The coolie has always been negatively portrayed. Contemporaries dismissed labour migrants as the ‘sweepings of Calcutta's slums’; the contracts they signed victimized them further, by identifying them as a societal ‘other’ – a prey to prison, pariahs amongst free men. As coolies settled in the countries which had imported them as plantation labourers, they began to feature in literary accounts, but were always redolent of exoticism, images of alienness, barbarism and fatalism casting them permanently in their lowly agricultural role. The hindsight of historians has served the coolies little better: they have been assigned the status of ‘neo-slave’, stripped of caste, culture, even of family in some accounts. This chapter deconstructs the changing stereotype of the coolie.

‘In all European countries, the necessity of supplying their daily wants is, to the labouring classes, a sufficient motive to exertion. But the case is very different in tropical climates, where the population is very scanty in proportion to the extent of territory; where the soil … readily yields a subsistence in return for very little labour; and where clothing, fuel, and lodging, such as are there required, are obtained very easily. […]