From victims of “a new system of slavery” to valued non-residents, from sojourning abroad to eventual settlement and political integration, the images of generations of Indians and Chinese moving out of their homes flash across the pages of this volume of essays. Whether the boatloads of poor coming out of British India and the independent India inherited by the nationalists, or those contracted out of Imperial China and escaping a China in chaos or at war, the rich variety of peoples described here make words like migrant and diaspora quite inadequate to encompass them. Thus the authors of the essays in this volume are not content to find labels for these people, or pin down the correct terminology to describe what they have been through, but have dug deeply into a wide range of sources to explain the experiences that shaped the communities they established far away from home.

Indian and Chinese merchants have been trading abroad for centuries. Where the labour classes were concerned, however, it was the Indians who got onto official records first. By the early nineteenth century, the British who controlled the Indian economy also had a global trading and plantation empire to fill with hard-working labour. They institutionalized a system of contracts so that their enterprises could be assured of a dependable supply. In China, on the other hand, the Qing emperor pretended that good Chinese stay at home to look after their parents and tend their tax-producing fields. Those who traded outside the country or sought work and adventure overseas without explicit permission were outlaws or traitors hiding in foreign lands. In their desire to seek work outside China, they had to depend on their kinfolk or put themselves at the mercy of unscrupulous recruiters. Until the end of the second half of the century, no mandarin wanted to know about the working conditions of the Chinese communities in East and Southeast Asian ports and in the new lands across the Pacific Ocean.