11.
After Britain abolished the slave trade, colonial powers replaced it with the “coolie” system, shipping more than 2 million Chinese and Indian workers to plantations worldwide under conditions abolitionists called “a new system of slavery.”
After Britain abolished the Atlantic slave trade in 1807 and slavery itself in 1833, plantation owners across the colonial world needed new labor. The answer was the coolie system, a massive network of indentured labor contracts that transported an estimated more than 2 million workers, primarily Chinese and Indian, to sugar plantations in Cuba, Peru, British Guiana, Trinidad, Mauritius, South Africa, and elsewhere between the 1830s and 1920s. Workers signed contracts they often couldn’t read, for terms of 5 to 8 years, with no meaningful ability to leave.
Mortality rates on coolie ships regularly reached 12–30%, comparable to the worst years of the Atlantic slave trade. Workers were confined below deck and chained when deemed unruly. An 1872 Chinese government investigation into conditions in Cuba found coolies were whipped, shackled, branded, and worked to death on sugar plantations. In Peru, the suicide rate among Chinese laborers was so high that plantation owners complained about the financial losses. The Cuban commission documented workers throwing themselves into boiling sugar vats to escape.
Peru imported an estimated 100,000 Chinese laborers between 1849 and 1874; Cuba imported roughly 125,000 between 1847 and 1874. British colonies imported over a million Indian workers. The word “coolie” itself — likely derived from a Tamil or Chinese word for hired laborer — became a racial slur that persists across multiple continents today. The system collapsed under international pressure, but not before sustaining the global plantation economy for decades after abolition. As historian Lisa Yun wrote, the coolie trade was “the serving of the same plate of exploitation under a new name.”
Sources: Moon-Ho Jung, Coolies and Cane, Lisa Yun, The Coolie Speaks, Smithsonian Magazine, National Archives UK, UNESCO, Yale
