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#Post#: 10556--------------------------------------------------
Coolies
DIR By: 90sRetroFan
Date: January 13, 2022, 11:28 pm
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HTML https://www.yahoo.com/news/making-sugar-making-coolies-chinese-130150429.html
--- Quote ---
> Making sugar, making 'coolies': Chinese laborers toiled
alongside Black workers on 19th-century Louisiana plantations
> ...
> “Racism is real in America, and it always has been,” Vice
President Kamala Harris said on March 19, 2021. “In the 1860s,
as Chinese workers built the transcontinental railroad, there
were laws on the books, in America, forbidding them from owning
property.”
>
> In fact, far more Asian workers moved to the Americas in the
19th century to make sugar than to build the transcontinental
railroad. It is a history that can force Americans to contend
with colonial violence in the making of the modern world, dating
back centuries to Christopher Columbus and his search for trade
routes and quick wealth.
>
> As I explore in my book “Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and
Sugar in the Age of Emancipation,” thousands of Chinese migrants
were recruited to work side by side with African Americans on
Louisiana’s sugar plantations after the Civil War. Though now a
largely forgotten episode in history, their migration played a
key role in renewing and reinforcing the racist foundation of
American citizenship. Recruited and reviled as “coolies,” their
presence in sugar production helped justify racial exclusion
after the abolition of slavery.
> ...
> In places where sugar cane is grown, such as Mauritius, Fiji,
Hawaii, Guyana, Trinidad and Suriname, there is usually a
sizable population of Asians who can trace their ancestry to
India, China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia and
elsewhere. They are descendants of sugar plantation workers,
whose migration and labor embodied the limitations and
contradictions of chattel slavery’s slow death in the 19th
century.
>
> Beginning in the 17th century, the global sugar industry and
slavery grew hand in hand to shape the course of capitalist
development. Mass consumption of sugar in industrializing Europe
and North America rested on mass production of sugar by enslaved
Africans in the colonies. The whip, the market, and the law
institutionalized slavery across the Americas, including in the
U.S.
>
> When the Haitian Revolution erupted in 1791 and Napoleon
Bonaparte’s mission to reclaim Saint-Domingue, France’s most
prized colony, failed, slaveholding regimes around the world
grew alarmed. In response to a series of slave rebellions in its
own sugar colonies, especially in Jamaica, the British Empire
formally abolished slavery in the 1830s. British emancipation
included a payment of £20 million to slave owners, an immense
sum of money that British taxpayers made loan payments on until
2015.
>
> Importing indentured labor from Asia emerged as a potential
way to maintain the British Empire’s sugar plantation system. In
1838 John Gladstone, father of future prime minister William E.
Gladstone, arranged for the shipment of 396 South Asian workers,
bound to five years of indentured labor, to his sugar estates in
British Guiana. The experiment with “Gladstone coolies,” as
those workers came to be known, inaugurated what historian Hugh
Tinker called “a new system of slavery,” which would endure for
nearly a century.
>
> Louisiana’s sugar bowl
>
> Louisiana is firmly enmeshed in the global history of empire,
sugar and slavery. When Bonaparte’s dream to make France great
again collapsed in Haiti, he agreed to sell France’s claims in
North America to the U.S. empire in 1803, in what has come to be
known as the Louisiana Purchase. Plantation owners who escaped
Saint-Domingue with their enslaved workers helped establish a
booming sugar industry in southern Louisiana.
>
> On huge plantations surrounding New Orleans, home of the
largest slave market in the antebellum South, sugar production
took off in the first half of the 19th century. By 1853,
Louisiana was producing nearly 25% of all exportable sugar in
the world.
>
> Enslaved Black workers made that phenomenal growth possible.
On the eve of the Civil War, Louisiana’s sugar industry was
valued at US$200 million. More than half of that figure
represented the valuation of the ownership of human beings –
Black people who did the backbreaking labor of making sugar on a
grand scale.
>
> During the Civil War, Black workers rebelled and joined what
W.E.B. Du Bois called the “General Strike,” abandoning sugar
production as quickly as they could. On plantation after
plantation, Black workers ran away. By the war’s end,
approximately $193 million of the sugar industry’s prewar value
had vanished.
>
> Disappearing acts
>
> Desperate to regain power and authority after the war,
Louisiana’s wealthiest planters studied and learned from their
Caribbean counterparts. They, too, looked to Asian workers for
their salvation, fantasizing that so-called “coolies” would be
cheap, industrious and submissive – a “model minority” of sorts.
>
> Thousands of Chinese workers landed in Louisiana between 1866
and 1870, recruited from the Caribbean, China and California.
Bound to multiyear contracts, they symbolized Louisiana
planters’ racial hope for a new system of slavery. “We can drive
the n*****s out and import coolies that will work better, at
less expense,” journalist Whitelaw Reid reported hearing all
across the South in 1866, “and relieve us from this cursed
n***** impudence.”
>
> To great fanfare, Louisiana’s wealthiest planters spent
thousands of dollars to recruit gangs of Chinese workers. When
140 Chinese laborers arrived on Millaudon plantation near New
Orleans on July 4, 1870, at a cost of about $10,000 in
recruitment fees, the New Orleans Times reported that they were
“young, athletic, intelligent, sober and cleanly” and superior
to “the vast majority of our African population.”
>
> Mostly segregated in specifically designated buildings in
former slave quarters, Chinese workers generally contracted to
work for wage rates far below the prevailing rate in the sugar
region: around $14 per month, compared with about $20 per month
that local Black men received. But the competition between Black
and Chinese laborers that planters predicted did not
materialize.
>
> On the ground, Chinese workers behaved no differently from
Black workers. When they heard that other workers earned more,
they demanded the same. When planters refused, they ran away.
The Chinese recruits, the Planters’ Banner observed in 1871,
were “fond of changing about, run away worse than negroes, and …
leave as soon as anybody offers them higher wages.”
>
> Adapting to the rhythms of sugar production, where workers
were in high demand during the harvest season at the end of the
year, Chinese workers transformed themselves from long-term
contract laborers to short-term seasonal laborers. Many moved
around Louisiana throughout the 1870s, stopping over in New
Orleans and other towns between stints on sugar plantations.
Many others left sugar production altogether. In their search
for something better, Chinese workers blended into the landscape
so well that they disappeared.
>
> But the racial image of Asian workers as industrious and
submissive “coolies” making sugar on plantations stuck. When
Congress debated excluding the Chinese from the United States in
1882, Rep. Horace F. Page of California argued that the United
States could not allow the entry of “millions of cooly slaves
and serfs.” That racial reasoning would justify a long series of
anti-Asian laws and policies on immigration and naturalization
for nearly a century.
--- End Quote ---
#Post#: 15031--------------------------------------------------
Re: Coolies
DIR By: 90sRetroFan
Date: August 7, 2022, 6:02 pm
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HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiX3hTPGoCg
#Post#: 20013--------------------------------------------------
Re: Coolies
DIR By: 90sRetroFan
Date: May 30, 2023, 10:11 pm
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HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgWU_EUcWlc
Woke comments:
--- Quote ---
> My great great gran was fetching water from the river and a
cart stopped and said they will give her a lift to the village (
she had her small daughter with her ) . She then realised they
were going the wrong way and next thing was loaded on a boat to
South Africa.
--- End Quote ---
--- Quote ---
> I know a family whose matriarch was kidnapped in India on her
way to the shop to get food for her kids and forced to sign
indenture contract. She never saw her young kids again and cried
about it everyday till her death
--- End Quote ---
--- Quote ---
> This is exactly why the phrase and attitude of “get over it”
in terms of slavery and similar traumas is not only blunt, but
also highly violent. You cannot get over trauma (inherited or
not) when society is constantly trying to erase your story out
of convenience while basically living off of your family’s
sufferings. This is beyond sickening. Keep bringing these
atrocities to the surface
--- End Quote ---
--- Quote ---
> They feel that if we keep talking about it, then we are making
them feel bad for things their ancestors did. Well mate, if you
benefited and still continue to benefit form those horrors, you
should feel bad!!
--- End Quote ---
--- Quote ---
> A great deal of the racism from Indians is inherited by the
colonial mindset. When I say Indians I’m not talking about India
now, but India then (so Pakistan and Bangladesh too, so let’s
call it the subcontinent). They were used as the heavies for the
British empire, on all levels of civil service/indenture. So the
ingrained idea that brown is better than black but inferior to
white still remains.
> It’s less pronounced (although still there) with those in the
west, but believe me it’s still there.
--- End Quote ---
--- Quote ---
> Trying to form a wedge between two groups, both exploited by
the British, is wrong and unproductive.
--- End Quote ---
--- Quote ---
> This is the legacy of colonialism, where you can’t understand
the beauty of what you had for the plastic existence you have
today. Just think, the Ganges River was never polluted the way
it is today before colonialism but you’d call that progress
right?
--- End Quote ---
--- Quote ---
> the British never apologised, but even if they did it wouldn’t
be genuine.
--- End Quote ---
--- Quote ---
> We Indians should not forget what these Brits has done to us.
We should held them accountable for all of these.
--- End Quote ---
#Post#: 22990--------------------------------------------------
Re: Coolies
DIR By: 90sRetroFan
Date: October 23, 2023, 2:04 pm
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HTML https://www.yahoo.com/news/navy-ends-tradition-chinese-laundrymen-133143001.html
--- Quote ---
> Navy ends tradition of Chinese laundrymen on warships over
spying fears
> ...
> The Navy is ditching its century-old tradition of having
Chinese servants on warships amid fears they could be spying.
>
> Hundreds of Chinese laundrymen have worked on British ships
since the 1930s with most from Hong Kong but will now be
replaced by Nepalese Gurkhas.
--- End Quote ---
Woke comments:
--- Quote ---
> classic british imperial racism still in full display.
--- End Quote ---
--- Quote ---
> re: "having Chinese servants"
>
> I know England is steeped in tradition, but come on!
--- End Quote ---
--- Quote ---
> LOL because of an espionage risk? How about the fact that it's
basically just racist AF!
--- End Quote ---
--- Quote ---
> This is how brainwashed material planted in your brain day in
day out. As long the title has Chinese and spy, then it is
working. When you see it everyday consistently for a long period
of time.
--- End Quote ---
--- Quote ---
> White people can't do their own laundry? What in the actual...
--- End Quote ---
--- Quote ---
> We don't want anyone finding out how we get our white so
white.
--- End Quote ---
--- Quote ---
> What’s wrong with Caucasian English laundry men if there are
fears of spying? Is it because you don’t want to do the work?
Now you got Nepalese doing it smh.
--- End Quote ---
--- Quote ---
> This is creepy, racist, and about three quarters of a century
out of date as a practice. Now they're going to replace them
with another targeted ethnic group? How about their sailors do
their own laundry? What's up with this? It's outrageous.
--- End Quote ---
--- Quote ---
> Just a long standing slavery tradition
--- End Quote ---
--- Quote ---
> Geez, I thought that was just a stereotype from old movies
from the 1930's and 40's.
--- End Quote ---
--- Quote ---
> t’s racists from the beginning. It was racists all along. Use
tradition as an excuse.
--- End Quote ---
--- Quote ---
> Proving beyond a shadow of a doubt what a group of Racist
hoggies the Pommienavy and government in general are.
--- End Quote ---
--- Quote ---
> When your historically entitled country can’t function without
servants…
--- End Quote ---
--- Quote ---
> Blatant colonial exploitation.
--- End Quote ---
--- Quote ---
> I find it a bit pathetic that the Royal Navy, instead of
having their own service members perform laundry duty like the
US Navy, somehow think tasks like this are below them and hire
'servants' from 'colonial' countries to take care of tasks like
this.
--- End Quote ---
--- Quote ---
> The U.S. navy used to use Filipinos to perform the same kind
of duties.
--- End Quote ---
--- Quote ---
> The US Navy did it until 1970.
--- End Quote ---
--- Quote ---
> It's disgusting that the Brits continues its colonial /
imperialist traditions of using ethnic Chinese & now Nepalese
Ghurkas to do their laundry. The sun set on the British Empire a
hundred years ago. The British Handover of Hong Kong back to
China on July 1, 1997 was a fantastic celebration in HK Harbor.
We Americans loved witnessing the removal of the British Union
Jack from everywhere in the former colony. And I reminded a Brit
that it was our Independence Day celebration 3 days from now
(July 4). LOL.
--- End Quote ---
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