Among Australia’S Pioneers: Chinese Indentured Pastoral Workers on the Northern Frontier 1848 to C.1880

By Margaret Slocomb

The almost simultaneous abolition of the slave trade and the cessation of convict transportation to the colony of New South Walesnow eastern mainland Australiastarted a quest by the squatter pastoralists for alternative sources of cheap labor for their vast sheep runs. Over a period of five years, beginning from 1848, around three thousand Chinese men and boys from Fujian Province were recruited under conditions little different from the slave trade.

In Among Australias Pioneers, author Margaret Slocomb focuses on the experiences of approximately two hundred of these Chinese laborers between 1848 and 1853. Her research examines their working conditions during the five-year indenture period and also traces the lives of several of the men who, at the end of their contract, chose to remain in those districts, which, by then, had become familiar to them. Perhaps they regarded themselves as pioneer immigrants.

Slocomb recounts the experiences of these men on the dangerous northern frontier of European settlement. While some succumbed to the despair and loneliness of a shepherds life, others survived their indenture and went on to play an important role in the emerging society of the new colony of Queensland. They may certainly be counted among the nations pioneers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press AU
• Release date: Jul 25, 2014
• ISBN: 9781452524818

Margaret Slocomb

Margaret Slocomb holds a PhD in history from the University of Queensland, Australia. An education specialist, she spent most of her professional career in China and several countries in Southeast Asia, particularly Cambodia. This is her first book on Australian history.

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Copyright © 2014 Margaret Slocomb.

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ISBN: 978-1-4525-2480-1 (sc)

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Balboa Press rev. date: 07/17/2014

Contents

Tables, Figures and Illustrations

List of Abbreviations

Preface

Part I

Supply And Demand

Chapter 1 Indentured Labour Migration In The Nineteenth Century

Chapter 2 The China Trade

Chapter 3 The Australian Frontier

Chapter 4 Labour Issues

Part II

Among The Pioneers

Chapter 5 Celestial Shepherds

Chapter 6 Labour

Chapter 7 Reward For Labour

Chapter 8 Masters And Servants

Chapter 9 Vagrants, Criminals And Dangerous Lunatics

Part III

Love And Fortune

Chapter 10 Post-Indenture Challenges And Opportunities

Chapter 11 Fortune

Chapter 12 Success

Bibliography

Notes

The Green Leaf’s Attachment to the Root

Don’t ask me where to go,

my heart is attached to you.

Don’t ask me where to go,

my passions go with you.

I am one of your green leaves,

My root is deep in your soil.

Waving farewell in spring breeze,

I leave here and go far away.

Whichever cloud I dwell upon,

my gaze is always on you.

If I sing in the wind,

the song is also for you.

So don’t ask me where to go,

My road is full of memory.

Please bless me and I’ll bless you.

This is the green leaf’s attachment

to the root.

Wang Jian

(Inscription on Memorial Stone, Overseas Chinese Museum, Xiamen.)

Tables, Figures and Illustrations

Tables

Table 1: Wages in relation to wool prices and exports, 1839–1850⁷

Table 2: Chinese Emigrant Ships from Amoy for New South Wales, 1848–53¹³

Table 3: Australian Wool Exports to England 1859-70 and Prices Realised³⁰

Table 4: Rate of Country Wages, Per Annum, with Rations, 1860¹⁴

Table 5: Burnett District Pastoral Workers’ Wages, 1864–65 Season¹⁵

Table 6: Booubyjan Station Store Prices at July 1, 1854²⁰

Figures

Figure 1 - China in the 19th Century.

Figure 2 - Area of Pastoral Settlement in Queensland by 1859

Figure 3 - Map of Queensland census districts, 1871: Burnett District

Figure 4 - Map of Queensland census districts, 1871: Wide Bay District

Illustrations

1. Five of the nine Archer brothers and a friend (centre back) in Brisbane, 1867. Tom is standing second from the left. (John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland, Neg: 8875)

2. Burnett Valley seen from McConnell’s Lookout near Gayndah

3. Part of Boonara Station, 2012.

4. Drovers and farm hands, Jimbour Station, 1869. (John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland, Neg:74272)

5. Woolshed at Booubyjan Station, c.1865. (John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland, Neg:86330)

6. Boondooma Station Homestead, 2012

7. Original Boondooma Station Store, 2012

8. Bottle tree in grounds of Gayndah Courthouse, 1929 (John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland, Neg:APA-099-0001-0004)

9. Early photograph of Maryborough, 1864 (John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland, Neg:35111)

10. South Sea Island worker at Fairymead Sugar Mill near Bundaberg, c.1880 (Fairymead Mill Collection [FMC], Picture Bundaberg:bun01951)

11. Recruiting schooner Locheil moored at Fairymead wharf, c.1880 (FMC, Picture Bundaberg:bun01971)

12. South Sea Island workers’ grass houses at Fairymead, c.1880 (FMC Collection, Picture Bundaberg:bun01955)

13. Jim Channer, eldest son of Tan Chan, c.1895

14. Chinese market gardener delivering vegetables, Bundaberg, c.1880 (FMC, Picture Bundaberg:bun01949)

15. Ashney family grave, Gayndah Cemetery, and memorial to Thomas Ashney.

16. Mary Ann Sooti, née Channer, eldest child of Tan Chan, with daughters Jessie Rowe Channer and Grace Sooti.

List of Abbreviations

Preface

This book aims to add to the body of academic knowledge concerning post-slavery indentured labour that was recruited mainly in Asia and the South Pacific for employment in the colonies of Western imperialist powers as recently as the end of the Second World War. The focus is a narrow one and deals with the experiences of around two hundred Chinese labourers (out of a total number of a little more than three thousand men spread throughout eastern Australia) who were imported by European, mainly British, squatters to provide cheap, reliable labour on the pastoral runs of two northern frontier districts of colonial New South Wales between 1848 and 1853. It examines their working conditions during the five-year indenture period and also traces the lives of several of the men who, at the end of their contract, chose to remain in those districts which had become familiar to them and in which, perhaps, they regarded themselves as pioneer immigrants.

The preliminary archival research concerning the recruitment, arrival and deployment in Australia of the Chinese indentured labourers had already been conducted for two doctoral theses: Wang Singwu’s The Organization of Chinese Emigration 1848-1888: With Special Reference to Chinese Emigration to Australia (San Francisco: Chinese Materials Center, Inc., 1978) and Maxine Darnell’s thesis of 1997 entitled The Chinese Labour Trade to New South Wales 1783-1853: an exposition of motives and outcomes (unpublished, University of New England). The latter study which concerns the Northern Districts of the colony of New South Wales provided invaluable appendices that gave some of the indentured workers’ names, their employers, and locations of contract. Without either of these foundation studies, the present work would have taken many more years of detailed research and expense. My gratitude and respect for these historians’ work is sincerely felt.

Although there have been other studies of Chinese immigration and adaptation in Australian colonial history, particularly those by Cathie May, Shirley Fitzgerald, Eric Rolls, and Barry McGowan, to my knowledge, apart from the two theses already mentioned, there are none that deal specifically with Chinese immigration that was unrelated to the gold discoveries. The immigration experience of the Chinese indentured pastoral workers was so different from that of the Chinese diggers that they demand a history of their own.

The contiguous districts of Wide Bay and Burnett in what is now Queensland developed from the co-dependency of port and productive hinterland, and even today that alliance is recognized by the familiar reference to the hyphenated Wide Bay-Burnett region. The Wide Bay district had a more diversified economy and a more transient population than the Burnett which was solidly pastoral. There were Chinese indentured labourers in the Wide Bay but the local press, the Chronicle, took little interest in them individually. In the Burnett, on the other hand, the editor of the Argus delighted in reporting the crimes and escapades of the Chinese shepherds regularly and at length. Both newspapers, along with the leading metropolitan papers, also assumed responsibility through their editorials and reporting styles for shaping local attitudes towards the relatively large number of young, single, Chinese males in these remote districts. Colonial newspapers were an invaluable source of information.

Of concern to me during the writing of this book was making use of terms that are regarded today as politically and culturally inappropriate: reference to coloured labour, in particular, could not be avoided. There were European indentured labourers on Burnett sheep runs, but, for the most part, the squatters sought cheap and submissive labour that could be reliably supplied and easily accessed. They also preferred labour from sources where its real value on the harsh and often dangerous Australian frontier was unknown, even unknowable, to the immigrant workers. Once a five-year contract was signed, their wage rates were incontestable and a master’s authority was firmly backed by labour law. The near-perfect sources for this sort of labour were India, China and the South Sea Islands and this labour was officially referred to as coloured. Other sensitive terms are those of white and black with reference to Europeans and indigenous Australians and the relationship between them. I have also used Kanakas and Celestials which may be regarded by some descendants of South Sea Islander and Chinese labourers as disrespectful.

Accusations of slavery and racism haunt this episode of early Queensland history when several experiments with indentured coloured labour were conducted, all of them occurring in the Wide Bay-Burnett. These indentured labourers were never slaves, even though some employers’ behaviour and attitudes towards them belied this. An indenture was a legal contract with prescribed time and wage limits. The colonial justice system, for the most part, upheld the basic tenets of the laws that provided a small measure of protection to the worker under contract. Many abuses occurred, but justice was also served. The presence and practice of racism with regard to these imported labourers, however, is far more difficult to defend or even to demonstrate.

I argue that frontier Australian society in the years before, say, 1874 or 1875, was racist specifically with regard to indigenous Australians. The history of first contact has been thoroughly researched, explored and recorded by historians and there is no question that the most abhorrent violence, perhaps genocide, was perpetrated against indigenous Australians who stood in the way of European colonisation. The destruction of Aboriginal society in the Wide Bay-Burnett was as swift, thorough and painful as it was elsewhere on the rapidly moving frontier of colonial Australia. Some Burnett squatters had a reputation for openness, even kindness, towards the indigenous people of that district, but this was at best an occasional and paternalistic response to the ultimately futile efforts of Aboriginal resistance to white dominion. European behaviour towards the Indian Hill Coolies, the Chinese Celestials and the South Sea Islanders was essentially different from the treatment of indigenous Australians.

It is difficult to reconcile the abusive treatment of Chinese labourers during the indenture period, abuse that was not less than torture in some instances, with the genuine support and general accommodation that was accorded them in the post-indenture period. There is no evidence, for instance, that the Chinese pastoral labourer, once he was free of his bond, was paid less than any other labourer hired on Burnett runs. There were cases of malpractice that were heard in the courts, but one imagines that the same employer tactics applied to all itinerant workers, not only towards Chinese workers. It can be said with confidence that no Chinese worker ever knowingly and willingly accepted less pay than was awarded to a European with equal skill in the same job. Furthermore, there are recorded instances of townspeople coming together to petition authorities or to submit character references to the court when it was felt that Chinese residents in their town were being treated unfairly. For example, Chinese seeking naturalisation during a difficult period after 1858 when legislators attempted to bring down discriminatory laws were given written support by the leading citizens of the Burnett to secure their certificates. Some former Chinese indentured labourers married European women, ran successful businesses, bought and sold property, and acquired personal wealth and status as local officials.

During the period under study, despite the general observance of British law and its institutions, it is safe to say that the colonial societies of the Wide Bay and Burnett districts were ruled by and for the interests of class; status and property took precedence even over race where social ranking was concerned. An indentured Chinese labourer, however, failed the test of social inclusion with relation to all points of difference from the dominant group and was left exposed to abuse and exploitation.

The presence of unfairly paid and physically abused coloured labourers in their frontier communities where justice was dispensed by local magistrates who were themselves employers of this sort of labour made liberal commentators in the colony uneasy. These educated men were highly conscious of the fact that only the law separated employment of this sort of cheap labour from slavery. Even on the frontier, the white population was familiar with the anti-slavery debate and with the issues of the American Civil War. In the Northern Districts, there was also the recent memory of the cruel system that had operated at the Moreton Bay penal settlement. It was the consciousness of both slavery and transportation that protected the Chinese from even worse abuse. What all the coloured indentured servants suffered, however, was scorn, from which there was no protection.

Scorn for the underpaid is not synonymous with racism but it is easily confused with racism when the underpaid belong to a visible other group. That the Chinese indentured labourers (as the Indians before them and the South Sea Islanders later) were forced to accept wages far below the standard rate was hardly their fault and like most assertive immigrants throughout history, they forcibly resisted this abuse, and were then punished for their resistance. Once free of the unfair conditions of contract, however, they were allowed to be as competitive as any other members of the community and were entitled to the same rewards that were as important socially as they were financially.

This does not mean that all Wide Bay and Burnett district residents warmly welcomed the Chinese and other non-Europeans who lived among them. Xenophobia was as rife in colonial Australia as it was elsewhere, but it was kept in check by British colonial policy and the law which offered naturalisation to aliens and free movement to peoples of the Empire and those from friendly states. After the mid-1850s, along with calls for self-government, however, came demands for the exclusion of immigrants who were not white. The arguments were typically shallow and prejudiced, but while temporary restrictions were placed on the immigration of Chinese by each of the three self-governing colonies of eastern mainland Australia, their force of implementation was moderated by the disapproval of the British Colonial Office. After 1874, with the formation of the first shearers’ association and the first stirrings of nationalism, the call for a White Australia became a loud and sustained demand. The excuse for this shameless policy of racial discrimination is best remembered today as the need to protect workingmen’s wages from the competition of cheap labour represented by Chinese immigration. The experiment with Chinese indentured labour in the Wide Bay and Burnett districts that commenced in 1848 had already proved this argument to be false. Their labour was cheaply bought only through deception and force on the part of the employers, not by any willingness on their own part to value their labour less than others. Reason and example, however, were superfluous to the debate as populist politicians and sensationalist print media, then as now, shaped the national identity.

Many people contributed to the writing of this book. The works of all historians cited in the bibliography and the careful selection and collection of these and specific district histories in regional and state libraries, along with easy public access to colonial newspapers and official records allow independent historians like myself to investigate those corners of the past that have a bearing on the big picture. The Wide Bay-Burnett constitutes only a small part of the Australian continent, but in the mid-nineteenth century it staged dramatic events that may be regarded as formative of the Australian character. I am grateful to all the librarians who gave me professional, courteous assistance. Local amateur historians also gave me access to their considerable knowledge and resources. Pat Smith of Mount Perry Shire Family History provided constant support and encouragement throughout this project; I also owe a debt of thanks to Cynthia Berthelsen of the Gayndah Historical Society, Trevor Power of the Banana Shire Historical Society, Buddy and Lynne Thomson of Boondooma Homestead, and Ada Simpson of the Ration Shed Museum at Cherbourg. Ray Poon, chairman of the Chinese-Australian Historical Association, generously shared his own research and reference materials with me. Carole Channer, another descendant of an Amoy shepherd, gave me the initial impetus to investigate the topic and to write the history.

PART I

Supply and Demand

Nothing obscures our social vision as effectively as the economistic prejudice. So persistently has exploitation been put into the forefront of the colonial problem that the point deserves special attention… Yet, it is precisely this emphasis put on exploitation which tends to hide from our view the even greater issue of cultural degeneration. If exploitation is defined in strictly economic terms as a permanent inadequacy of ratios of exchange, it is doubtful whether, as a matter of fact there was exploitation. The catastrophe of the native community is a direct result of the rapid and violent disruption of the basic institutions of the victim (whether force is used in the process or not does not seem altogether relevant). These institutions are disrupted by the very fact that a market economy is foisted upon an entirely differently organized community; labor and land are made into commodities, which, again, is only a short formula for the liquidation of every and any cultural institution in an organic society.

Karl Polanyi¹

CHAPTER 1

Indentured Labour Migration in the Nineteenth Century

On May 14, 1833, when the British colonial secretary, Edward Stanley, rose to present to parliament the ministerial proposals to end slavery, more than eight hundred thousand African slaves still laboured on the sugar plantations of the West Indies and other possessions of the British Empire.² From 1788 until the abolition of the trade in 1807, British ships alone had transported thirty-eight thousand slaves across the Atlantic each year as part of a sordid trafficking in persons that had persisted for more than two centuries. When the law came into force on August 1, 1834, this workforce was nominally free; however, under the new system of apprenticeship, a supposedly interim arrangement of bonded labour given as a sop to the planters who were demanding compensation for their loss of property, the former slaves were still subject to the strict regimen of the plantations. Despite the confidence the planters had in the political power they were able to wield, they realized that they had to look for a more permanent method of supplying their labour needs. A solution was found in the indenture system with workers sourced mainly from India but also from China and other parts of the world affected by the era of new imperialism. In the terminology of the time, they were Asiatic or coloured labourers.

The British law abolishing slavery that was followed by similar laws enacted throughout the French, Dutch, and Spanish empires did not initiate the use of indentured labour in the colonies. In fact, in the preceding two hundred years, the worst years of the trans-Atlantic African slave trade, more than half of all European migrants to the New World colonies had been indentured servants.³ Even in the plantations of the Caribbean, white indentured servitude had preceded slavery.⁴ There can be no doubt, however, that the new indentured migrants of the nineteenth century were recruited, first of all, to replace the labour of the slaves who were liberated in the Americas throughout the 1830s. Others were employed in colonies such as New South Wales (eastern Australia) when the cessation of convict transportation to that British possession threatened the supply of cheap labour to the pastoral industry.⁵ Later in the century, after most of the northern districts of that colony, including the Wide Bay and Burnett districts, had separated from New South Wales and created the new colony of Queensland, indentured Melanesian workers from various islands in the South Pacific constituted the labour force on new sugar plantations where neither slaves nor convicts had ever been engaged.

Indentured Labour Migration

Indenture eludes fine definition. It is an ancient institution, as is labour migration in general. Stanley Engerman describes this form of contract labour migration as

One mode along a spectrum of forms of migration, permanent and temporary, whose purpose is to move populations from one area to another, and, possibly, to influence (or limit) the selection of occupations after arrival. It combines characteristics of free and involuntary migration, and the relative components of freedom and coercion have long been a subject of controversy.⁶

This rather broad definition may apply equally to indentured migration, both before and after the abolition of slavery. For the place and period under study, that is, a colony of the British Empire in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, an indentured worker is understood to have been a labourer, usually coloured, who was recruited and bound to an overseas employer by a contract, presumed to have been voluntarily entered into before departure to the place of work, for a specified period of time, ranging between three and seven years, in return for stipulated remuneration and conditions that may or may not have included return travel to the point of recruitment on completion of the contract. It was the existence of this legal or quasi-legal contract that set the trade apart from other forms of labour migration in the period under review.

The so-called new indentured migrants who were employed in the outposts of the British and other European empires in the nineteenth century, post-slavery, differed from those of earlier centuries in several respects. The most obvious of these was their place of origin: they came mainly from India, and then China, and various Pacific Islands but after 1834, Africans, including former slaves, also indentured themselves, as did Japanese and Javanese.⁷ Europeans and some North Americans continued to indenture themselves but their numbers were greatly reduced during this period as other forms of migration offered them greater opportunity. This new form of labour migration was also highly age and sex selective, being single, young, adult, and male, although some Indian labourers were accompanied by their wives, who were also indentured servants, and even their children. The system was also regulated, efficient, and cost-effective in terms of recruitment, transportation, and assignment. This was especially the case with regard to colonial Indian labour migration overseas, where the indentured labour trade amounted to a regular industry that was carefully supervised by the bureaucratic colonial administration there. In fact, Douglas Hay and Paul Craven refer to the indenture system as industrial immigration.⁸

Despite the regular efficiency with which indentured labour flowed around the world between 1834 and the end of the Second World War, it remained a highly controversial business. Although the new labour trade was supposed to represent a modern and rational market for the buying and selling of free labour, in the older literature, according to Hay and Craven, an indenture had always been considered to be a mark of unfreedom.⁹ The implications of this, for the employer and the receiving society in general, must surely have carried over to the new system, despite the official terms of engagement and the imprimatur of the British Colonial Office or its European equivalent.

In spite of popularly held opinion, however, an indentured worker was not a slave, even though what the employers sought was not just cheap, reliable labour but a workforce that was also meek, docile, and submissive, terms that abound in the literature on the topic and that are surely more applicable to slave than to free labour. Despite the common perceptions, there were important distinct differences from slavery: at the end of the contract period, at least until restrictive immigration policies were introduced, the indentured worker was free to return home, settle or re-engage on his own terms of hire; children born during the contract period were certainly not the property of the employer; and, in case of coercion and abuse by his employer, he had, in theory at least, the same rights of appeal to British justice as other colonial residents.

Nevertheless, in practice, there were abuses at all stages in the process that were reminiscent of the slave trade. Recruitment, in some cases, was barely different from kidnapping; the sea voyages were cramped, hazardous, and not uncommonly undertaken in those same vessels latterly used to trans-ship African slaves; and in the often remote areas to which the indentured workers were assigned, recourse to justice or even some measure of protection under the law was rarely accessible. Despite the contract, the indentured worker did not choose his place of work or his occupation; those matters were non-negotiable and usually determined by the employer’s manager or overseer to whom he was consigned and with whom he did not share a common language. An agreeable workplace was purely a matter of chance, and a contract was little guarantee of freedom of action because, as Hay and Craven point out, Freedom of contract does not mean freedom to abandon the contract.¹⁰ The only alternative to complete submission to a given situation, absconding, was deemed a criminal act under law, and penal sanctions applied. The law defined and prescribed the indentured worker’s situation to the extent that these authors regard indenture as an important and varied form of the socio-legal relation of master and servant, and one that had more to do with the unequal power relations between employer and employee than with the rational exchange of labour on a free market.¹¹

A Socio-Legal Relationship

Master and Servant laws drafted and implemented in the British colonies were used as a powerful means of enforcement of the terms of contract and as an equally powerful deterrent to indentured workers’ claims for fairer terms and conditions. The workers’ market bargaining advantage should have been high. After all, following the abolition of slavery and the almost simultaneous cessation of convict transportation, demand for cheap, reliable labour was at a premium throughout the developing colonial world, and in some instances, most notably on the dangerous and violent northern frontier of white settlement in distant New South Wales, it was practically unobtainable. Given such high demand, workers of the same linguistic and ethnic background in any one location might have been expected to organize themselves and bargain collectively for higher wages and better conditions. However, although records of magistrates’ benches were full of individual acts of disobedience, negligence, and even attempted suicide by these new indentured labourers, organized strikes or other forms of collective action taken by them were rare and short-lived. Hay and Craven argue that it was the severity of consecutive Master and Servant acts, in conjunction with other laws on vagrancy, public order, access to land, and so on that were crucial in constructing masters’ coercion and eliminating resistance.¹² Master and Servant legislation was, they claim, a catalogue of constraints and disincentives that created firm boundaries around the exercise of workers’ freedom of action.¹³

The laws, in fact, were used to fashion the kind of workforce that was preferred by the employers and the joint stock companies that owned or leased the plantations, the mines, and the vast pastoral properties that represented imperial wealth and power. In the British colonies, Master and Servant legislation applied to all workers, not only to those on indenture, but indentured labour was used to maintain the employer’s advantage in any contest over wages and conditions. In Hay and Craven’s opinion,

Master and Servant law was carefully designed to create labour markets that were less costly, more highly disciplined, less free than markets in which the master’s bargain was not assisted by such terms. Even where indentured labour coexisted with a more open labour market, employers were well aware that the effect of a bounded sector under more coercive sanctions was to depress wages in the wider labour market as well.¹⁴

Indentured labourers were therefore in the invidious position of wedge between capital and free labour. Even more than skin colour and language differences, this fact set them apart from the existing regular workforce and earned its further contempt, because, according to Peter Corris, [T]he migrant labourer [is] without honour where he works, for his function is to do what the people there will not do.¹⁵

In some respects, from a socio-legal perspective at least, the experiences of all indentured immigrant workers were similar; in other ways, they differed significantly, not only from place to place, job to job, but also according to the degree of support they received from outside. In the colonial Australian context, the Indian workers were protected to a large extent by regulations imposed by the colonial administration in India that carried the weight of the British Colonial Office throughout the rest of the empire, while the South Sea Islanders had such strong advocates in the London Missionary Society that, as Peter Corris observes, By the turn of the [twentieth] century the Queensland trade was governed by seven Acts of Parliament, eighteen schedules, fifty-four regulations and thirty-eight instructions.¹⁶ Even if many of these rules and regulations went unobserved or were even unknown to those who were meant to police them, he adds, their mere existence was cautionary. The Chinese indentured workers, on the other hand, had no recourse to Exeter Hall.¹⁷ The early emigrants not only risked permanent exile by leaving China illegally, but also bore the brunt of negative stereotypes fostered by hysterical media reports about Chinese resistance to British imperial ambitions on China’s territory. Paradoxically, this lack of concern for their welfare and the absence of official oversight stood the more resourceful and resilient among them in good stead. Having completed their period of indenture, some of the Chinese shepherds from the 1848 to 1853 experiment became naturalized citizens, married European immigrant women, purchased property and conducted successful businesses or even stood as candidates and won places in local government. Not all had successful lives, but it can be said that the experience of the Chinese indentured workers of the 1848 to 1853 experiment was genuinely a migrant experience, not merely that of sojourning labourers.

Numbers

The crisis that struck the British and European financial markets in 1837 caused widespread socio-economic distress that continued throughout the Hungry Forties and triggered a massive flow of out-migration, principally to other temperate climate areas, especially those in North America where the opening of new lands beyond the Mississippi River offered opportunities previously undreamt of by Europe’s poor. Following the discovery of substantial gold deposits in California and Alaska in 1849, and two years later in the southeastern Australian colonies of New South Wales and Victoria, this flow became a veritable flood. Other factors, including great changes taking place in agriculture and the iron and steel industries, as well as the rapid extension of rail and oceanic transportation, facilitated the voluntary emigration of around 46.5 million people from Europe mainly to the Americas, but also to Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, in the century from 1821 to 1920. According to the figures quoted by Stanley Engerman, the vast majority of these emigrants (slightly over forty-five million) left Europe after 1846.¹⁸

These were aspirational migrants bent on creating a better life for themselves and their children than the one they left behind. For the most part, too, they were urban people, or at least most recently residents of towns and cities. They did not emigrate in order to work, as perhaps their parents had, as little more than peasants for the local nobility in some rural colonial backwater, and the long campaign to end slavery would, in any case, have warned them away from engaging with the plantations. Moreover, the development of class consciousness that accompanied the wave of revolutionary fervour of the 1830s and 1840s, along with the social ferment mobilized by groups including the Chartists, Owenites, socialists, and communists made them unlikely candidates for the sort of labour that was in most demand in the colonies, namely mass labour for the plantations and the mines, or solitary labour as shepherds and hut-keepers on the vast pastoral runs. Consequently, because they were unable to obtain the white workers that suited their needs, the plantation owners and the big pastoralists looked first to India, then China, and elsewhere for a steady supply of labour.

In raw figures, the total number of indentured workers who joined this huge intercontinental flow of migrants was comparatively small. In fact, according to Engerman, the illegal slave trade to Cuba and Brazil between 1821 and 1867 accounted for nearly as many individuals as did all the trades in contract labour.¹⁹ On the other hand, in the areas where they were consigned to work, they often accounted for a significant proportion of the local non-indigenous population. According to estimates given by Engerman, starting from 1838 (or 1826 in the case of Réunion) until 1918, around 1.6 million Indians were recruited for plantation labour in British colonies, principally Malaya, British Guiana (with approximately one-quarter of a million each), Natal and Trinidad (152,400 and 143,900 respectively), and on behalf of French planters in Mauritius (451,800) and Réunion (86,900).²⁰ British Guiana, Trinidad and other parts of the British West Indies also received Chinese indentured labourers, although far fewer than the number of Indians. Out of a total of approximately 330,000 Chinese workers contracted between 1849 and 1907, two-thirds of them went to Cuba and Peru. Altogether, including Japanese, Pacific Islanders, Javanese, Africans, and those from Portuguese possessions, Engerman suggests that just over 2.4 million indentured labourers joined the intercontinental movement of people in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Figures quoted by David Northrup for roughly the same period add up to slightly more than two million; the main differences being the inclusion of 57,869 European and North American indentured migrants to the Caribbean and Hawaii in his total figure, and the exclusion of Chinese indentured migrants to Malaya.²¹ Therefore, according to both estimates, non-indentured European migration was more than twenty times greater than that of Asian, African and Pacific Islander contract labour migration to the colonies during that period. Approximately half of all these indentured workers were contracted during the quarter-century from 1851 to 1875.²² According to their destinations, they laboured on plantations, down mines, and on railway construction sites but they were also sometimes engaged to work as domestic servants, agricultural labourers, deckhands, cooks, porters, and so on.

Indentured labour migration, at