Global History Summer Talk with Evelyn Hu-DeHart

Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Prof. of History, American Studies and Ethnic Studies at Brown University, will join us for a lecture on "Degrees of Freedom and Unfreedom: Chinese Contract Laborers (Coolies) and Enslaved Africans in Cuba, mid to late 19th Century".

With the British blockade of the slave trade to Cuba making the transatlantic slave trade too risky and expensive, Spanish planters in Cuba, the last remaining major colony in the Americas by the mid-19th century, turned to south China to recruit laborers under 8-year contracts to work alongside enslaved people on their estates. Two questions immediately arose about the Chinese coolies: Were they slave or free? Were they white or black?