This project examines the place and experiences of Chinese immigrant laborers in the post-emancipation Atlantic. This history studies how Chinese immigrant laborers fit into post-slavery societies and influenced everyday struggles to define freedom through the organization of labor. By linking questions of immigration to post-emancipation problems of labor, Chinese immigration complicates traditional white-black narratives of post-slavery labor arrangements and widens our view of the struggle for freedom in the Atlantic to include immigrants from the Pacific and transnational labor brokers.
This history also shows how imperialism, capitalism, and global migration knit together the post-emancipation Atlantic in a struggle of ideologies and economic systems. Though free in the United States, Chinese immigrants indentured in the Caribbean troubled notions of a natural progression from slavery to a liberal capitalist political economy. Forms of freedom and unfreedom, distinct from both slavery and capitalism, emerged from experimental labor regimes. Examining these regimes, the project challenges binaries that conflate contracts with freedom or that dissolve distinctions between slavery and capitalism.
Niu will examine British colonial records on Chinese migration and indenture, contracts with Chinese laborers, public records, and newspapers to reconstruct and interrogate Chinese immigrants’ place in these post-emancipation societies. Emphasizing both comparison and connection, his project highlights contingency within each society, while underscoring the common challenge of building new labor regimes and political economies upon the ruins of slavery.
Nui also plans to organize an interdisciplinary conference on transnational labor and freedom in the 19th century. This conference takes an explicitly global approach, acknowledging that parallel histories of migration and freedom have much to offer one another—conceptually and methodologically—even if separated by vast geographies.
In these ways, the project connects labor history, immigration and ethnic studies, and histories of capitalism with the global politics of race. It reckons with the ambiguities of wage labor, international business, global migration, and colonialism in the age of emancipation, while furthering understandings of the legacies of slavery and unfreedom as they relate to struggles for multiracial freedom and free labor today.
