Thank you so much. I have no slides, so you just have to look at me or something else.
First, thanks so much to the organisers for inviting me. It's lovely to be here and I too am not an economic historian.
I guess all of us are here at the tail end to give you a different angle of vision on some of these questions.
My paper is drawn from my forthcoming book called The Chinese Question,
which is about the Chinese who participated in the great gold rushes of the 19th century
and the racial politics of exclusion that arose in the Anglo-American settler societies.
In this paper, I think about Chinese gold seekers as ironic historical actors in that period.
It's global economic development,
although we cannot hold them responsible as causal agents in the trajectory of British and then U.S. global economic and financial hegemony.
I propose that we think about them as vectors of both convergence and divergence in the rise of British and
American power and the weakening and isolation of China in the global economy in the 19th and early 20th century.
The gold rushes of the last half of the 19th century were unprecedented in scale and consequence from the California gold rush of
1848 to the discovery of gold in the Yukon in nineteen oh one gold miners and gold mining companies extracted from the Earth.
So four hundred and thirty five million ounces of gold, more than the total amount that had been mined in the previous three thousand years,
perhaps 150000 Chinese participated in the gold rushes around the world.
To be sure, they were a minority of the Goldfield populations,
although they comprise upwards of 20 to 25 percent of the people in the gold districts in California and Victoria, Australia, in the 1850s and 60s.
The 60000 Chinese who went to the Transvaal between 1984 and 1910,
were instrumental in the revival and expansion of industrial gold mining after the South African war.
The economic historian Jean-Jacques van Houlton considered the increase in the global supply of gold.
A fortuitous meeting of the monetary demands posed by expanding world trade.
But we might think of it more as a stimulus. A new stage of capital accumulation gold increased the money supply,
promoted investment and trade enabled more countries to go to a gold monetary standard eventuated in it, becoming the international monetary standard.
Gold alone does not explain the rise of Great Britain and then the United States as the world's leading investor and creditor nations.
But gold was definitely a brick in the road of their ascent.
The participation of Chinese in the gold rushes was ironic in several respects at the scale of broad historical sweep.
They contributed to one of the great historical divergences of the period.
The shift from China's commanding position in the early modern global silver
trade to becoming semi colonised by Euro-American powers in the 19th century.
My point here is not to revisit the arguments for the Great Divergence circa 18:00 or 7500,
but to appreciate some of the consequences of this shift from the primacy, primacy of silver or bi metal ism to gold in global trade.
Take, for example, the war indemnities that the imperialist powers imposed on China during a century of humiliation.
The settlements of the two opium wars amounted to 30 million silver dollars, or seven point five million pounds.
These penalties seriously hobbled the ching. But consider those against the indemnities imposed by Japan after the Sino-Japanese War in 1896.
Fifty million pounds and by the boxer protocols of nineteen oh one, sixty seven and a half million pounds payable to the eight foreign powers.
Moreover, indemnities payable in gold, which required China to sell silver on the world market at a time when its price relative to gold was falling.
Notwithstanding, I want to focus mostly on this paper closer to the ground on the Chinese emigrants whose myriad activities
during the gold rush is more directly influenced the changing nature of relations between China and the West.
I will consider gold miners, as well as merchants who were always just a half step behind them,
as was the general case on the Gold Fields or who were former gold miners themselves.
So first, there was a matter of how much Chinese earn directly from gold mining and where those profits went.
Now this is very hard to determine with any precision because Chinese miners tended to underreport earnings,
and much of the data we have are anecdotal. But, for example, in Sacramento County, California, in 1860,
small cooperatives of four to five members own claims assessed on average of $2500, with each partner earning 40 to $50 a month.
And this is actually comparable to the earnings of white miners at the time.
After expenses, one might save three dollars a month or $30 a year to send to one's family in China.
If we try to scale up, we can use other data to get a sense of Chinese economic activity in mining.
For example, in 1861 in California, Chinese paid one hundred eighty seven thousand dollars in foreign miners taxes,
over two million dollars in water charges and one point thirty five million to purchase.
Mining claims some who are lucky a gold mining simply return home with their pile,
as contemporaries would say, returning Chinese often carry gold and gold dust for others.
So there are also remittance carriers. For example, 18 men returning to China from New South Wales in 1857.
On this ship, aethereal carried the gold of three hundred and seventy others worth over 9000 pounds.
One of them carried gold, divided into 72 packets wrapped in long strips of linen, one for himself and the rest for others in.
And near his home village in Guangdong province, and I will say more about remittances later his second, there is a matter of trade.
The gold rush is utterly transformed.
Transpacific commerce, the canton trade of the 18th and early 19th century had travelled through the Indian and Atlantic Oceans,
to Europe and to New York, and Hong Kong was still a struggling port.
Just seven years after a session to Britain, the California gold rush prompted Hong Kong to pivot to the Pacific.
It quickly became the premier Asian Entrepot for both goods and emigrants headed for the Gold Mountains for the year 1849 alone.
23 vessels exported from Hong Kong.
Nearly 5000 tons of goods to San Francisco, including rice, sugar and tea, beer, coffee, cigars and chocolate hats and clothing,
furniture and canvas tools and implements timber logs and planks, window frames, bricks, marble slabs and prefabricated wooden houses.
The Chinese population of Hong Kong itself grew as nearly 8000 people arrived in 1850,
with many intending to produce goods for the California market engaged in the shipping trade or other otherwise work in the booming port.
Chinese commercial firms in Hong Kong, although not as large or powerful as the venerable British and American houses like Jardine,
Matheson nevertheless became important players in the California trade and in the economy of the expanding Chinese diaspora.
Many Chinese merchants on the Goldfields were former miners, hiring others to work their claims while they ran a store,
invested in larger mining operations or branched out into other lines of business.
But the most powerful Chinese merchants were located in the big cities.
For example, Chen Locke that his Cantonese name, an early arrival, was known by the name of his firm Chee lung,
which in time became the largest and most famous Chinese business in San Francisco.
In 1852, Chee long imported as much as ten thousand dollars in Chinese goods at a time,
sold it all in a few days and returned to China for another shipment.
He established branches in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Yokohama. Over time, he and other big merchants owned their own lots, erected their own buildings.
Some merchants purchased their own ships or became shipping agents.
China remained one of San Francisco's three largest trading partners, at least to 1880.
Chinese merchants and shippers carried passengers in both directions.
They imported so-called fancy goods for white customers like silk and porcelain and
rice tea and opium from the growing for the growing population of Chinese immigrants.
They exported wheat, flour, ginseng and mercury, as well as Chinese miners gold dust.
By 1880, there were 25 Chinese import export firms in San Francisco.
The most prosperous were each worth a half million dollars, and many had seats on the city's merchant exchange, including seven who were stockholders.
So let me turn briefly to Australia, where gold was discovered in 1851, touching off the second major gold rush of the 19th century.
Trade with the Metropole increased exponentially, as well as sailing traffic from Hong Kong and Shomon to Victoria.
During the 1850s, Australia became the fourth largest importer of Chinese tea,
consumed not just by Chinese emigrants, but by British colonials as well.
Locating Meng was arguably the most powerful Chinese man in Victoria.
Unlike the Chinese merchants of California, whose trade ran bilaterally between San Francisco and Hong Kong,
loess interests nested in broader, overlapping networks of Chinese and British commerce in Asia.
He was born to a Cantonese merchant on Penang Island in the British Straits settlements.
His family had been settled there for over 100 years, long before the arrival of the British in the late 18th century.
In 1853, Lowe travelled from Mauritius, where he was tending to his family's business to Victoria.
After a few months of unsuccessful gold prospecting, he went to Calcutta and brought back to Melbourne a shipment of goods.
He founded Tang Ming and Co., an import firm. Soon, he would own a half dozen ships.
He imported mainly from Calcutta and Penang and Singapore, raised opium, sugar and other foodstuffs.
He was a major agent of credit tickets, the main way by which Chinese financed their passage to Australia.
He was an investor and founding director of at least a half dozen companies, including a distillery and several gold and silver mining companies.
He held shares in insurance companies and banks and was a founding shareholder and board member of the Commercial Bank of Australia, founded in 1850.
66.
Eventually, his business network extended to mining and Mercantile Ventures in New South Wales, Queensland, the Northern Territory and New Zealand.
His business dealings reveal a sport an important distinction in the opportunities Chinese faced in colourful.
You and Victoria, although California banks also did business with Chinese, notably the Wells Fargo and Co.
No American corporation welcomed Chinese capital. Moreover,
locating Meng was part of a Southeast Asian Chinese elite who were confident in
their identity of belonging within both the British Empire and the Chinese.
Diaspora merchant leaders held positions of authority in Chinese native place and clan associations, and as such,
they were spokesmen for Chinese to euro Americans, especially in response to racial discrimination and animus in Australia.
Lo Kang Meng was a leader in both the Senate who IgG1,
the native place association for people from the three counties around Gwangju and the Yi Yi Xing,
which was part of the drug Hong Kong,
the anti Manchu Secret Brotherhood Society that spread across the Chinese diaspora in the middle and late 19th century in both the U.S. and Australia.
Chinese merchant leaders sent delegations to meet with white officials,
wrote letters to the newspapers and published pamphlets that refuted Chinese racial stereotypes,
emphasise their positive contributions to society and appealed to Euro Americans for justice and equal treatment.
They also consistently raised the argument that restricting immigration would damage
trade as early as 1850 to Chinese merchants wrote to the governor of California.
Knowing that your country wishes to trade with China, they argued that trade quote cannot all be in one side.
The gold we have been allowed to dig in your minds is what has made the China trade grow up so fast.
Like everything else in this country, if you want to check immigration from Asia, you will have to do it by checking Asiatic commerce unquote.
Nearly 50 years later, the Chinese ambassador to the United States, Wu Tang Fong, wrote in the North American Review.
The immigration and trade were matters of mutual helpfulness and called for true reciprocity in US-China relations.
But if the notion that exclusion harm trade was a fixture in the debates over the Chinese question,
there has actually been little examination of the actual effects of exclusion laws on commerce and trade.
So in the rest of my talk, I want to address that question. And this is complex and multidimensional,
as exclusion had both direct and indirect effects on global trade and commercial
relations in different realms of economic activity and a different scales.
So let's take first the Chinese immigrant merchants and small capitalists whose activities
I have just described the exclusion laws adversely affected them in myriad ways.
Exclusion meant a shrinking population, which meant a shrinking ethnic market.
There were discriminations and harassments, such as San Francisco's ban against walking on a sidewalk with a pole on one shoulder.
In 1897,
the U.S. Immigration Bureau expanded the definition of labourer who would be excluded and narrowed the definition of merchant and exempt class.
After Chinese exclusion became permanent in 1942, a merchant named Leech who wrote quote, How can I call this my home?
And how can anyone blame me if I take my money and go back to my village in China, unquote?
The San Francisco newspaper editor Will Panjab claimed that quote Because of the injustice,
all of the great Chinese merchants who formerly paid one third of the customs duties at
the Port of San Francisco have gone back to China or do business in other countries.
In Australia, Chinese capitalists had invested in mining and plantation agriculture in the far north in the 1870s.
But by the turn of the century,
these opportunities narrowed as immigration restrictions constrain the availability of Chinese labour upon which they depended.
The Australian historian Paul Griffith argues that the elite Anglo-American Anglo-Australian
interests chose to destroy the economy of the Northern Territory rather than let Chinese develop it.
Queensland, with substantial capital already invested in agricultural development,
hired whites to replace Chinese and Pacific Islander labourers on plantations with higher wages subsidised by the government.
Cooktown, which had thrived as a port connecting northern Queensland to Singapore and Hong Kong, declined after 1890.
And in Melbourne and other southern cities, Chinese remain confined to the ethnic market,
with just a few niches that serve no non-Chinese consumers like gardening,
farming and furniture making with your economic activities in the United States and in the British settler colonies.
Chinese labour and merchant immigrant energies directed elsewhere.
Migration from southern China to Southeast Asia dramatically increased after 1870 16 million between 1891 and nineteen thirty eight.
I get this figure from six and a half and forty million from India.
Although Chinese has settled in the Nanyang for hundreds of years as locating Meng's family exemplified the late 19th and early
20th century booms in tin mining and rubber production for European industrial markets required ever larger numbers of workers,
and they were recruited from long established trade and labour networks.
We also see migration from northern China to Manchuria from 1890s to World War Two at comparable
scale in response to Russian and Japanese industrial and mining development in the region.
So exclusion resulted first in greatly diminished economic activities for Chinese merchants and capitalists in the West,
and second in the concentration of Chinese labour and mercantile emigration to Southeast Asia and North Asia.
The first did not directly cause the second, but neither are the two trends merely coincidental.
Both were integral to a broad reorganisation of global migration in the early 20th century.
British settler my emigration to the White Dominions East and southern European emigration to the INDUSTRIALISE,
the industrialising centres of the Americas and Asian migrations to the colonial economies of Southeast and North Asia.
This new ethno racial pattern of migration was not simply a spontaneous response to labour and capital market demands.
Rather, they resulted from a confluence of political and economic measures that directed
labour and commercial energies in certain directions and not in others.
These included negative policies like Chinese exclusion,
as well as positive policies such as deliberate British efforts to divert immigration from the United States to Canada and the other dominions,
and the tireless work of industrialists, agriculturalists, labour agents and shipping companies to recruit labour from Europe to the Americas,
from India and China to Southeast Asia and Chinese to North Asia.
OK, I'm going to skip the part about tea and conclude with some additional comments.
Well, let me just say this about tea.
I mean, China's exports of tea plummet in the late 19th century, and we talked about that a little bit yesterday.
But I just want to point out that Australia is amazing in how far it would go in its racial the racial basis of its policies.
The value of Chinese tea exports to Australia plummeted after 1886, when at the height of anti-Chinese agitation,
and a contemporary noted that hostility towards China outweighed all other considerations, including those of a commercial nature.
The Australian colonies also similarly refused to participate in the Anglo Japan Treaty of 1896,
which would have opened a lucrative Japanese market to Australian wood wool on account of that treaty's provision for free Japanese immigration.
OK, so let me conclude with some comments on immigrant remittances. Contemporary observers,
chain customs officials and Western economists in the early 20th century and remark on the scale of overseas Chinese remittance.
The ching diplomat Huang Tention, believed remittances from California in the 1880s to be about 1.2 million a year,
a credible estimate if just a quarter of the population in California sent $30 home in a year.
In 1983, Hosam Morris of the Chinese Maritime Customs House considered quote China's most important invisible
asset to be her export of brawn and brains in the emigration of a portion of her redundant population,
whether as traders or labourers, unquote. He quoted Fujian Customs Commissioners who called attention to the cash assets derived from remittance,
including those made by 2.5 million men who were earning money in Manilla,
Java and the Straits, amounting to over 10 million silver dollars a year, or one point ninety five million pounds.
Morris calculated Chinese remittances to be at least 73 million tails a year,
or about 11 million pounds, including that figure in China's assets for 1983.
Morris calculated that China's assets exceeded his liabilities, a modest net surplus in its balance of trade.
Now I won't go into this here, but these accounting structures are somewhat arbitrary,
and they also omit omit all Hong Kong trade because there are no customs data for that.
But the point is that he's trying to he's trying to make a point about the importance of remittance.
And more was not the only analyst who credit overseas Chinese remittance for balancing China's trade accounts.
The economists see of Riemer of the University of Michigan, writing in 1933, believed some four to five million overseas Chinese,
perhaps 60 percent of the total immigrant population, regularly sent remittances home to China.
He revised Morsi's figures upward based on his own investigation of bank records to arrive at an
estimated average annual remittance of 50 million U.S. dollars per year for the period 1982 to 1913.
He acknowledged that the small remittances of individual labourers from laundry men in
America to rubber workers in Malaysia constituted a considerable amount in the aggregate.
But the great sums, he said, are remittances of business profits and of income from property holdings, especially in Southeast Asia.
Remittance supported a transnational culture that sustain immigrant family ties and subsistence.
Sending money home, fulfilled familial obligations and raised the standard of living and social status of immigrants,
families in towns and villages in the late 19th century.
Thirty dollars but enough rice and small necessities for a small family for a year.
In addition to household maintenance, remittances, built houses, schools, libraries, roads, hospitals and railroads.
The people of keeping county in Guangdong lined the roads leading into their county with
fortified watchtowers to repulse bandits attracted by the wealth of remittance families.
And this is now in UNESCO's sight.
The prosperity of immigrants sending regions in Guangdong and Fujian provinces testified to the power of overseas remittance, Rima noted.
Quote The Chinese have built up business investments abroad with practically no out payments from China.
These investments bring into China payments from outside, which are of the greatest importance in her balance of payments, unquote.
Thus, even as exclusion policies shut Chinese out of the social and economic mainstream in the West,
the emigrants carried Goldust home in the linings of their jackets and sent foreign exchange through remittances.
One of the greatest ironies, perhaps of the Chinese question is that overseas Chinese in the United States,
Australia and Southeast Asia held onto their savings. And remitted large amounts to China when the price of silver dropped.
Thank you.