Country: Jamaica

Group: Chinese-Jamaicans

Date Finalized: 10/30/2020

Team: Abi Pentecost (lead), Maya Shrikant, Ethan Pelland

Content Warning: slavery

Approximate Time Period: 1854-1917

Chinese migrant populations were subject to forced labor under the guise of indentured servitude in Jamaica. There is sufficient evidence from academic sources to support the positive identification of forced labor for this ethnic group. Chinese-Jamaicans represent approximately 0.03% of the population.

In 1854, two groups of Chinese arrived in Jamaica; one group of 224 labourers from Hong Kong and another group of 1,042 labourers contracted to work on the Panama Railroad. Prior to the 1850s, African slaves had been forced to work on plantations cultivating sugar cane. However, Jamaica banned the slave trade in 1807 and by 1834, the practice of slavery itself became illegal (Commonwealth Secretariat, 2020). This resulted in a large decrease in the economic status of Jamaica and caused the nation to seek alternative sources of labor. Due to the strong British colonial presence in China at the time, the British government helped facilitate the manipulation of Chinese workers into the unethical system of indentured servitude (Shibata, 2005). Between the years of 1854 and 1886, close to 1300 Chinese workers arrived in Jamaica and were held in “contracts” to work on sugar cane plantations. It is noted that the “contracts” included a wage of $4.00 and rights to clothing, breaks, food,  and housing, but these rights were frequently violated (Bryan, 2020). In 1917, the indentured immigration system was outlawed (Lai, 2013). While Chinese-Jamaicans did face an environment of forced labor in the past, they enjoy a relative level of prosperity and integration within broader Jamaican society today. This is largely facilitated due to a shift in the nature of Chinese migration to Jamaica in the early 1900s as businessmen and entrepreneurs came (of their own volition) to the island and now monopolize much of the grocery market in Jamaica (Bryan, 2004).

We rated the data quality as a 2 for this ethnic group. While there is a fair amount of peer-reviewed scholarly sources, they don’t go into a great deal of depth on the specifics of the indentured servant system that the Chinese suffered in. Additionally, it was difficult to find or read about primary sources that detailed and provided evidence of the indentured servitude.

Sources

  1. Bryan, P. (2004). The Settlement of the Chinese in Jamaica: 1854–c.1970. Caribbean Quarterly, 50(2), 15-25. doi:10.1080/00086495.2004.11672230
  2. Commonwealth Secretariat. (2020). The Commonwealth; Jamaican History. Retrieved October 24, 2020, from https://thecommonwealth.org/our-member-countries/jamaica/history
  3. Lai, W. (2013). Asian indentured immigration to the Caribbean, 1838–1917. In The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration. Blackwell Publishing Ltd. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444351071.wbeghm045
  4. Shibata, Y. (2005). Revisiting Chinese Hybridity: Negotiating Categories and Re-constructing Ethnicity in Contemporary Jamaica – a Preliminary Report. Caribbean Quarterly, 51(1), 53-75. Retrieved October 22, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40654493