, has followed and expanded the efforts of the
“Peruvian school” developed by Pastor, introducing a new comparative methodology to
analyze the Cuban and the Peruvian experiences in a perspective of labor history and
labor relations. A recently published dissertation by Kathleen Lopez, instead, has
examined the history of the Chinese presence in Cuba in a longue durée view.87
On the contrary, little effort has been taken to uncover the organization and the
developments of the coolie traffic in the southern Chinese ports. An insightful study by
Australian scholar Wang Sing-Wu tried to fill in this historiographical gap in 1978,88 but
his limited pool of sources, mainly taken from the British archives, did not allow him to
give adequate attention to the trade in its Macao phase (1860-1874). An unpublished
dissertation by Elliott Arensmeyer (1978), as well, has raised the curtain over the
involvement of British firms in the early stages of the traffic, but has given limited
coverage of the mainly non-British entrepreneurs in its mature years.89
More recently, scholars specialized in migration history have also given their
contribution to the study of the coolie trade, formulating renewed interpretative
frameworks. In his effort to reconceptualize the history of Chinese migrations, in
particular, Adam McKeown has criticized the significance of indentured and contract

85
Republished as a collection of essays: Walton Look Lai and Chee Beng Tan, The Chinese in Latin
America and the Caribbean (Leiden: BRILL, 2010).
86
Moon-Ho Jung, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Lucy M. Cohen, Chinese in the Post-Civil War South: a People
Without History (New Orleans: Louisiana State University Press, 1984).
87
Benjamin Narvaez, “Chinese Coolies in Cuba and Peru: Race, Labor, and Immigration, 1849-1886”,
(Unpublihed Ph.D dissertation, University of Texas, 2010); Kathleen López, “Migrants between Empires
and Nations: The Chinese in Cuba , 1874-1959”, (Unpublished Ph.D dissertation, University of Michigan,
2005); recently published as Kathleen López, Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History (Chapel Hill: The
University of North Carolina Press, 2013).
88
Sing-wu Wang, The Organization of Chinese Emigration 1848-1888 (San Francisco: Chinese Materials
Center, 1978).
89
Elliott C. Arensmeyer, “British Merchant Enterprise and the Chinese Coolie Labour Trade, 1850-1874”
(Unpublished Ph.D dissertation, University of Hawaii, 1979).

23
labor, signaling how most of the scholarship in the field had been framed in unhistorical
dichotomies between settler and circular migrants, fundamentally grounded in a
pretended opposition between stereotyped “European” and “Asian” cultures of
migration,90 and the false assumption that “Chinese labor migrated only under conditions
of direct European control.”91 Furthermore, McKeown has challenged the traditionally
negative view of migration’s intermediary agencies and speculators, showing the role of
the debate on Asian how the image of the migrant as unbound self-motivated individual
constructed through the debate on Asian indenture became instrumental to the issuing of
exclusionary policies in the second half of the nineteenth century.92
McKeown’s positions have proven extremely efficacious in historicizing and
dispelling these Eurocentric biases, but his advices makes it necessary to reinstate a
debate about the role of violence, racism and colonialism in the setting of peculiar
patterns of migrations. 93 Turning his argument upside down we argue that the minor
proportion of contract migration is not a sufficient reason to overlook its historical
significance, and that the presence of similarities between the Asian contract labor system
and contemporary patterns of emigration from “white” European countries, especially
from the Mediterranean (Italian, Portuguese, Spanish), opens instead an avenue for
fruitful comparative investigation.94

1.3.2 Chinese historiography

Among Chinese historians95 the issue of the coolie trade, while a fundamental piece
of the historical memory of the Chinese “century of humiliation”, has rarely received
specific scholarly attention. The studies that have been carried out have introduced few

90
Adam McKeown, “Chinese Emigration in Global Context, 1850–1940,” Journal of Global History 5, no.
01 (2010): 96.
91
McKeown, “The Social Life of Chinese Labor,” 66.
92
McKeown, “How the Box Became Black.”
93
As suggested, for instance, by Sven Beckert, “although historian have recently tended to emphasize the
cultural, climatic and religious factors in explaining the balance of economic power in the world, the story
of cotton strongly suggests the importance of slavery, war, imperialism, tariffs and violence [...] free
markets hence, were to an important degree constructed by coercion.” Sven Beckert, “Cotton: A Global
History,” in Interactions: Transregional Perspectives on World History, ed. Jerry H. Bentley, Renate
Bridenthal, and Anand A. Yang (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005), 60.
94
McKeown, “Chinese Emigration in Global Context, 1850–1940,” 98–103.
95
It may be appropriate, given the scope of this work, to attempt here a brief review of the literature on the
coolie trade in Chinese-language. Given my limited linguistic skills this paragraphs relies heavily on two
bibliographical essays from the late 1990s and early 2000s: Li Anshan 李安山,“Lading Meizhou Huaqiao
Huaren Yanjiu Kaishu” “ 拉 丁 美 洲 華 僑 華 人 研 究 概 述 ” [Chinese Immigrants in Latin America: A
Historiographical Survey] in Yatai Yanjiu Luncun [Collected Writings on Asia-Pacific Studies], vol.1,
(Beijing: Beijing University Press, 2004), 236-358; and Roderich Ptak, “Macau and Sino-Portuguese
Relations. Ca. 1513/1514 to ca. 1900: A Bibliographical Essay,” Monumenta Serica 48 (1998): 343–96.

24
new sources, and have often failed to utilize non-English language—especially
Portuguese—Western sources. Locally based documentation from Guangdong and Fujian
provinces has been also generally neglected, partly because of the precarious state of the
Qing era archives; potentially groundbreaking collections in the Chinese Maritime
Customs’ archives in Guangzhou and Taipei or the pre-1858 archives of the Guangdong-
Guanxi Governor General subtracted by the British army during the Second Opium War
(conserved in the British National Archives) have not been exploited on this topic yet, and
work on local gazeteers has focused on a later period.96
A gulf, moreover, has surfaced between the two main historiographical tradition
concerned with this subject. On one hand, historians of the huaqiao shi current have
conceptualized the coolie experience in the context of the Western colonial expansion, but
have generally lumped together the Latin American, African and Southeast Asian strands
of indentured migration in a longer chronological span and a broader approach. A major
breakthrough in this line of inquiry was achieved in the early and mid-1980s with the
publication by Chen Hanshen, Lu Wendi, Chen Zexian and Peng Jiali of a major
collection of Chinese and Western sources.97 This work has provided the basis for most of
the subsequent Chinese-language accounts of the coolie trade, including scholars from
Taiwan.98
A second strand of studies has emerged, more recently, from the tradition of
interdisciplinary Macao studies (sometimes referred as Macaology).99 These studies have
introduced in the Chinese historiography the use of valuable Portuguese language sources
on the coolie trade, and have been generally in contact with the Portuguese
historiography. Some works on the coolie trade in particular have appeared in the late
1980s, 100 but the issue has been more often addressed without much depth in general
studies of Macao’s history, including, for instance, a valuable monograph by Fei

96
Madeline Y. Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration Between the
United States and South China, 1882-1943 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
97
Chen Hansheng 陈翰笙, Lu Wendi 卢文迪, Chen Zexian 陈泽宪 and Peng Jiali 彭家礼, eds. Huagong
chuguo shiliao huibian 华工出国史料汇编, 10 vols., [Collection of historical sources on overseas Chinese
labor], (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1980).
98
Wu, Jianxiong 吴剑雄, Shijiu shiji qianwang Guba di huagong: 1847– 1874 十九世纪前往古巴的
华工 (1847-1874) [Chinese coolies in Cuba during the nineteenth century], (Taipei: Zhongyang yanjiuyuan
Sanmin zhuyi yanjiusuo, 1988).
99
C.X. George Wei, ed., Macao - The Formation of a Global City (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2013),
xxxi–xxxiii.
100
In particular, Deng Kaisong 邓开颂, “澳门的苦力贸易及其对世界经济的影响” “Aomen de kuli
maoyi ji qi dui shijie jingji de yingxiang” [Macao coolie trade and its impact on the world economy],
Guangdong shehui kexue (1/1988), 54-61.

25
Chengkang, also available in Portuguese and English,101 or works by Chinese scholars
currently based at the University of Macau.102

1.3.3 Portuguese historiography

In his introduction to the third volume of the opera História dos Portugueses no
Extremo Oriente, Oliveira Marques had remarked the persistent gap in the Portuguese
historiography of Macao between a flourishing and copious production on the early-
modern era and a generally inadequate coverage of the nineteenth century, especially
from the perspective of social and cultural histories.103 A shortsighted attitude towards
disciplinary boundaries, had erected an insurmountable historical caesura in the 1820s
(the independence of Brazil), which has for long undermined, with some exceptions, the
possibilities of cross-disciplinary dialogue between the considerably advanced tradition of
early-modern studies in global history and history of Portuguese expansion and the less
developed field of the study of the Portuguese colonial empire in his latter stages.
Within this background, feeble attention has been paid to the Macao coolie trade, often
more from the perspective of a local than a global history. A singular exception in this
panorama was represented by the studies of William Gervase Clarence Smith, author of a
fundamental economic history of The Third Portuguese Empire. In a short research note
written in 1984 Clarence Smith had already claimed the importance of the coolie trade in
a general understanding of the nineteenth-century Portuguese colonialism in a global
framework, calling the attention of scholars upon the availability of copious but yet
unexplored documentation in Portuguese archives.104
By that time, in fact, Portuguese researchers had not yet dedicated any serious effort to
that topic, while scholars based in Macao had been almost exclusively interested in
engaging a narrow-sided polemics with the image of the coolie trade rendered by English-
language historians, in the attempt of comparing its deeds with those of analogous
streams of emigration from the colony of Hong Kong and other Chinese treaty ports

101
Chengkang Fei, Macao 400 years (Shanghai: Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, 1996).
102
Zhidong Hao, Macau History and Society (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012); Vincent
Wai Kit Ho, “Duties and Limitations: The Role of United States Consuls in Macao, 1849-1869,” in
Americans and Macao: Trade, Smuggling and Diplomacy on the South China Coast, ed. Paul A. Van Dyke
(Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012).
103
António H. de Oliveira Marques, ed., História Dos Portugueses No Extremo Oriente, Vol.III, Macau e
Timor: Do Antigo Regime à República (Lisboa: Fundação Oriente, 2000), 7–8. ; of the same opinion Rui
Manuel Loureiro, Guia de história de Macau 1500-1900 (Macau: CTMCDP, 1999).
104
William Gervase Clarence-Smith, The Third Portuguese Empire, 1825-1975: A Study in Economic
Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987); “The Portuguese Contribution to the Cuban
Slave and Coolie Trades in the Nineteenth Century,” Slavery & Abolition 5, no. 1 (1984): 24–33.

26
under the British influence.
This trend dates back to the years of the traffic: it was, for example, the position
expressed by the superintendent of Chinese Emigration Antonio Marques Pereira in 1861,
and most of the contemporary supporters of the coolie trade in Macao.105 Montalto de
Jesus (1902) 106 reinforced this view arguing against the hypocrisy of the abolitionist
British policy, and trying to demonstrate how the majority of the profits of the “coolie
trade” were in hands of foreign merchants, often from the countries that were
campaigning officially against the trade (again Britain and the United States). Padre
Manuel Teixeira’s short essay The So Called Portuguese Slave Trade in Macao of 1976
also proceeded in this direction.107
A new wave of historical studies starting in the 1990s developed a more balanced
approach, recognizing the structural characteristics that differentiated the Macao from
other emigration hubs in nineteenth-century Southern China. The topic, however, has not
been yet made object of a really specific and exhaustive study, while being addressed in
some general histories of the Portuguese colony.108 In his celebrated Encountering Macau
Geoffrey Gunn, for instance, still framed the coolie issue “em termos de se saber se o seu
comércio contribuiu ou não para a prosperidade de Macau”, 109 arguing with Andrade
Corvo’s 1874 official relation that it actually did not:

Dominado por capital estrangeiro, o comércio beneficiava e enriquecia as

companhias estrangeiras (Espanha, Peru, etc.) e seus agentes. Em termos internos, o
comércio trazia corrupção a Macau enquanto o desenvolvimento comercial e a
prosperidade da colonia lucravam marginalmente.110

He acknowledged, however the connections of the coolie trade with a complex

“underworld”, “envolvido no comércio do opio, das mui tsai, e da prostituição”,111 and
the connivances of local Portuguese (and Chinese) authorities and officials.
Beatriz Basto da Silva’s Emigração de Cules stands until now as the only Portuguese

105
António Feliciano Marques Pereira, Relatorio da Emigração Chineza em Macau (Macau: Typographia
de José da Silva, 1861).
106
Carlos Augusto Montalto de Jesus, Historic Macao (Hong Kong: Kelly & Walsh, 1902).
107
Padre Manuel Teixeira, O comércio de escravos em Macau: The so called Portuguese slave trade in
Macao (Macau: Imprensa Nacional, 1976).
108
Geoffrey C. Gunn, Encountering Macau: A Portuguese City-state On The Periphery Of China, 1557-
1999 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996); translated into Portuguese as Geoffrey C. Gunn, Ao encontro de
Macau: Uma cidade-estado Portuguesa na periferia da China, 1557-1999 (Macau: Fundação Macau,
1999); José Vicente Serrão, “Macau,” in Nova História da Expansão Portuguesa, Vol. 10: O império
africano 1825-1890, ed. Valentim Alexandre and Jill Dias (Lisboa: Estampa, 1998).
109
Gunn, Ao encontro de Macau, 106–107.
110
Ibid.
111
Ibid.

27
monograph available entirely dedicated to the coolie trade. 112 Although admittedly not
intended as a comprehensive account, 113 her book makes one of the most insightful
contributions on the issue in the international scene, particularly valuable for her use of
high quality first hand sources from the Macao Historical Archives (of which she was for
long time director), including some rare collections that have been regretfully lost after
Macao’s handover to the People’s Republic of China in 1999.
In the last decade, a series of general studies of diplomatic history had successfully
placed the issue of the coolie trade into the big picture of the long struggle of the
Portuguese authorities to obtain recognition for the colonial status of Macao, and the
repeated attempts to settle treaties with the Qing Empire along the 1850s, 1860s and
1870s. 114 Alfredo Gomes Dias, author of several path-breaking works on Macao’s
political and diplomatic history in the nineteenth century, has approached briefly the
coolie issue, reacting against traditional narratives of coolies’ victimization, resulting
eventually in some extent to a readdress of the efficacy of later 1870s regulations on the
trade issued by Macao’s authorities.115
Recently, subject-specific studies published on the Macao’s Cultural Institute excellent
journal Review of Culture have started to address singular aspects of the coolie trade,
disclosing for instance the role of American traffickers in the setting up of the Macao
coolie network and their use of the Portuguese false flag to cover their participation after
the 1862’s US Congress ban;116 while historian of architecture Francisco Vizeu Pinheiro
has interestingly attempted to trace the location of the coolie depots in Macao, the
infamous barracoons, based on a study of contemporary travel literature and early
twentieth century tourist guidebooks.117

112
Silva, Emigração de cules.
113
Ibid., 179.
114
António Vasconcelos de Saldanha, Estudos Sobre As Relações Luso-Chinesas (Lisboa: Instituto
Superior de Ciências Sociais e Políticas, 1996); António Vasconcelos de Saldanha, O Tratado Impossível:
Um exercício de diplomacia luso-chinesa num contexto internacional em mudança, 1842-1887 (Lisboa:
Instituto Diplomático, 2006). An earlier account in Lourenço Maria da Conceição, Macau entre dois
tratados com a China (Macau: Instituto Cultural de Macau, 1988).
115
Alfredo Gomes Dias, Sob o signo da transição: Macau no século XIX (Macau: Instituto Português do
Oriente, 1998); “Do tráfico de escravos à emigração dos cules”; Cf. also Jorge Manuel dos Santos Alves,
Um porto entre dois Impérios: Estudos sobre Macau e as relações luso-chinesas (Macau: Instituto
Português do Oriente, 1999).
116
Maria Teresa Lopes da Silva, “Macau e os cules na política dos EUA ( 1844-1874 ),” Review of Culture
(International Edition), no. 29 (2009): 17–30. Teresa Lopes da Silva is the current Portuguese leading
expert on the coolie trade, and is expected to defend her Ph.D. dissertation on the topic soon.
117
Francisco Vizeu Pinheiro, “Macao’s Coolie Trade: One City, Two Cultures, Three Communities. Social
Harmony, Separate Development and Taxing Vices,” Review of Culture (International Edition), no. 35
(2010): 60–81.

28
1.3.4 Italian historiography

Finally addressing the much limited context of Italian historiography, we must sadly
recognize a nearly complete vacuum on this subject. Almost no study has dealt with the
participation of Italian subjects to the coolie trade.118 Early accounts appeared during the
fascist era in the form of non-academic local maritime history, like the works of Tommaso
Gropallo, and Gio Batta Ferrari. 119 These studies, mainly based on contemporary oral
testimonies, provide interesting sources for cross-checking the biographical profiles of
some coolie traders and their family background, although they are generally unscientific
and inflated by a bombastic exaltation of the Genoese achievement in the New World.
In more recent times, some coverage of this topic has come from two short articles by
Mario Enrico Ferrari (1982) and Eugenio Clini (2001)120, but none of them has showed an
adequate understanding of the actual dimensions of the affair. Taken apart a quite sterile
dispute on the possible involvement of Giuseppe Garibaldi in the coolie business in 1852-
1853 which will be dealt with later,121 the topic was also touched upon by two different
sets of studies, which however failed in getting into reciprocal contact. The first school,
developed from the ‘60s studies on Italo-Chinese diplomatic relations and led by the
pioneering historian of East Asia Giorgio Borsa, dealt with some of the diplomatic
documentation and noticed the attempt by Italian ambassadors and Navy officers to stop
the involvement of their countrymen in the trade (Borsa, Licata, and more recently
Francioni). 122 Still, Borsa’s interpretation on this point did not take notice of the gap
between the official declarations and the effective actions taken, that seen in closer detail
showed a general incompetence and inactivity of the Italian representatives to deal with
118
For instance, a recent contribution by the sinologist Giorgio Trentin, whose Ph.D. dissertation addressed
the nineteenth century inter-Asian labor migration, examined the main dynamics of the coolie trade to Cuba
and Peru, but did not give any mention of the Italian presence in it: Giorgio Trentin, “Il dramma dei coolies
in Occidente: il caso cubano,” in Caro Maestro... Scritti in onore di Lionello Lanciotti, ed. M.Scarpari and
T. Lippiello (Venezia: Cafoscarina, 2005), 1201–14.
119
Tommaso Gropallo, Il romanzo della vela, Milano, Ceschina, 1929; Gio. Bono Ferrari, Capitani di mare
e bastimenti di Liguria del secolo XIX: Genova e la riviera del Levante (Rapallo: Tigullio, 1939).
120
Mario Enrico Ferrari, “Sulla tratta dei ‘coolies’ cinesi a Macao nel secolo XIX: l’abolizione della
schiavitù e lo sfruttamento di nuovi ‘coatti’ nelle colonie europee e in America Latina,” Storia
Contemporanea XIV, no. 2 (1983): 309–32; Eugenio Clini, “L’ingaggio dei coolies nel XIX secolo,”
Mondo Cinese, no. 31 (2001).
121
Cf. the debate in Giorgio Borsa, Paolo Beonio Brocchieri, and Philip Kenneth Cowie, Garibaldi,
Mazzini e Il Risorgimento Nel Risveglio dell’Asia e dell’Africa (Milano: Franco Angeli, 1984). Also Philip
Kenneth Cowie, “Contro la tesi di ‘Garibaldi negriero,’” Rassegna storica del Risorgimento LXXXV, no.
III (1998): 389–97. Also, Appendix II.
122
Giorgio Borsa, Italia e Cina nel secolo XIX (Milano: Ediz. di Comunità, 1961); Glauco Licata, Notabili
della Terza Italia (Roma: Cinque lune, 1968); more recently, see Andrea Francioni, Il banchetto cinese:
L’Italia fra le Treaty Powers (Siena: Nuova Immagine Editrice, 2004). Only a few lines on the coolie trade
can be located in the recent Shirley Ann Smith, Imperial designs: Italians in China, 1900-1947 (Madison:
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2012), 5,22 n.14, n.16.

29
this international issue.123
Conversely, some specialists of the Italian emigration in Peru, especially Gabriella
Chiaramonti and Giovanni Bonfiglio, uncovered some of the activities of the main Italian
coolie traders, producing some excellent social and biographical accounts, but failed to
fully notice their relevancy in a broader context.124 Among the aims of our work, against
this backdrop, is an attempt to bridge the achievements of these two scholarly traditions
and integrate their results within the context of the international historiography on the
coolie trade.

1.4 Outline of chapters

This thesis is divided into seven chapters, including this introduction, organized in a
mixed chronological and thematic order. The following chapter locates the coolie trade
into the processes of globalization at stage in the mid-nineteenth century, underlying its
multiple connections with the contemporary circulation of goods, people and capital. If in
general terms the coolie trade developed from preexistent patterns of Chinese labor
migration to Southeast Asia, four historical events concurred to produce its specific
conditions: the process of slave emancipation and the international struggle against the
African slave trade; the discovery of guano’s fertilizing proprieties and the beginning of
exploitation of the Chincha guano islands in Peru—which compelled the Andean republic
to procure a steady and reliable source of manpower—the so-called “opening” of China
after the First Opium War and the setting up of the treaty system with the specific
guarantees to Western merchants in China; and lastly, the California gold rush, which
created in China a powerful spontaneous push to migrate abroad preyed upon by the
unscrupulous speculators of the coolie traffic in its early stages.
Chapter 3 shifts the angle to a local scale of analysis describing the impact of the
coolie trade in southern China and the growth of Macao as the major entrepôt for the
recruitment and export of Chinese laborers. Crucial in this process was the development
of a global press campaign against the coolie trade that gradually forced this business out
of the British controlled treaty ports, with a few exceptions, by 1861-1862. These years
also coincided with a renewed demand of coolie labor from the Peruvian sugar and cotton

123
More details in Chapter 6 and 7.
124
Gabriella Chiaramonti, “L’emigrazione italiana in America Latina nell’Ottocento: il caso peruviano,”
Movimento operaio e socialista 2, no. 2 (1981); “La migración italiana en América Latina. El caso
peruano,” Apuntes 13 (1983): 15–36; Giovanni Bonfiglio, Gli italiani nella società peruviana: Una visione
storica (Torino: Edizioni Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli, 1999). See also Giovanni Bonfiglio, Dizionario
storico-biografico degli italiani in Perù (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1998).

30
plantations determined by the increased cotton price during the American Civil War.
Chapter 4 explores instead the organization of the Macao coolie trade during this
transitional stage, displaying how the society of Macao adapted to this renewed economic
stimulus, and the political implications of this change.
Starting with an in-depth description of the Genoese emigration to Peru in the early
nineteenth century, Chapter 5 introduces the core topic of this thesis analyzing the modes
of participation of Italian merchants in the business. The chapter traces a series of
individual trajectories of Italian coolie traffickers, and elaborates a census of their
contribution. According to my preliminary estimations, based on a complex crossing of
primary—newspapers and archival documentation—and secondary sources, their share in
the trade was not insignificant, about one sixth of the total, which grows to a much higher
share if we limit our figure to the Peruvian traffic, and to their years of activity. In
addition, Italian ships and captains can be counted among the most long-lived and
frequent protagonists of the coolie traffic, with peaks of 7 voyages—Captain Raffaele
Demoro, who died in his last voyage—or 12 passages for a single coolie ship, record
detained by the clipper Camillo Cavour, of the Canevaro y Cía. Chapter 6 addresses the
involvement of the Italian diplomacy in the management and control of the coolie
business. Drawing mainly from sources from the Italian Foreign Ministry, it explores it
interrogates the main lines of the Italian government position on the issue, from the
appointment of a consul in Macao in 1864 to the publishing of a consular report by the
plenipotentiary minister to China and Japan Vittorio Sallier de La Tour in 1871. A specific
episode, more than others, mobilized the Italian society, bringing the issue even to the
attention of the Parliament; the coolie uprising on the ship Teresa, taken over and forced
to liberate its human cargo on the Chinese shores in 1868. This case, part of a long series
of maritime disasters that had fraught the records of the coolie trade, will be addressed
specifically in Chapter 7, along with a study of the alleged relations between the coolie
trade and the contemporary Chinese piracy.

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