Three very different projects discussed in this issue highlight the political challenge of perceived racial difference for liberal and social democratic forces in the twentieth-century West. In the first article Latin American specialist Heidi Tinsman probes the issue of labor control and lack of rights among Chinese contract laborers in postslavery 1870s Peru from an original angle. Through the activities of special Chinese envoy Yung Wing, sent to survey the conditions of Chinese contract workers on Peruvian plantations, we gather at once the contemporary power and the limitations of an antislavery discourse as applied to a new migrant workforce. Yet even as Qing dynasty officials, whom Yung Wing represented, registered a compelling critique of Western hubris in international relations, that critique, Tinsman indicates, did not fully resonate with the perspective, or aspirations, of the contract laborers themselves.
Fifty years on from the debate over whether conditions of immigrant contract laborers...
