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Arnold Meagher. The Coolie Trade: The Traffic in Chinese Laborers to Latin America, 1847-1874. Philadelphia: Xlibris. 2008. 477pp.
The publication of this dissertation is long overdue. By now, this history dissertation, completed in 1975 for the University of California Davis, has been cited repeatedly by many researchers and scholars, so that it is in fact already quite well known within those circles. However, in its manuscript form, it is highly unlikely that it would have been assigned to seminars on Caribbean or Latin American labor history or Chinese diaspora studies. (Researchers like myself accessed it on microfilm through Dissertation Abstracts.) Now available in paperback, that may change, although the book appears to be self-published (with order information directed to a website or a toll-free phone number) and questions regarding publicity and distribution may still limit its dissemination among a broader audience of historians and students. Nor is this work revised from dissertation or updated to incorporate any of the new scholarship on the subject since Meagher's pathbreaking work almost four decades ago. Nevertheless, reviews in this and other academic journals dedicated to scholarship on Latin American and the Caribbean and on the Chinese labor diaspora will spread the word for a work that deserves to be better known and used for its merits.
The purpose of the dissertation, now book, is to closely document the traffic or trade in indentured Chinese laborers, commonly known as coolies, to the Caribbean and South America. Between 1847 and 1875, ships registered to twenty Western nations (a surprisingly large number that included the unexpected addition of Austrian, Belgian, and Norwegian fleets to those of the English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and Americans known to be participating in the African slave-trade-transported over 250,000 people, mostly young Chinese men...