Mònica Ginés Blasi: “Consuls as Intermediaries of Chinese Indenture: An Integrating Perspective of Diverse Coerced Migration Systems (1830-1940)”

Abstract

Between 1830 and 1940, about 23 million Chinese left their country to be put to work across the globe, often under coerced conditions. The historiography of Chinese migration has suffered from almost complete compartmentalization and has often perceived these different migration systems as separate – even in the work of global labour historians. In my work I provide a desegregated perspective of Chinese migration by pinpointing its entanglements and parallelisms with diverse forms of labour im/mobilization and exploitation. The organization of Chinese migration became an international imperial enterprise central to the Western incursion in China, and it involved strong and peripheral Western nations alike, becoming the single most transversal item of interest of Western imperial colonialism in the nineteenth century. The project presented investigates the actors that shaped and intervened in these overseas migration systems, and particularly identifies foreign consular staff and government officials as labour intermediaries. My research demonstrates that they not only had an active role as creators of labour markets but were also central connectors of diverse global migration systems.