to food production. Then, as the natives disappeared (owing to flight or to
death from overwork or disease), the Spanish, the Portuguese, and then
the French, British, and Dutch turned in force to Africa’s Atlantic littoral,
which ultimately yielded the -odd million replacement workers who sur-
vived shipment to produce American staples.
After the abolition of slavery, governments nearly everywhere sent
prisoners to sugar and cotton fields owned both privately and by states.
Modern Australia infamously began as a penal colony. France shipped its
(supposedly) most desperate convicts to the jungles of Guyana—one will
recall the legendary escapist called ‘‘Papillon.’’ All southeastern U.S. states
practiced convict leasing of some sort from the late s well into the
twentieth century. A few set up huge state farms, Texas most egregiously,
where African Americans (almost exclusively) worked mile-long rows.
Elsewhere emancipation opened veritable floodgates of indigent, heavily
indebted new immigrants, especially from Asia. Planters welcomed aug-
mentations of poor populations that stabilized cheap labor markets in
plantation regions. The Asian masses included Japanese, subcontinent In-
dians, and especially Chinese ‘‘coolies.’’ Many of the last came from the
province of Fujian, in China’s rocky southeast, which was already famous
(or pitied) by the mid-nineteenth century for its own shocking diaspora,
which continues to this day. By late in the twentieth century, at least one
of Fujian’s packed counties contained somewhat less than the number of
documented Fujianese living abroad. Some Fujianese migrants became
merchants in southeastern Asia. Others mined gold in mid-nineteenth-
century California. More were farmworkers, particularly after European in-
vestors drained parts of the Mekong Valley and other lush tropical places
for sugar plantations. Fujianese farmers had grown cane sugar at home for
at least a millennium. Now, in the nineteenth century, working for British,
French, American, or Cuban masters, among others, they extended sugar
culture into Indochina, the Philippines, and Hawaii and replaced African
slaves in the Caribbean and other parts of the tropical New World.
After the emancipation of slaves in the United States, Mississippi plant-
ers expressed keen interest in replacement ‘‘coolie’’ labor, and a few hun-
dred Chinese actually arrived. A generation later, a small part of the great
Italian diaspora of ca. –—indentured Sicilian and other Mezzo-
giornese peasants—was recruited to the lower Mississippi deltas to pick
cotton and, their employers hoped, stabilize an increasingly restive black
sharecropper population. Bad as they were, conditions in the deltas could
hardly have been worse than those of thecoloniain the Italian South. Yet