Extracts from the Diary of Edmund Ruffin

Ruffin, Edmund

doi:10.2307/1915346

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The discussion was anchored by comparisons between coolie and African American labor. 19 Wray stated his belief in the superiority of Chinese indentured labor considered under the "general, but incorrect, name of 'Coolies.'" Ruffin and Hammond emphasized coolie "mistreatment."…”

Section: The Planter's Imaginationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Asian Indentured Labor in the Age of African American Emancipation

Sell

2017

Inter. Labor Working-Class Hist.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article examines transnational connections between African American emancipation in the United States and Chinese and Indian indenture within the British Empire. In an era of social upheaval and capitalist crisis, planters and colonial officials envisioned coolies as a source of uninterrupted plantation labor. This vision was often bound to the conditions of African American emancipation. In British Honduras, colonial officials sought to bring emancipated African Americans to the colony as labor for sugar plantations. When this project failed, interest turned toward indentured Chinese labor managed by white planters from the U.S. South. In India’s North-Western Provinces, the outbreak of famine came to be seen as a “kindred distress” to the crisis in Lancashire’s textile industry. Unemployed English factory workers were seen as suffering from famine due to the scarcity of slave-produced cotton, just as colonial subjects suffered from scarcity of food. While some weavers in the North-Western Provinces were taken into the coolie trade, the emigration of unemployed Lancashire weavers was looked to as a possible alternative to indenture. Drawing upon archives in Australia, Belize, Britain, India, and the United States, this article explores connections between seemingly disparate histories. By focusing upon their interrelation, this article locates the formation of crisis not in raw materials, but rather within a transnational struggle over racialized labor exploitation, or what W.E.B. Du Bois called the “dark and vast sea of human labor.”

show abstract

Section: The Planter's Imaginationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Asian Indentured Labor in the Age of African American Emancipation

Sell

2017

Inter. Labor Working-Class Hist.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Extracts from the Diary of Edmund Ruffin

Cited by 1 publication

References 0 publications

Asian Indentured Labor in the Age of African American Emancipation

Asian Indentured Labor in the Age of African American Emancipation

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About