The Transformation of the World (36 page)

The number of new immigrants in the United States grew from 14,000 a year in the 1820s to 260,000 in the 1850s and a peak of approximately a million in 1911. The main driving force all through the century was the robust growth of the American economy, whose curve roughly paralleled that of immigration,
and the continual decline in transportation costs. After 1870 the proportion of immigrants from northern and western Europe receded, while that from east-central, eastern, and southeastern Europe increased. It was a dramatic trend. In 1861–70 east-central and eastern Europeans accounted for only 0.5 percent of immigrants, and southern Europeans for only 0.9 percent; in the 1901–10 decade, the shares were 44.5 percent and 26.3 percent respectively.
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This had colossal effects on the cultural and especially the religious composition of US society.

The national shares of European migration across the Atlantic are a revealing indicator. Of the western and southern European countries, Ireland ranked first during the last three decades of the nineteenth century, followed by Britain and Norway in joint second place; third was a group made up of Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden; while Germany followed some distance behind. Conversely, how important was transatlantic emigration for the individual European countries? In the decade after 1870, 661 per 100,000 of the local population emigrated from Ireland, against 504 from Britain, 473 from Norway, 289 from Portugal, and 147 from Germany.
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In absolute figures, British, Italians, Germans, and Habsburg subjects were the most numerous among those who crossed the Atlantic, although until about 1880, Italians migrated more within Europe than overseas. Only one large European country did not take part: France. Of course, national averages give only a bird's-eye view; emigration was actually concentrated in certain regions within countries—for example, Calabria, western England, western and southern Ireland, eastern Sweden, or Pomerania.

Unforced migration across the Atlantic can also be estimated only approximately. Informed conjectures hover around 55 million for the whole period between 1820 and 1920,
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60 percent of it (33 million) to the United States. The second most important destination was Argentina, to which roughly 5.5 million (10 percent) emigrated between 1857 and 1924, followed by Canada and Brazil.
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These figures do not take returnees into account. Although European emigration, unlike Indian or Chinese labor emigration, was normally considered definitive, there were always a certain percentage who went back or who moved on to another country. Canada had vast unpopulated territories but did not fulfill the expectation that part of the huge migratory flow to the United States would turn northward. Indeed, around the end of the century Canada was sending
more
people to the United States than it was receiving. Canada was a classic way station, a demographic sieve.
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Argentina is an extreme case in the history of emigration. Nowhere else in the world, including the United States, did immigrants constitute such a high proportion of the population by the end of the nineteenth century. In 1914, of the eight million people living in a country five times larger than France, approximately 58 percent had either been born abroad or were children of first-generation immigrants.
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For decades, one-half of the inhabitants of the capital, Buenos Aires, had not been born in Argentina. Immigration from Spain to the River Plate region, other than of officials or military men, began only in
the middle of the century; it had little to do with the fact that the country had once been ruled by Spain, and should therefore not be regarded as a postcolonial phenomenon.
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By 1914 Buenos Aires was the third-largest Spanish city in the world, after Madrid and Barcelona, but it was Italians who made up the principal group of immigrants by numbers. Many of them moved there only temporarily, the journey from Italy being so easy to arrange that it was possible even on a seasonal basis. Italian musicians from rustic choirs to celebrated primadonnas sojourned there during the slack season of the peninsular opera year, turning Buenos Aires into a major center of Italian opera.
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Since it had scarcely any continuity with the colonial past, the immigration to Argentina was not marked, as in North America, by the old practice of indenture, and unlike in Brazil African slavery was almost insignificant. It was therefore “modern,” in the sense of not being burdened with unfree labor relationships. For lack of an adequate internal market, the economy was from the beginning geared to production for international demand: at first sheep farming (cattle played little role before 1900), and then an agricultural revolution that, within a few years after 1875, turned the former grain importer into one of the world's largest exporters of wheat. Immigrants were used here as farm laborers and sharecroppers; only few managed to acquire land on a significant scale. Argentina became much less of a melting pot than the United States. The Spanish-Creole upper classes did little for the integration of newcomers, while more than 90 percent of these spurned Argentine citizenship in order to escape military service.
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Italians in Buenos Aires were renowned for their patriotic passions. Mazzini and Garibaldi found much support there, and conflicts between secular forces and church loyalists were pursued with passion.
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Contract Labor

In the nineteenth century there were also new migrations that did not originate in Europe. They were driven by the “pull factor” of labor shortage and occurred very largely, though not exclusively, within the British Empire and other areas under British control. The economic engine was not so much the processing industries as three other kinds of capitalist novelty: plantations, mechanized mining, and the railroads. Quantitatively the most important was the plantation, which combined agrarian and industrial revolutions by applying industrial mechanization and work organization to the production and processing of agricultural raw materials. Those who moved were, without exception, colored. And the extent of this migration was still greater than that of the transcontinental movement of Europeans. Indians arrived in East and South Africa, the east coast of South America, the Caribbean islands, and the Pacific island of Fiji; Chinese relocated to Southeast Asia, South Africa, the United States, and western South America. The geographic spread is apparent from
table 4
, whose figures are actually on the low side, since unrecorded migration and human trafficking must also have been considerable.

Table 4: Main Destinations for Contract Labor, 1831–1920

Source:
Simplified from David Northrup,
Indentured Labour
, pp. 159–60 (Tab. A.2).

Before 1860 this migration served to fill gaps left by the ending of slavery in the sugar plantations of the British Caribbean and the island of Mauritius (which in mid-century was the largest supplier of sugar to the United Kingdom). Ex-slaves invariably turned their back on the plantations and tried to scratch out a living on land of their own, which could not often have been much more lavish than a slave's existence. The reduction in the supply of local labor accompanied an expansion of the global demand for sugar and a long-term fall in sugar prices, which was due in part to the fact that the production of beet sugar was growing faster than the production of cane sugar.
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A labor supply was required, and it needed to be as cost effective as possible. New centers such as Trinidad, Peru, and Fiji entered the market. It was in this competitive atmosphere that the demand grew for cheap and acquiescent labor.
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Later, Asian migration flowed toward new plantations in colonies that had never known slavery, and into mining and railroad construction. The foundations of this “Asian contract labor system” were laid in the 1840s. It rested upon a generalizable and easy-to-manage form of cheap employment: indenture. The contractual compulsion to work thus reemerged in Asia soon after it had disappeared from new immigration to the United States. The distinctiveness of this new Asian system should not be underestimated, however. Although contract laborers were often kidnapped and cheated in the manner of slaves, and although they were often subjected to harsh discipline in the manner of early European factory workers, they were free persons in the eyes of the law, with no social stigma and no “lord” who systematically interfered in their private lives. They were employed for a specific period, and their children, unlike those of slaves, were legally unaffected by the relationship of dependence. On the other hand, they were often exposed to a racism in the new country that white indentured servants did not have to endure.

The sea journey itself was frequently a horrific experience; Joseph Conrad, in his novel
Typhoon
(1902), described this in the case of some Chinese “coolies” returning to their mother country. Conditions were especially bad on ships bound for Latin America and the Caribbean, which even after the introduction of steamers from southern China took 170 days to reach Cuba or 120 to reach Peru. Sailing ships remained in use here longer than in any other crossing. Laborers were crammed together on plank beds below decks, sometimes in chains, while troublemakers were confined in cages and pillories on deck. Nevertheless, the conditions were not comparable to the horror of the slave ships, whose human cargo had often been as much as six times larger for the same space.
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In many respects contract laborers were better off than European indentured servants of the early modern period, since they had not only room and board but a regular wage, usually free accommodation, and a modicum of health care.
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Contract labor was not the continuation of slavery by other means, and therefore not an archaic practice, but rather an old system of (in principle) free labor migration adapted to imperial requirements in a capitalist age. It should not be seen as an exotic “tropical” form but is to be bracketed together with transatlantic migration. Wherever the wages on offer overseas were so low that they could attract only the poorest of the poor, the cost of the sea crossing had to be met either by someone else or through an advance on future pay.

In reality, colored migrants did not differ so sharply from white settlers: insofar as they were not repatriated for political reasons (as the Chinese were from Transvaal), Asians remained in their destination country as much as Europeans did—a virtual totality in the case of South Asians in the Caribbean. By 1900 Indians had overtaken Africans as the largest group in Mauritius, making up 70 percent of the island's population; they were more numerous than Europeans in Natal and formed a third of the population in Trinidad and British Guyana. Forty percent of the inhabitants of Hawaii were of Japanese origin, and another 17 percent were Chinese.
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In the most disparate parts of the world, Asian minorities became a stable element in the local society, often constituting a kind of middle class. Asian contract labor essentially consisted of Indians and Chinese. Of the two million non-European contract laborers who figure in the statistics between 1831 and 1920, 66 percent originated in India and 20 percent in China.
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The Indian migration was the only one that continued on a significant scale throughout the period.
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It began in the 1820s, climbed rapidly to a peak in the 1850s, and remained at an average of 150,000 to 160,000 a decade until 1910. This export of labor was a spillover from accelerated flows within India and a side effect of the extensive migration to Burma and other parts of Southeast Asia. The figures show a link not only with demand inside the British Empire but also with the chronology of famines in various regions of India. The chaos and repression following the defeat of the 1857/58 Great Rebellion were reflected in a sharp increase, but long-range factors also played a role. The unusually large number of weavers is attributable to the destruction of India's rural textile industry. The
emigration was by no means restricted to the poor: members of higher castes also packed up and left. The especially detailed statistics that we have for Calcutta show that the movement involved a cross-section of the rural population of northern India.

Once the relevant statutory provisions were created in 1844, the Indian emigration became less arbitrary and prone to abuse than the export of labor from China. Deception and abduction were rarer occurrences, and it was to a larger degree voluntary.
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At first it encountered much resistance from abolitionists, humanitarians, and colonial administrators,
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but later the interests of imperial planters prevailed. The principles of liberal political economy decreed that no one should be hindered from freely searching for work. Governments within the empire also concluded agreements with one another to overcome labor bottlenecks. In Natal it was difficult to recruit the local population for work on the new sugar plantations, and so in the 1860s the government of the Colony of Natal (which Britain had annexed in 1845) negotiated a supply of contract laborers from India. The idea was that they would return to India at the end of the contract period, but most of them stayed on and helped to build the local Asian community.
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