Prof. Dr. Evelyn Hu-De Hart

I am writing a book on the Chinese in the Spanish Empire, from Manila in the 16th century to Cuba in the 19th c.  I have discovered that Chinese who migrated to Spanish Manila in the mid-16th century and Chinese who migrated to Cuba in the mid-19th century bookended the long history of the Spanish Empire at the beginning and at the end of its global reach that spanned the Atlantic and the Pacific for four centuries.

At the BCDSS, I am working on the 2nd half of this book, which concerns 125,000 Chinese contract laborers (almost all men colloquially called "coolies") sent to Cuba to work along enslaved African men and women on the sugar plantations in the second half of the 19th century.  The question I ask is: were these Chinese coolies an extension or a new form of slavery, as many historians in and outside Cuba assert, and if so, what is the evidence and the argument for this position? Or, were they free laborers despite the harsh conditions of the plantations, and if so, how and when did they gain their freedom and in this sense, constitute a step in Cuban labor history in the transition from slave to free or wage labor?  Another way of posing the question is to examine degrees of freedom in Cuban labor history.

since 2002
Professor of History and American Studies/Ethnic Studies, Brown University, USA

Visiting Professor in Beijing, Singapore, and Barcelona
International Member of the Academia Mexicana de la Historia

PhD, University of Texas at Austin, USA

BA, Stanford University, USA