Chinese Workers in Mozambique. The Engagement of Indentured Laborers in the Portuguese Empire (1857–1859)

Abstract

At the end of the 1850s, Lisbon conceived the employment of Chinese workers, emigrants from Macau, in services considered specialized (bricklayers, blacksmiths, carpenters, copper workers and stone chippers), in the province of Mozambique, by the system of indentured labor. Even without consulting any authority in those localities about its convenience, the initiative produced a series of documents, which transited vertically between the metropolis and the colonies. This documentation makes it possible to identify a pioneering movement of indentured labor within the limits of the Portuguese empire, in the wake of the growing flow of this type of labor (especially of Chinese and Indian men) in the Indian and Atlantic worlds. Moreover, the documented dispute between these workers and the Mozambican government over the performance and remuneration of services also makes it possible to identify the agency of the Chinese recruits in defending their contractual rights.