Author: Walton Look Lai Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press ISBN: 9780801877469 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
In Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar Walton Look Lai offers the first comprehensive study of Asian immigration and the indenture system in the entire British West Indies—with particular emphasis on the experiences of indentured laborers in the major receiving colonies of British Guyana, Trinidad, and Jamaica. Exploring living and working conditions as well as the makeup of immigrant communities and their cultures, Look Lai offers a "dialectical pluralist" model of Caribbean acculturation that contrasts with the more familiar "melting pot" or "pure pluralist" model.
Author: Walton Look Lai Publisher: ISBN: Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 408
Book Description
In Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar Walton Look Lai offers the first comprehensive study of Asian immigration and the indenture system in the entire British West Indies -- with particular emphasis on the experiences of indentured laborers in the major receiving colonies of British Guyana, Trinidad, and Jamaica. Exploring living and working conditions as well as the makeup of immigrant communities and their cultures, Look Lai offers a "dialectical pluralist" model of Caribbean acculturation that contrasts with the more familiar "melting pot" or "pure pluralist" model.
Author: Gaiutra Bahadur Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 022604338X Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 313
Book Description
Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize: “[Bahadur] combines her journalistic eye for detail and story-telling gifts with probing questions . . . a haunting portrait.” —The Independent In 1903, a young woman sailed from India to Guiana as a “coolie” —the British name for indentured laborers who replaced the newly emancipated slaves on sugar plantations all around the world. Pregnant and traveling alone, this woman, like so many coolies, disappeared into history. Now, in Coolie Woman, her great-granddaughter embarks on a journey into the past to find her. Traversing three continents and trawling through countless colonial archives, Gaiutra Bahadur excavates not only her great-grandmother’s story but also the repressed history of some quarter of a million other coolie women, shining a light on their complex lives. Shunned by society, and sometimes in mortal danger, many coolie women were runaways, widows, or outcasts. Many left husbands and families behind to migrate alone in epic sea voyages—traumatic “middle passages” —only to face a life of hard labor, dismal living conditions, and, especially, sexual exploitation. As Bahadur explains, however, it is precisely their sexuality that makes coolie women stand out as figures in history. Greatly outnumbered by men, they were able to use sex with their overseers to gain various advantages, an act that often incited fatal retaliations from coolie men and sometimes larger uprisings of laborers against their overlords. Complex and unpredictable, sex was nevertheless a powerful tool. Examining this and many other facets of these remarkable women’s lives, Coolie Woman is a meditation on survival, a gripping story of a double diaspora—from India to the West Indies in one century, Guyana to the United States in the next—that is at once a search for roots and an exploration of gender and power, peril and opportunity.
Author: Madhavi Kale Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press ISBN: 0812202422 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 243
Book Description
When Great Britain abolished slavery in 1833, sugar planters in the Caribbean found themselves facing the prospect of paying working wages to their former slaves. Cheaper labor existed elsewhere in the empire, however, and plantation owners, along with the home and colonial governments, quickly began importing the first of what would eventually be hundreds of thousands of indentured laborers from India. Madhavi Kale draws extensively on the archival materials from the period and argues that imperial administrators sanctioned and authorized distinctly biased accounts of postemancipation labor conditions and participated in devaluing and excluding alternative accounts of slavery. As she does this she highlights the ways in which historians, by relying on these biased sources, have perpetuated the acceptance of a privileged perspective on imperial British history.
Author: Bernard Moitt Publisher: ISBN: 9780813027791 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 203
Book Description
This interdisciplinary exploration of the effects and consequences of the cultivation of sugarcane and spread of the sugar industry in societies that relied on free, enslaved, and indentured labor compares the plantation systems used in the Caribbean and the southern United States with the small independent growers and cooperative units of India and the Mascarenes. In the literary works analyzed, the theme of resistance to the vagaries of the sugar plantation system that sought to dehumanize the workers stands out--resistance both by the enslaved and the indentured, by male and female. With regard to the enduring legacies of the sugar plantation system, this study highlights class formation and domination, the practice of racism, and economic growth punctuated by perpetual crisis.
Author: Publisher: ISBN: Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 188
Book Description
"Provides background information and establishes the context for this episode in the international history of labor as well as in the histories of Cuba, Caribbean plantations, and the overseas Chinese."--Journal of Economic Literature. In 1873, prompted by reports of such abuse in the Spanish colony of Cuba, the government of China sent an Imperial Mission to investigate the living and working conditions of Chinese laborers on the island's sugar plantations. The result was The Cuba Commission Report, a gruesome record of the experience of Chinese workers in Cuba, corroborated by hundreds of depositions taken from the laborers themselves. This softcover edition reproduces the English-language text that was part of the original report of 1876. In a special note to the reader, Rebecca Scott and Sidney Mintz describe the kinds of information contained in this remarkable document. "This is, indeed, labor history and migration history," writes Helly, "but of a sort rarely narrated in so terrifying a manner."
Author: David Northrup Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 9780521485197 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 214
Book Description
The indentured labour trade was begun to replace freed slaves on sugar plantations in British colonies in the 1830s, but expanded to many other locations around the world. This is the first survey of the global flow of indentured migrants from Africa that developed after the end of the slave trade and continued until shortly after the First World War. This volume describes the experiences of the two million Asians, Africans, and South Pacific Islanders who signed long-term labour contracts in return for free passage overseas, modest wages, and other benefits. The experience of these indentured migrants of different origins and destinations is compared in terms of their motives, conditions of travel, and subsequent creation of permanent overseas settlements.
Author: Sidney W. Mintz Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 1101666641 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 322
Book Description
A fascinating persuasive history of how sugar has shaped the world, from European colonies to our modern diets In this eye-opening study, Sidney Mintz shows how Europeans and Americans transformed sugar from a rare foreign luxury to a commonplace necessity of modern life, and how it changed the history of capitalism and industry. He discusses the production and consumption of sugar, and reveals how closely interwoven are sugar's origins as a "slave" crop grown in Europe's tropical colonies with is use first as an extravagant luxury for the aristocracy, then as a staple of the diet of the new industrial proletariat. Finally, he considers how sugar has altered work patterns, eating habits, and our diet in modern times. "Like sugar, Mintz is persuasive, and his detailed history is a real treat." -San Francisco Chronicle
Author: Walton Look Lai
Author: Walton Look Lai
Author: Gaiutra Bahadur
Author: Madhavi Kale
Author: Bernard Moitt
Author: 
Author: Moon-Ho Jung
Author: Ashutosh Kumar
Author: David Northrup
Author: Sidney W. Mintz