Coolie is a pejorative term used for low-wage labourers, typically those of Indian or Chinese descent.
Indian labourers in British Trinidad and Tobago; around 1890s
Illustration of the port of Amoy, where many Chinese labourers were shipped to foreign lands.
The Royal Decree of Graces of 1815, a legal order approved by the Spanish Crown to encourage foreign settlement of the colonies of Cuba and Puerto Rico
Chinese immigrant workers building the first transcontinental railroad in the US
The Indian indenture system was a system of indentured servitude, by which more than 1.6 million workers from British India were transported to labour in European colonies, as a substitute for slave labor, following the abolition of the trade in the early 19th century. The system expanded after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833, in the French colonies in 1848, and in the Dutch Empire in 1863. British Indian indentureship lasted till the 1920s. This resulted in the development of a large South Asian diaspora in the Caribbean, Natal, East Africa, Réunion, Mauritius, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Myanmar, and Fiji, as well as the growth of Indo-Caribbean, Indo-African, Indo-Mauritian, Indo-Fijian, Indo-Malaysian, and Indo-Singaporean populations.
Newly arrived indentured labourers from India in Trinidad
Artistic representation of the first Indian workers seeing the island of Mauritius from a ship in 1834
Indenture Memorial, Kidderpore, Kolkata
Plaques of Indenture Memorial, Kidderpore, Kolkata
