JOHN EDWARD JENKINS
Introduction by Letizia Gramaglia University of Warwick
INTRODUCTION
The ‘coolie’ slave trade1Slavery was legally abolished throughout the British Empire on 1 August 1834. The culmination of abolitionist efforts in Britain was greatly accelerated by international rivalries, as well as by widespread unrest across the Caribbean.2The mass insurrection that paralyzed western Jamaica at the end of 1831, known as the Baptist War, was one of the greatest rebellions in West Indian history. “Under the charismatic leadership of Samuel ‘Daddy’ Sharpe, it mobilized 60,000 slaves over an area of 750 square miles; and it was undoubtedly one of the main factors that led to the abolition of slavery in 1833” (Fryer 92).
The Abolition Act granted financial compensation to the dispossessed slave-owners, as well as the right to the labour of their former slaves for a fixed-term after emancipation; the scheme, known as ‘apprenticeship’, was originally conceived as a twelve-year period for planters to adjust to the new inevitable turn of events. However, when the Whig Government finally passed the Act, ‘apprenticeship’ was reduced to 5 years for domestics and 7 years for field workers, causing a fear of imminent ruin amongst proprietors with strong monetary interests in the West Indies. Planters’ anxiety over the economic consequences of full emancipation prompted immediate action to secure new labour; in Mauritius, where a small number of indentured workers from India and Singapore had been
introduced as early as 1829, plans were swiftly resumed for the importation of fresh labour from the Subcontinent. British Guiana followed suit; from Liverpool, John Gladstone, merchant and father of the Prime Minister William E. Gladstone, wrote a letter to the shipping agency Gillanders, Arbuthnot & Co. in Calcutta dated 4 January 1836, to enquire about the possibility of recruiting and transporting Indian workers to his plantations xii in Demerara. He explained: You will probably be aware that we are very particularly situated with our Negro apprentices in the West Indies, and that it is a matter of doubt and uncertainty how far they may be induced to continue their services on the plantations after their apprenticeship expires in 1840. […] We are therefore most desirous to obtain and introduce labourers from other quarters […].
4Gillanders’ response was reassuring; the firm was “not awarethat any greater difficulty would present itself in sending men to the West Indies, the natives being perfectly ignorant of the place they agree to go to, or the length of the voyage they are undertaking.”5
On 10 March 1837, Gladstone and his friend, John Moss of Liverpool, placed an order for a minimum of 150 young and able-bodied Indian ‘coolies’ to be sent to their sugar plantations in Demerara. Gladstone further instructed the Calcutta firm that “if the female Coolies will engage to work there, a larger proportion may be sent, say two women to three men, or, if desired, equal numbers; but if they will not engage to work there, then the proportion sent to the Isle of France, of one female to nine or ten men, for cooking and washing, is enough!”(qtd. in Scoble 6).6
On 5 May 1838, the Whitby and the Hesperus delivered a total of 437 Indian immigrants to the coast of British Guiana. More specifically “155 men, five women, and ten children, in all 170 persons for Messrs. Gladstone and Moss” disembarked from the Hesperus, and from the Whitby “250 men, seven women, and ten children, in all 267 persons” for distribution among other Demerara sugar estates.7
On 30 August 1838, Governor Light, who had just completed a tour of the colony, wrote to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Glenelg: “From the reports I have received, and from my personal observation, the Coolies appear satisfied with their position, and have not disappointed their employers” (qtd.in Scoble 9). Of a similar nature were Light’s later dispatches; on 11 January 1839, he maintained: “the Coolies on Mr. GLADSTONE’S property, are a fine healthy body of men; they are beginning to marry or co-habit with the negresses, and take pride in their dress” (Ibid. 10). The international press, however, was exposing a different truth and reports of abuses in the
recruitment and treatment of the ‘coolies’ rapidly reached the British public. As early as 4 May 1838, the day before the first batch of indentured immigrants even set foot on Guianese soil, the Liverpool Mercury cited from the
Calcutta Courier of 7 February 1838 as follows: We have been informed by an eye witness of certain abuses of those Chokedars who were put on guard over the Coolies, shipped for Demerara on board the Hesperus, a few days ago. One of the Coolies died, and, it is alleged, from the man being refused permission by the Chokedars in guard to come on deck. The Coolie in
question was, it appears, against his will, kept down below during several hours of the night, notwithstanding repeated applications by him to be permitted to breathe the fresh air; and within a few hours after he was, by the exertions and orders of our informant, brought on deck, the poor creature died. The object of the Chokedars, in keeping these poor people below originates, it appears, in the usual system of extortion, practiced whenever the opportunity occurs by natives in authority; the natives were made to pay by the Chokedars price, for the privilege of coming on deck.
On September 8, 1838 the Bristol Mercury denounced: “call it by what name the machinators may, the scheme for an importation into the slave colonies of ‘free labourers’ can be no other, in fact, than a renewal of the slave-trade in the first instance, and a perpetuation of slavery in the second.” The following year, copy of an article published by the British Emancipator on 9 January reached British Guiana and a commission was finally appointed to enquire into the condition of the Coolies on plantation Belle-Vue, one of Gladstone’s possessions. The evidence found was appalling, yet none of the men found guilty of mistreatment were fined or imprisoned. Additional proof emerged from a parallel investigation in Calcutta, where a local commission had been set up to look into allegations of kidnapping and other irregularities in the recruitment of emigrant workers. In light of the findings, the Governor-General’s council finally decided to suspend the system and passed Act XIV on 29 May 1839 to prohibit overseas emigration for manual labour (Tinker 66-69).
For over four years, the supporters of planting interests led a tenacious campaign of pressure to overturn the ban; at the same time, the anti-slavery movement worked strenuously to uphold its humanitarian cause and ensure that the ban remained in force.

A solution was found in government intervention, which was “championed in British political circles as the guarantor of freedom” (Jung 680). In 1842 the importation of coolies to Mauritius was restored on condition that the state would regulate all phases of recruitment, transportation and employment; the resuming of the system in the West Indies was now only a matter of time. In 1844 Governor Light wrote to Lord Stanley, the new Secretary of State for the Colonies: “All eyes are now turned to India”; on 26 January 1845, a new cargo of Indians bound to
British Guiana left Calcutta on board the Lord Hungerford, restarting a flow of contracted emigration that would continue until 1917 (Tinker 81).8

The Chinese ‘coolie’ trade
As the importation of Indian workforce was brought to a halt in 1839, Guiana proprietors were pressed to consider further alternatives. According to Clementi, the first hint that British Guiana should look to China for a supply of free labour dated back to 1811 (Clementi 2); yet, it was not until 12 January 1853 that the first shipment of 262 Chinese ‘coolies’ arrived in the colony on board the Glentanner. Two years later migration to the colony was “suspended due to financial pressures and the consequent difficulty of obtaining adequate shipping” (Look Lai
98). Besides, complications and irregularity linked to the recruitment of labourers fomented a climate of tension in China which became unfavourable to the successful maintenance of the system; on November 24,1852, Dr Ely, ship surgeon on board the coolie vessel Samuel Boddington from Amoy to Demerara, noted in his Journal:
Amoy is in a state of great confusion and alarm. An army of armed Chinese had entered the city, killed several
Europeans, etc…The disturbance said to be caused by the coolie brokers having enraged the community by
enticing some young men to leave home and go on board the coolie ships under false pretence” (qtd. in Look Lai 102-103).
In April 1853, the China Emigration Agent, James White, reported: “The experience of this season has fully confirmed my former views as to the disadvantage, if not danger, of leaving the emigration from China in private hands, without sufficient responsibility, and paid by bounty or by commission on each emigrant shipped” (qtd. in Look Lai 108). Anxious to maintain their provision of labour and to protect their image, the British called for a legalised scheme; from 1859 voluntary contract migration from licensed depots was initiated and the reception of emigrants for the British West Indies was placed in the hands of official agencies at Hong Kong and Canton. Shipments continued on an annual basis until 1866, when a second more severe interruption occurred, due to disagreement over new indenture regulations and the payment of return passages to China. The Emigration Agency in Canton was closed in 1873-4 and although a compromise was finally reached, only one further shipment, carrying voluntary uncontracted labourers, was made to British Guiana in 1879. Overall, this precarious and inconstant flux introduced 13,541 Chinese workers to the South American colony, of whom only 2,075 were women.
The living and working conditions of Chinese coolies in British Guiana did not differ much from those of their fellow immigrants from India; yet, as Look Lai regrets “we have no formal accounts from the Chinese themselves on what they thought about their new life in the nineteenth century West Indian plantation environment” (165). On the other hand, the outraged condemnation of the system issued by the former Chief Justice Joseph Beaumont, and published independently in 1871 under the title “The New Slavery: An Account of the Indian and Chinese Immigrants in British Guiana”, contains copious accounts of cruelty and violence against Chinese labourers in the colony.9

The Royal Commission of Enquiry
State intervention, which had been used to validate the resurrection of the indenture system in India and to regulate migration from China, did not result in the dissociation of ‘coolieism’ from slavery. Sugar planters held a position of great influence in the Government of British Guiana and controlled the majority of the seats in the Court of Policy, a circumstance that afforded them the power to sway the enactment of local indentureship legislations in their favour. In 1863 re-indenture of immigrants after their first five years in the colony was made legal; the following year new penalties were added for absence from work and misbehaviour, giving planters total licence over their ‘coolies’. Opposition was voiced by three individuals: the Immigration-Agent General (Protector) James Crosby, appointed in 1858; the Chief Justice Joseph Beaumont; and the magistrate William Des Voeux. The appointment of Sir Francis Hincks as Governor of the colony in 1862 made matters worse. Devoted to the interest of the planters, Hincks imposed strong limitations on Crosby’s powers, organized the dismissal of Beaumont in 1865, and transferred Des Voeux from one district to another until the magistrate was finally moved to St Lucia as Administrator in 1869.10
It was from his new island residence that, in December 1869,Des Voeux wrote a long and detailed letter to the Secretary of State for the Colonies reporting on the ill-treatment of immigrant labourers in Demerara. More specifically, Des Voeux’s memo charged the Immigration Agents, the magistrates, the medical attendants on the estates, and the late Governor, with subservience to the planters, and called for an investigation of the abuses of the indentureship system. According to Des Voeux, inadequate medical facilities, summary and partial justice, scanty
accommodation and daily harassment were common practice in the colony and reduced the indentured immigrants to a position “not far removed from slavery”. Regarding the administration of justice, he wrote:[…] of the great numbers of immigrants who are weekly committed to goal for breaches of contract, a very considerable proportion are convicted of neglect to do what they were physically incapable of doing; and whether my belief is just or not, I know that a sense of the injustice of such convictions is a very potent cause of the prevailing discontent.11 Meanwhile, distressing reports of misconduct, accidents and deaths continued to appear in the British press. In February 1870, an article previously published by the Demerara Colonist was circulated by the Glasgow Herald and several other British newspapers; the piece reported the death of ninety-eight emigrants on board the Shand, a ‘coolie’ ship bound to British Guiana:
Among the dead were numbered 29 men, 33 women, 5 boys, 7 girls, 9 male and 11 female infants. Of the 364 landed here, 39 were in a condition which necessitated their immediate transference to the hospital. […] The surgeon states that about fifty of the immigrants were in a low state of health when shipped; and that he would have objected to their embarkation had he been aware of their condition. But, as he did not join the ship until she was ready for sea, he did not become acquainted with it until she had actually sailed. […] When lime juice and fresh vegetables were required, it was found that the lime juice was bad, and that the whole of the onions and potatoes taken on board at Calcutta were rotten.12
Later that month, the Glasgow Herald quoted from the Demerara Colonist of 24 January: Another immigrant vessel has arrived, and again, we regret to say, the rate of mortality reported is exceptionally high […]. The Sophia Joakim, which sailed form Calcutta on September 14, with 424 immigrants, arrived here on the 9thinst., after a passage of 114 days […] with 391, 33 having died on the voyage.13 A Royal Commission of Enquiry was finally set up in August 1870 to investigate on the legitimacy of Des Voeux’s allegations and to report on the condition of immigrants in British Guiana. The Commission was formed by Sir George Young, junior barrister, Mr Charles Mitchell, of Trinidad, nominated by the Colonial Office, and Mr W. E. Frere, who arrived in British Guiana after a delay of six weeks; they collected evidence from numerous witnesses and inspected 55 out of the 124 estates employing immigrants in the colony. Their annotations were presented to the Parliament in a lengthy Report in June 1871; the dwellings of the immigrants, the state of the hospitals, the material and moral conditions of contracted labourers, and the financial and legal aspects of immigration were fully reviewed in the 954 paragraphs of the document. In their conclusions, however, the commissioners only called for limited and partial reforms, leaving intact the essential structure of the system. They recommended that, for the “satisfactory continuation of immigration”, the Penal and Reindenture clauses of the Immigrant Labour Law should be reformed and that the Immigration Office should be reorganised as a department of the Government and brought under the direction of the medical staff of the estates.

The Coolie, his Rights and Wrongs (1871)
The findings of the Commission were critically reviewed by John Edward Jenkins, a radical barrister particularly sensitive to imperial issues, chosen by the Aborigines Protection Society and the Anti-Slavery Society to observe and report on the proceedings of the investigation. Jenkins was born to a Wesleyan family in southern India in 1838, “the very year that the first batch of labourers left India for British Guiana” (Dabydeen 6). Educated at first in Canada and then at the University of Pennsylvania, he came to England in the early 1860s where he passed the Bar in 1864. He became rapidly renowned for his radical ideas on political and social matters and combined his dedication to the law with the writing of a large number of novels.14 Upon his return from British Guiana, Jenkins collated the results of his observation in The Coolie, his Rights and Wrongs (1871), a meticulous work in which he denounced the corruption of officers and magistrates involved in the immigration system and offered a forthright account of what he had witnessed in British Guiana. Biased laws, arbitrary incarceration, unfair wages, a scarcity of women, inadequate accommodation and daily aggravations, made the immigrants’ life miserable and jeopardised the well-being of the colony. The pleading of an Indian labourer, reported by Jenkins, powerfully conveys the frustration of the indentureds: “O massa, plees, massa help Coolie. Manahee too bad, massa, starve um, beat um, chuck um, so. Massa stop um wagee, take um wife. Coolie live too bad, massa: too hard work, too little money, too little food.”
Yet, in offering his criticism Jenkins did not act against the planters or out of mere compassion for the immigrants, “but in the general interest of colonial well-being and good government.” The barrister’s view was that the presence of unsuitable workforce in British Guiana plagued both planters and administrators, slowing down the economy of the entire colony. Bad recruitment and corruption were responsible, he believed, for all subsequent problems on the plantations and for the general discontent of workers and masters alike. Frequently sick and broken in spirit, hardened, harassed and cheated on their wages, the unhappy ‘coolies’ too often “became a burthen to the estate, a nuisance to the manager, and restless, complaining, unprofitable, in the work they did.” Far from questioning the very existence or continuation of the system, Jenkins suggested that indentureship could indeed be rendered
beneficial, both to the Indians and the planters, through “the elimination of the injustices that corrupted the ideals of the Empire” (Dabydeen 19). After all, as David Dabydeen points out, Jenkins was not a revolutionary or a communist, but a social reformer with humanitarian tendencies, concerned with the honour and success of British civilisation (Ibid.).
Predictably, The Coolie provoked hostile responses from those close to the plantocracy. The ‘West Indian’ author of an anonymous pamphlet entitled The Coolie in Demerara went to great length to counter Jenkins’ allegations. The elaborate emigration system set up at both ends of the trade, the ‘West Indian’ argued, made it “a sheer impossibility for a single coolie to find himself on board a ship and bound for the British West Indies except by his own free will and consent”; besides, if compared to the conditions of the English labouring classes, the state of the indentured Indians was a privileged one, with free housing and hospital provisions (qtd. in Dabydeen 13-14). The plantation system, he concluded was innocent of Jenkin’s charges.15

The American edition
The nineteenth century ‘coolie’ trade mobilised an international network of recruiters, shippers, and investors. In looking back at British colonial politics, it is therefore worth bringing into the picture wider elements of interdependence with some of the other global players of the period. The outlawing of the African slave trade during the first half of the nineteenth century strongly reduced the availability of workforce in areas with a slave-based economy.16
In Cuba, a leading sugar-producing colony, planters demanded a supply of labour in numbers far superior to the delivery capacity of illegal traders. Gladstone’s enterprise inspired a Spanish slave-trader to kick start the introduction of Chinese labourers to Cuba in 1846, four decades before the abolition of slavery in the colony. Between 1847 and 1874 almost 125,000 Chinese labourers landed in Cuba to work side by side with the slave population (Jung 682). Early reports depicted the immigrants in a state of sickness and misery akin to slavery and the Cuban venture attracted immediate criticism from American abolitionists. Yet, within a few years, many began promoting‘coolie’ labour as a way to expedite emancipation; Chinese emigration would benefit “both the Chinamen and the Negro, if you can at once relieve the hunger of the former and preserve the freedom of the latter” (qtd. In Jung 683). By the early 1850s the New York Times heartily prompted U.S. slaveholders to emulate their competitors in the Caribbean presenting ‘coolies’as a means to abolition (Jung 683).
A few years later, positions had shifted and both pro-slavery lobbies and abolitionists were condemning the importation of coolies, albeit for different reasons. Southern pro-slavery ideologues argued that the failings of emancipation confirmed the natural order of slavery and stood against state intervention into matters of race and labour (Jung 690). At the same time, anti-slavery lobbies had abandoned their former campaign and were now determined to expose the hypocrisy of British authorities that had simply revived African slavery under new semantics.
Meanwhile, American clippers had become increasingly involved in the transportation of ‘coolies’. As outrage against the kidnapping and deception of emigrants begun to spread in China, incidents related to the ‘coolie’ trade risked to jeopardize America’s commercial access to Asia. In a communication to the foreign consular body at Canton, dated January 6, 1860, the allied Commanders in Chief in China presented the deposition of 105 men, who have lately been brought away from certain Coolie receiving ships at Whampoa— namely, the American ships Messenger, Pioneer,
Governor Morton, and the Oldenburg bark Fanny Kirchner; you will read with pain the particulars therein given of the system of torture that has been pursued in order to wring from the victims of the trade a nominal consent to an eight years’ engagement in the Island of Cuba…17
As Jung clarifies: “Initially cast as the ‘free’ advancement form coerced labor, ‘coolies’ came to epitomise slavery in the United States at a time when the national crisis over slavery was about to erupt in open warfare” (694). In February 1862, Lincoln signed an act to prohibit the ‘Coolie Trade’ in American vessels. Yet, when in the aftermath of the Civil War (1861–1865) the prospect of black emancipation encouraged former slaveholders to look at the example of the Caribbean for economic rescue, enforcement of the act was made practically impossible by the ambiguity of its wording, which inadvertently failed to differentiate properly between ‘coolie’ and free voluntary immigration (Jung 697). It was in light of the international interests surrounding his subject that Jenkins prepared a revised edition of The Coolie for the American public. He understood that the ‘coolie’ question extended beyond the British dimension in ways that made it impossible to consider ideologies of empire in isolation. For the same reasons, we have chosen to reproduce hereafter the American edition of
The Coolie, first printed and distributed by George Routledge and Sons in New York in 1871