Coolie definition
Coolie in Tamil means wages for casual labour
Coolie means “bitter force” in Chinese. The Chinese “coolie laborers” worked all the time and “no regard is paid to their complaints for food, etc and slavery is nothing compared to it.”7 At that time, Hawaii was still an independent island kingdom, which the American planters wanted to use to make economic profits by exploiting plantations, especially sugar plantation. The planters were “frustrated by the inefficiency and recalcitrance of Hawaiian laborers and began to employ a few Chinese.”8 The Chinese laborers were better than the Hawaiian workers, because they were more industrious and more efficient. Because of them, the production of sugar increased. What’s more, the planters in Hawaii wanted to employ more and more Asian laborers in order to avoid strikes, because different races of workers had less probability to gather together to improve conditions without the same language. The more profits the planters gained, the more Chinese “coolies” they needed.
Examples of Coolie in a sentence
It‟s five days now since you took her from the river, and she has never even opened her eyes or showed any sign of life except that queer sort of breathing.‟57 Coolie Cho‟s wife shows no fear of her husband, answering back and engaging in a shouting match with him.
Writing of British Guiana in 1871, an Englishman observed that “the Coolie is nil; he has no voice, nor the shadow of a voice.”247 This char- acterization was apt — for most of the arc of indenture, the laborer’s (and her advocates’) options for effective dissent were slim to none.