Notes
- Later in the century, after the close of the indenture period, Mexico saw a significant free Chinese immigration during the regime of Porfirio Diaz (1876–1911). See Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Immigrants to a Developing Society: the Chinese in Northern Mexico 1875–1932, Journal of Arizona History 21 (1980): 49–86.
- For a useful general study on the British West Indian plantation economies after Emancipation, see William Green, British Slave Emancipation the Sugar Colonies and the Great Experiment, 1830–65 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976). See also Franklin Knight, Slave Society in Cuba in the Nineteenth Century (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970) for a comparable discussion on the Cuban sugar economy.
- G. Roberts and J. Byrne, Summary Statistics on Indenture and Associated Migration affecting the West Indies, 1834–1918, Population Studies XX: 1 (July 1966): 127. The one hundred Chinese immigrants landed in the island of Antigua in 1863 came from a French vessel which had been stranded off the island of Barbuda.
- The best sources for details of Chinese migrations to the British West Indies are the British Colonial Office Documents of the period, C.O.295 and C.O.298 Series for Trinidad, and C.O. 111 and C.O. 114 for British Guiana. The Annual Reports of the Colonial Land and Emigration Commission (1854–1873) in the British Parliamentary Papers are also important. See also Persia Campbell, Chinese Coolie Emigration to Countries within the British Empire (reprinted in New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969) and Cecil Clementi, The Chinese in British Guiana (British Guiana, 1915).
- For a comprehensive comparative discussion on the indentured labor migrations from British India in the nineteenth century, see Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian labor Overseas 1830–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974).
- For an early pioneering study on Chinese coolie migrations to Cuba and Peru, see Eugenio Chang-Rodriguez, Chinese Labour Migration into Latin America in the Nineteenth Century, Revista de Historia de America 46, December 1958, 375–397. More recent studies include Duvon Clough Corbitt, The Chinese in Cuba 1847–1947 (Kentucky, 1971), and Denise Helly, Ideologie et Ethnicite: les Chinois Macao a Cuba 1847–1886 (Montreal: Les Presses de L'Universite’ de Montreal, 1979). See also Watt Stewart, Chinese Bondage in Peru 1849–1874 (Westport, Connecticutt: Greenwood Press, 1970).
- See Barry Higman, The Chinese in Trinidad 1806–1838, Caribbean Studies 12 (October, 1972): 21–44, for a discussion on the fate of this early settlement in the Western Hemisphere.
- It certainly predates the settlement of tea growers in Brazil, usually cited as the earliest, by several years. See E. Chang-Rodriguez, 377.
- B. Higman, 42.
- E. L. Joseph, History of Trinidad (reprinted, London: E. Cass Library of West Indian Studies, 1970).
- It is worthwhile noting that in 1851 there were already 7,682 Indian immigrants in British Guiana, out of a total population of 127,695, and 4,169 Indians in Trinidad, out of a population of 68,600. Census Reports for British Guiana & Trinidad.
- Noel Deerr, History of Sugar, chap. 24,399 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1949) mentions one female as being among the Chinese who went to Trinidad on the Fortitude in 1806. The author has examined the official correspondence in the C.O.295 series, and not been able to substantiate this. See C.O. 295/14, Hislop to Windham, October 26, 1806.
- Cecil Clementi, The Chinese in British Guiana, 197.
- Ibid., 130–131.
- Persia Campbell provides the following estimates:
- Comparative Cost of Importing Coolies from India and China
- Passage of 100 coolies from India at £16 a head £1,600
- Return of 15% to India at £13 a head £195
- £1,795
- (The West Indian planters claimed that not more than 10–15 percent of Indians took advantage of return passage options)
- Under the proposed terms of the 1866 Chinese Convention:
- Passage of 100 coolies from China at £25 a head £2,500
- Return of 80 percent (20 percent mortality) at £15 a head £1,200
- £3,700
- Thus the cost of 100 Chinese laborers would exceed the cost of 100 Indian laborers by nearly £2,000.
- Persia Campbell, Chinese Coolie Emigration to Countries within the British Empire, 142.
- The Cuban planters, however, continued to import Chinese coolie labor up to 1874 at almost double the proposed British West Indian prices! Clearly this tells us something about the vitality of the Cuban sugar industry, as well as about the inevitable brutality of the conditions under which the Chinese labored on the Cuban sugar plantations. (The Cuban contracts, however, were eight-year contracts).
- C.O.295/227, Notes on the Annual Return of Indentured Immigrants in Trinidad for the Year 1863, paragraph 17.
- Cecil Clementi, The Chinese in British Guiana, Chapter 14.
- Author Jack Chen (himself Trinidad-born), in his The Chinese of America (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980) mentions some of the professional “firsts” among the North American Chinese, 220: Tong King Chong, qualified in 1912 as the first Chinese lawyer in America; Faith Sai So Leong, graduated in 1910 from San Francisco's dental school as the first modern-trained Chinese woman dentist in the world. Their British-trained West Indian Chinese counterparts were perhaps just as accomplished.