This word had been in use in many countries, on five continents, since the previous century. It referred first and foremost to workers from China and India, transported on the same boats and by the same captains as in the time of slavery.
Upon arrival at their destination, the coolies worked as hard as beasts on sugar cane plantations, down in mines, building railroads, often dying before the end of their five-year contract without having received their promised and longed-for salary. Companies involved in the trade assumed beforehand that twenty, thirty, or forty percent of the “lots” would perish in the course of the voyage at sea. The Indians and the Chinese who outlived their contracts in the British, French, or Dutch colonies settled in the Seychelles; in Trinidad and Tobago; in the Fiji Islands; Barbados; Guadeloupe; Martinique; in Canada, the United States . . . Before the Cuban Revolution, the largest Chinatown in Latin America was in Havana.
Unlike the Indian coolies, who included in their ranks women fleeing abusive husbands or desperate situations, the Chinese coolies were exclusively male—Chinese women didn’t take the bait. The Chinese exiled in distant colonies with no possibility of returning home sought consolation in the arms of local women. All those who did not succumb to suicide, malnutrition, or abuse organized themselves to publish newspapers, create clubs, and open restaurants. Thanks to the dispersal of those men, fried rice, soy sauce, and wonton soup became favourites all over the planet.
As for the Indian coolie men, they had one chance in three of wooing an Indian woman, as many of them also embarked on an adventure that would transform the status of women and the distinction between castes. They were in a position to choose, even to receive a dowry rather than provide one. This new power engendered a fear in men of not having a woman or of losing one. Neighbours, passersby, and the women themselves were a threat to them. Some men shut their wives up in strongbox houses, others wound ropes around them like ribbons on a gift box. When men’s fears are confronted by women’s power, the result is deadly.
The Chinese and Indian slaves and coolies were wrenched away from their native lands, while the Vietnamese coolies stayed at home and laboured under comparable conditions imposed by expatriate settlers.