Chinese contract labor, the corporeal rift, and ecological imperialism in Peru’s nineteenth-century guano boom

ABSTRACT

Building on the theory of ecological imperialism in the context of the Peruvian guano boom, this analysis explores the metabolic rift in the human relation to external nature and the corresponding corporeal rift in the destruction of human bodily existence. Guano capitalists robbed Peru of the manure deposited by seabirds, while British imperialism introduced a system of racialized expropriation (the ‘coolie trade'), referred to by Karl Marx as ‘worse than slavery.’ Previous failures to understand this historical tragedy were due to the legal forms adopted, which categorized as semi-free labor what was in fact the social murder of the workers.

KEYWORDS:

• Metabolic rift
• corporeal rift
• ecological imperialism
• bonded labor
• guano

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the Department of Sociology at the University of Oregon for their support through the Marquina Award, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts. Mauricio Betancourt would like to also thank the Mexican National Council of Science and Technology (CONACyT) for its financial support through a Ph.D. scholarship.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The meaning of ‘ecological imperialism’ as a system of unequal ecological exchange is quite different from the biocentric usage introduced by Alfred Crosby (2004), who was concerned almost exclusively with the effects of colonialism on environments via the introduction of invasive species (see Foster and Holleman 2014). In deference to Crosby, Gregory Cushman (2013:, 77) introdued the term ‘neo-ecological imperialism’ to refer to unequal ecological relations between societies. But, in fact, the term ‘ecological imperialism’ has been used virtually as long in the latter, socio-ecological sense, as it has been employed in Crosby’s narrower, more biocentric conception (see Foster 1994; Foster and Holleman 2014). Ecological imperialism has played a crucial role in the rise and ongoing development of capitalism, as distant lands, resources, and peoples are plundered as part of facilitating the accumulation of capital (Beckert 2014; Foster and Clark 2020). An important forerunner, Georg Borgstrom (1965, 77–90) coined the concept of ‘ghost acres,’ in order to illuminate how Britain, in particular, was dependent on obtaining food and raw materials from ‘hinterlands’ in order to sustain its productive and consumptive operations. Here he was acknowledging the historical role of ecological imperialism in seizing, controlling, and influencing the lands in other countries and the flow of environmental resources within the global economy. ‘Ghost acres’ were presented as a ‘commensurate gauge’ of ecological usage within a global context, prefiguring contemporary ecological footprint analysis (Foster and Holleman 2014, 208–09).

2 The term ‘coolie’ was drawn from the Tamil word kuli meaning wages or hire and was originally applied to agricultural or day labourers in India. It was adopted by the British to describe the system of utilizing Chinese and Indian indentured servants, drawn from their colonies and spheres of influence in Asia (Bahadur 2014: xx). As the term ‘coolie increasingly became associated with slavery, English speakers, especially in the United States, began using the term more pejoratively’ (Narvaez 2010, 37).

3 The first artificial, chemical fertilizers, superphosphates, were synthesized by J.B. Lawes at the Rothamsted Manor station in 1842–43 (Foster 1999, 376). As far as other fertilizers, farmers raided the Napoleonic battlefields, such as Waterloo, Leipzig, and Austerlitz, as well as catacombs in Sicily and Crimea, to collect bones—a source of phosphates and nitrogen—to spread over fields (Foster 1999, 375–376; Clark and Foster 2009, 316). Colonies were forced to grow rapeseed, which was imported to Britain to make oil cakes that were used to feed to livestock and therefore to enrich the manure that was later applied to soil.

4 Ernesto Yepes (1981) details the impacts of the guano revenue on Peru’s fiscal health as it was also used for the consolidation of the internal debt, allowing a fraction of the Peruvian bourgeoisie to use its newfound capital to create national banks, and thus be able to profit on the state’s cycle of debt and dependency.

5 Other companies and nations sought out alternative sources in order to profit off of the ongoing need to replenish lost nutrients. British interests scraped Ichaboe Island off the coast of Namibia clean of its guano, which was of lower quality than that found in Peru (Levin 1960). The U.S. Congress passed the Guano Islands Act on August 18, 1856, whereby any U.S. citizen could take possession of any unoccupied island, not within the lawful jurisdiction of another government, that contained guano deposits, in the name of the United States. Additionally, it authorized the U.S. president to, at his discretion, deploy the military ‘to protect the rights of the discoverer’ of a given guano deposit. During this era, thousands of Native Hawaiians harvested guano on various Pacific islands, providing this fertilizer for the global market (Rosenthal 2018). Other European countries, in the midst of the post-Napoleonic ‘balance of power’ era, tried to get their share of bird excrement. In fact, on April 14, 1864, Spain occupied the Chincha Islands in a failed attempt to restate its influence over its former colony during the Chincha Islands War (1864-1866) (Skaggs 1994).

6 In this article, our analysis is focused on the guano boom. It is useful to note that in 1853 effective means of mining nitrates were developed. Rich deposits were discovered in the Tarapacá desert in Peru and in Atacama in Bolivia. By the 1860s, nitrates from these fields were an important export, as the nitrates were also being used as fertilizer to enrich exhausted fields in Europe (as well as to produce explosives). The British heavily invested in nitrates. As guano deposits were being diminished, the Peruvian government in 1875 attempted to monopolize nitrate deposits within the region, leading to tensions with Chile. This conflict eventually led to the War of the Pacific (also known as the Nitrate War) between Chile and Peru-Bolivia (as part of an alliance) from 1879 to 1884. Britain backed Chile, who won the war and gained control over the nitrate fields that had been in Peru and Bolivia (see Davis 1931; Slater 1986; Mayo 1987; Farcau 2000; Foster and Clark 2003).

7 Transformations in the penitentiary system, moving towards ‘rehabilitation more than punishment,’ resulted in the reduction of the prisoners available for work in the guano mines (Méndez Gastelumendi 1987).

8 The increasing income from guano also helped provide a basis for the Peruvian government to abolish in 1854–55 the Indigenous tribute, which had long been a crucial part of generating state revenue (Méndez 2005, 112; Cruzado 2020).

9 In the same vein, Carlos Aguirre argues that the abolition of slavery in Peru needs to be understood in relation to the diminishing ability of Peru’s landowner class to effectively control and discipline slaves, in a context of increased resistance (such as the Trujillo revolt of 1851), and an inability to bring in new slaves. Aguirre (1993, 311) argues that ‘the abolition of slavery took place in Peru when it was clear to the masters that the erosion of the mechanisms of social control over the slaves had progressed too far.’ At the same time, the employers still preferred ‘coercive work relations’ and wanted ‘discipline more than anything’ from coolie workers (Aguirre 1993, 307).

10 This is not an exhaustive account of the various projects developed to employ bonded labor. Others included the introduction of Polynesian workers and the extension of the ‘guardianship’ exercised by masters over children of slaves who had been born free (Arona 1891; McCall 1976; Tardieu 2003; Narvaez 2010).

11 While Peru banned slavery in 1854, several attempts were made to re-introduce slave labor between 1860 and 1871, as a ‘solution’ to labor shortages (Tardieu 2003).

12 Of course, Peruvian elites were not alone in this sentiment. The elites of the young republics in the Americas were concerned with increasing their population, but not with ‘any kind’ of migration. For debates regarding favoring European migration in other parts of Latin America, see Juan Bautista Alberdi (1852) and Domingo F. Sarmiento ([1850] 1968).

13 Polynesians were also kidnapped, deceived, and coerced in ways that resulted in their being shipped as contract labor to Peru. Legend and some circumstantial evidence have often been taken as suggesting that some of these individuals were sent to work on the Chincha Islands. However, whether Polynesians actually became guano diggers on the Islands in any numbers remains questionable and is considered very doubtful by today’s historians (Maude 1981, 135–37).

14 Chinese migration to California, for example, was structured under a different social relation than the one that developed in Cuba and Peru (Lai 1989). It is also important to note that there were earlier trans-Pacific systems of slave labor, in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, under other historically specific conditions, whereby the Spanish used Asian slaves in colonial Mexico (Seijas 2014).

15 On the U.S. guano islands, such as Baker Island, Hawaiian contract labors were utilized for the work (Rosenthal 2018). It was also common on these islands to employ Black workers (Skaggs 1994, 101, 173).

16 Marx’s knowledge of the dire conditions of so-called coolie labor and his depiction of it as ‘worse than slavery’ in the case of guano diggers in Peru, no doubt was a product in part of his close studies of parliamentary debaters of the time, including the work of John Bowring, political economist, Member of Parliament, Superintendent of Trade in China, and Governor of Hong Kong, who was disturbed by the coolie riots in Amoy in 1852–53 as well as the mutiny on the American ship the Robert Browne. Bowring became a strong critic of the coolie trade on the Chincha Islands, suspending the transport of coolies on British ships to the Chincha Islands in 1854 (see Correspondence with the Superintendent of British Trade in China 1853, 2, 4, 31; House of Lords 1855, 27–29, 46, 57; Bowring 2014, 138–39; Young 2014, 36–41). Marx, though highly critical of Bowring’s role in 1857 in the Second Opium War, took extensive notes from his work in the early 1850s and was no doubt well aware of his position on coolie trafficking as an extreme form of slavery. See Marx and Engels (1972, 101–6) and Draper (1986, 29).

17 Tomich (2004) argues that it is during this period that a ‘second slavery’ is established, with distinct characteristics. See also Laviña and Zeuske (2014).

18 The international ‘coolie’ trade, as it was known, was characterized by the forced migration of East Indian labor within the British colonies themselves, and the forced migration of Chinese laborers within non-British colonies, facilitated especially by the British, who were at the center of this trade, although many other countries were involved. Whereas the largest number of the ‘Chinese’ bonded laborers were ethnically Chinese, they included under that designation workers from other parts of East and Southeast Asia as well.

19 The inefficacy of the process was the result, according to a local government official who visited the islands in 1853, of the way in which responsibilities over the process had been divided: while contractors had to secure the extraction of the material, the national government was in charge of the loading. This meant that contractors, who hired the coolie workers, had little interest in using much of their labor force or time in the loading process (De Pierola [1853] 1928; Méndez Gastelumendi 1987; Narvaez 2010).

20 In The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels (2009, 38, 106-7) refers to the way in which society forces workers to remain in conditions such that death ensues, and yet permits these conditions to remain, ‘as social murder,’ a notion he borrowed from the Chartist literature of the time.

21 In an extensive study of these issues, Trazegnies Granda found that the notion of free employment was present among jurists and politicians of the time, who understood that the presence of violence at the moment of consent would render the contracts void. However, it was also true that the loose and easily manipulated ‘coolie contracts’ were treated as vague contratas, without specifying what type of legal contract they were. He explained that the contradiction between adoption of liberal conceptions of freedom and rights and the regulations enacted to control Chinese workers should be understood as a form of ‘legal-social schizophrenia,’ geared to extreme labor exploitation pervaded by a veneer of legality (Trazegnies Granda 2016, 261).

22 Rural Police Regulations still contemplated this differential regulation in 1877 (Trazegnies Granda 2016).

23 The very idea of a standard contract, one that is pre-formulated by one of the parties and merely accepted or denied by the other, was not very common in the nineteenth century, and the fact that one of the parties had no possibility of bargaining over the clauses or terms of the contract was in tension with the liberal idea of exercise of free will, which was the base of the contractual obligations. Moreover, the signing of these contracts usually took place with one of the parties being absent, namely the employer. The translation into Chinese and other languages was incomplete and evidence of signing often consisted simply of a cross (Trazegnies Granda 2016).

24 The Portuguese ended the Chinese coolie trade via Macao in 1874, and the British took a similar stand, leading to the trade dying out within a few years.

25 Humberto Rodríguez Pastor (1979) deals with the story of one of the most important of such mainland rebellions in his book Patilvica 1870: La rebelión de los rostros pintados.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lola Loustaunau

Lola Loustaunau is a PhD. Candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Oregon and a Wayne Morse Fellow. Her research focuses on precarity, migrant workers, food manufacturing, and processes of collective organizing. She recently co-authored “No Choice but to Be Essential: Expanding Dimensions of Precarity During the COVID-19 Pandemic” (Sociological Perspectives, 2021) and “Impossible Choices: How Workers Manage Unpredictable Scheduling Practices” (Labor Studies Journal, 2019).

Mauricio Betancourt

Mauricio Betancourt is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Oregon. His research has focused on the history of environmentalism, agroecology, and the analysis of the nature-society relationship. He recently published “The Effect of Cuban Agroecology in Mitigating the Metabolic Rift: A Quantitative Approach to Latin American Food Production” in Global Environmental Change (2020).

Brett Clark

Brett Clark is professor of sociology, environmental humanities, and environmental and sustainability studies at the University of Utah. His research focuses on the political economy of global environmental change. He is the co-author of The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and the Ecological Rift.

John Bellamy Foster

John Bellamy Foster is professor of sociology at the University of Oregon and editor of Monthly Review (New York). His two most recent books are The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and the Ecological Rift (co-authored with Brett Clark; Monthly Review Press, 2020) and The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology (Monthly Review Press, 2020).