A Free Race of Cultivators: Afro-Asian Histories, Ecologies, and Intimacies in the Early Nineteenth-Century Caribbean

Abstract

This dissertation draws together the Indian and Atlantic Oceans while also arguing for the Haitian Revolution as a catalyst in the conscription of Chinese and Indian migrants to the early nineteenth-century Caribbean. In particular, I examine attempts to conscript Asian migrants before the abolition of chattel slavery in British, French, and Spanish colonies of the circum-Caribbean: 1806 (Trinidad), 1811 (Jamaica), and 1820 (French Guiana) as well as 1838 (Guyana) and 1847 (Cuba). Broadly, I write against traditional historical frames, which naturalize the “substitution” of indentured individuals for enslaved people. Instead, my study situates people of Asian and African descent within the same landscapes to demonstrate how imperial projects joined their histories together. Chapters 1 and 3 focus especially on the environment in order to emphasize how Asian migrants and Afro-diasporic residents drew upon their respective environmental knowledge to refuse colonial projects. Chapters 2 and 4 attend particularly to gender and sexuality while seeking to understand how differentially colonized and racialized peoples sought to articulate intimacies and make kin.