Abstract:

Between the late 1840s and 1874 about 280,000 Chinese contract laborers, also known as
“coolies”, were induced or sold overseas to meet the demand for cheap and exploitable labor
coming from several Latin American societies—mainly Cuba, Peru and the British West
Indies—after the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. This massive migration involved the
creation, first in the “treaty ports” of southern China, and after 1851 in Macao, of a well-oiled
multi-national network for the recruiting and shipping of these semi-coerced workers.
Italian emigrants in Peru, almost all of Genoese origin, controlled a significant share in
this business, second only to French, Spanish and Peruvian merchants. Part of a wider
“commercial diaspora” established in the main Latin American ports during the last days of
the Spanish colonial domination, they engaged in almost all the phases of the coolie traffic—
either as seamen, ship-owners, charterers or emigration agents—and employed Chinese labor
in their cotton and sugar plantations on the Peruvian coast.
Providing a close analysis of these merchant families and their firms’ activities, this thesis
offers a deeper insight into the organization and structure of the so-called Macao coolie trade
and its interaction with the nineteenth-century global circulations of people and commodities.

iii