The title might distract us from the very important point this book is making. Its real subject pertains to the tensions between the American ideal of free immigration and citizenship versus the realities of the labour market looking for cheap labour abroad, and which, precisely because of its lack of citizen rights, can be hired cheaply. In 1862, at the beginning of the Civil War, the United States Senate outlawed the importation of coolies from China by American citizens and on American vessels because the practice was considered to be a continuation of the system of slavery. This law was aimed to stop the import of Asian coolies to the plantation belt in the states adjacent to the Gulf of Mexico. It did not, however, change the fact that thousands of Chinese had already entered the United States through San Francisco, and that they could easily move to the Southern states after the Pacific Railroad was completed in 1869.
In the aftermath of the Civil War and the emancipation of the black population of the South, the planters launched a campaign to import Chinese labour under the guise of “free labour immigrants”. The planter elite pursued their interests, trying to shift from slavery to indentured labour, even though they calibrated their language and spoke about free labour and free immigration. They dreamt of tens of thousands of Chinese labourers flooding the devastated sugar plantations of the South and reviving what was once an important sugar-producing part of the world. Few Chinese actually came, but it was enough to sharpen racial tensions. In the wake of the Civil War, Southern “poor whites” and smaller planters had hoped for the reconstruction of a white-dominated Southern settler community and definitely not a multi-ethnic society. Actually, the latter did not happen. Even though Asian migrants were reluctantly accorded legal status by US federal authorities, socially they were confined to the status of coolies throughout the nineteenth century. In fact, Chinese labour migrants were excluded from the US altogether from 1882 onwards. As Moon-Ho Jung notes: “The last slave-trade law, from this angle, was simultaneously the first immigration law” (p. 38).
The debates on Asian coolies were at the heart of the identity formation of the United States as a settler colony. After the abolition of slavery, American citizenship and whiteness were no longer identical, while the United States was not yet ready to conceive of itself as a multi-racial nation. The country began to redefine itself in the early 1860s as a country for white immigrants. It was in those years that the word “trafficking” was used to describe the migration of Chinese coolies across the Gulf of Mexico. Indeed, the same word is in use today to describe unauthorized immigrants who are smuggled in under appalling circumstances.
Again, this book offers a lot more than a labour history of Louisiana in the wake of the Civil War, as it touches directly on the nexus between citizenship, labour, and migration. And all this is based upon a meticulous investigation using primary sources. Yet, a minor point of critique may be appropriate. Though there is an extensive literature on race, migration, and citizenship in the United States, the author makes only scant reference to it. There is no reference to the work of Adam McKeown, for example, and only one, a rather tongue-in-cheek one at that, to the work of Matthew Frye Jacobson rather than the more extensive engagement with his Whiteness of a Different Color one might have expected.
