Coolie () is a term historically used for low-wage labourers, typically those of Indian descent in the Caribbean and parts of Africa. The term was first used in the 16th century by European traders across the Indian Subcontinent. In the 18th century, it more commonly got passed down and referred to the generation who migrated as Indian indentured labourers to the Caribbean in the 19th century. During the British colonial era, the term was adopted and officially used during the transportation and forced employment of Indian labourers via employment contracts on sugar plantations formerly worked by African slaves.
The word has had a variety of negative connotations. In modern-day English, it is usually regarded as offensive. In the 21st century, coolie is generally considered a racial slur for Indians in Oceania, Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Americas (particularly in the Caribbean (varying)).
The word originated in the 17th-century Indian subcontinent and meant "day labourer"; starting in the 20th century, the word was used in British Raj India to refer to porters at railway stations. The term differs from the word "Dougla", although in Jamaica and parts of the Caribbean the term can be used for those of fully Indian decent and dougla decent. Coolie is mostly used to refer to people of fully-blooded Indian descent whose ancestors migrated to the British and Dutch (as koelie) former colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. This is particularly the case in South Africa, the Eastern African countries, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Suriname, Jamaica, other parts of the Caribbean, Mauritius, Fiji, and the Malay Peninsula.
In modern Indian popular culture, coolies have often been portrayed as working-class heroes or anti-heroes. Indian films celebrating coolies include Deewaar (1975), Coolie (1983), Coolie (1995), Coolie (2025) and several films titled Coolie No. 1 (released in 1991, 1995, and 2020).
Etymology The term coolie is widely believed to have originated from the Tamil word (kūli, ). The word appears in the classical Tamil literature, including the Thirukkural (Kural 619), where it refers to the wage or reward earned through laborious effort: The word is still commonly used in Tamil with the same meaning. During British colonial rule, Tamil-speaking labourers were among the first to be sent abroad as indentured workers, and the word spread to English and other Indian languages through colonial usage.
The term also appears in other Indian languages, such as Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu) / (qulī, ) and Telugu (kūlī, ). The slave meaning is derived from Chagatai (qul), ultimately from Proto-Turkic *kul (). However, some scholars believe the Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu) usage may also have been influenced by Tamil.
The Dravidian root word kūli, meaning "wages", is found across most Dravidian languages except the North Dravidian branch.
Another theory suggests that the Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu) word qulī could have originated from the name of a tribal (i.e., Adivasi) or caste group in Gujarat.
In Chinese, the word (Pinyin: , ), is an example of phono-semantic matching of the Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu) word. Although unrelated etymologically, the term came to be used similarly by colonial powers to describe Chinese manual labourers.
The word coolies was recorded in English as early as 1727, when Engelbert Kaempfer described dock workers unloading Dutch merchant ships in Nagasaki, Japan.
History of the coolie trade
Abolition of slavery and rise of the coolie trade The importation of Asian labourers into European colonies occurred as early as the 17th century. However, in the 19th century, a far more robust system of trade involving coolies occurred, in direct response to the gradual abolition of both the Atlantic slave trade and slavery itself, which for centuries had served as the preferred mode of labour in European colonies in the Americas. The British were the first to experiment with coolie labour when, in 1806, two hundred Chinese labourers were transported to the colony of Trinidad to work on the plantations there. The "Trinidad experiment" was not a success, with only twenty to thirty labourers remaining in Trinidad by the 1820s. However, such efforts inspired Sir John Gladstone, one of the earliest proponents of coolie labour, to seek out coolies for his sugar plantations in British Guiana in the hopes of replacing his Afro-Caribbean labour force after the abolition of slavery there in 1833.
Social and political pressure led to the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire in 1833, with other European nations eventually following suit. Labour-intensive work in European colonies, such as those involving plantations and mines, were left without a cheap source of manpower. As a consequence, a large-scale trade of primarily Indian and Chinese indentured labourers began in the 1820s to fill this need. In 1838, 396 South Asian workers arrived in British Guiana, and such a stream of migrant labour would continue until the First World War. Other European nations, especially colonial powers such as France, Spain, and Portugal, soon followed suit, especially as Britain, through several treaties such as Strangford Treaty and the Treaty of Paris of 1814, also pressured other nations to abolish their involvement in the Atlantic slave trade. In most European colonies, the importation of Asian labourers began in earnest after the abolition of slavery. However, in some colonies, such as Cuba, slavery would not end until 1886, about forty years after coolies were introduced.
A number of contemporary and modern historians noted the influence of the old form of colonial slavery on the coolie system. The coolie trade, much like the slave trade, was intended to provide a labour force for colonial plantations in the Americas and the Pacific whose cash crops were in high demand across the Atlantic World. Coolies frequently worked on slave plantations which had been previously worked by African slaves, and similarly brutal treatment could be meted out by plantation overseers in response to real or perceived offences. On some Caribbean plantations, the numbers of coolies present could reach up to six hundred. In 1878, historian W. L. Distant wrote an article for the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, detailing his time spent on West Indian plantations observing the work ethic and behaviours of coolies, and noted that many overseers believed that Asian coolies, much like African slaves, held an affinity for intensive outdoor labour work. The views of overseers towards coolies differed based on ethnicity: Chinese and Japanese coolies were perceived to be harder working, more unified as a labour force, and maintained better hygiene habits in comparison to Indian labourers, who were viewed as being lower in status and treated as children who required constant supervision.
Debates over coolie labour Unlike slavery, coolie labour was (in theory) under contract, consensual, paid, and temporary, with the coolie able to regain complete freedom after their term of service. Regulations were put in place as early as 1837 by the British authorities in India to safeguard these principles of voluntary, contractual work and safe, sanitary transportation. The Chinese government also made efforts to secure the well-being of their nation's workers, with representatives being sent to relevant governments around the world. Some Western abolitionists saw coolie labour as paving the way towards abolition, to gradually and peacefully replace African slave labour without loss of profit. However, other abolitionist groups and individuals – such as the British Anti-Slavery Society and the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, along with American abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison – were highly critical of coolie labour. Proslavery advocates, particularly in the Southern United States, condemned coolie labour but used it to argue against the abolition of American slavery, claiming the latter was more "humane" than the former.
In practice, however, as many opponents of the system argued, abuse and violence in the coolie trade was rampant. Some of these labourers signed employment contracts based on misleading promises, while others were kidnapped and sold into servitude; some were victims of clan violence whose captors sold them to coolie merchants, while others sold themselves to pay off gambling debts. Those who did sign on voluntarily generally had contracts of two to five years. In addition to having their passage paid for, coolies were also paid under twenty cents per day on average. However, in certain regions, roughly a dollar would be taken from coolies every month in order to pay off their debts.
Chinese coolies
In European colonies Workers from China were mainly transported to work in Peru and Cuba. However, many Chinese labourers worked in British colonies such as Singapore, New South Wales, Jamaica, British Guiana (now Guyana), British Malaya, Trinidad and Tobago, British Honduras (now Belize), as well as in the Dutch colonies within the Dutch East Indies and Suriname. The first shipment of Chinese labourers was to the British colony of Trinidad in 1806 "in an attempt to establish a settlement of free peasant cultivators and labourers". On many of the voyages, the labourers were transported on the same vessels that had been used to transport African slaves in previous years.
The coolie slave trade run by American captains and local agents, mainly consisting of debt slavery, was called the 'pig trade' as the living conditions were not dissimilar to that of livestock; on some vessels as many as 40 per cent of the coolies died en route. As many as 500 were crammed into a single ship hold, leaving no room to move. The coolies were also stamped on their backs like livestock. Foreign merchants took advantage of the unequal treaties negotiated between the Qing government and Western powers after the Opium Wars, as well as the resulting political and economic instability, to broker deals for "contracted" workers. Anglophone capitalists referred to the opium trade and captive Chinese labour as "poison and pigs".
Portuguese Macao was the center of coolie slavery: it was described as "the only real business" in Macao from 1848 to 1873, generating enormous profits for the Portuguese until it was banned due to pressure from the British government. Between 1851 and 1874 approximately 215,000 Chinese were shipped from Macau overseas, primarily to Cuba and Peru, with some being shipped to Guiana, Suriname, and Costa Rica. These coolies were obtained via a variety of sources, including some who were entrapped by brokers in Macau through loans for gambling, and others who were kidnapped or coerced.
In 1847, two ships from Cuba transported workers to Havana to work in the sugar cane fields from the port of Amoy (Xiamen), one of the five Chinese treaty ports opened to the British by the Treaty of Nanking in 1842. The trade soon spread to other ports in Guangdong, and demand became particularly strong in Peru for workers in the silver mines and the guano collecting industry. Australia began importing workers in 1848. These workers were deceived about their terms of employment to a much greater extent than their Indian counterparts, and consequently, there was a much higher level of Chinese emigration during this period.
The trade flourished from 1847 to 1854 without incident, until reports began to surface of the mistreatment of the workers in Cuba and Peru. As the British government had political and legal responsibility for many of the ports involved – including Amoy – such ports were immediately closed. Despite these closures, the trade simply shifted to the more accommodating port within the Portuguese enclave of Macau.