Category Archives: migration

by Joel | 17 June 2024 · 5:14 pm

Khmer Rouge Stated Goals

From Prisoners of Class: A Historical Memoir of the Khmer Rouge Revolution, by Chan Samoeun, tr. by Matthew Madden (Mekong River Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 78-80:

One day, about a week after the groups and villages are organized, we receive an order to attend a meeting in Tuol Tnaot at 7 p.m. Each family is to send one representative. When we return from work in the evening, we hurriedly eat dinner and head out for the meeting at the appointed time.

Tonight is a new moon and there is no moonlight. We all sit on the ground in front of a wooden house with a tiled roof beside the highway, near the mouth of the road leading to Wat Don Sar. A small kerosene lamp has been lit and casts a flickering light on the meeting.

A revolutionary cadre dressed in black and wearing a black cap on his head and a krama around his neck comes and stands before us to announce the start of the meeting. We don’t know his name or his rank, and we can’t see his face clearly in the dark. He begins to speak:

“Greetings, fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, who have just been evacuated from Phnom Penh. The Revolutionary Organization regrets taking so long to get you organized into groups and villages. Our Organization has faced many responsibilities and has been very busy. Now we have gotten you organized, so you ought to understand the political line of the Revolutionary Organization and the way of life in revolutionary society. The Revolutionary Organization has the political aim of annihilating all traces of the regime that ruled the country for sixteen years [Sihanouk, 1954-1970], as well as the five-year, one-month regime [Lon Nol, 1970-1975]. Therefore, anything in the image or spirit of these two regimes must be obliterated. Fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters who used to live under these two regimes, you must learn to align, temper, and build yourselves to become suitable as a revolutionary people.

“Cast off the morality of vice! The morality of exploitation! The morality of taking advantage of others! Obey the discipline of the Organization! Don’t be free! Don’t have your own opinions! Don’t be vague in your consciousness!

“Food will be distributed according to your labor. Those comrades who work will receive food. The Organization has no need for the lazy or the worthless!

“The wheel of history rolls forward! No one can stop the wheel of history! Whoever puts forth his arm will lose his arm! Whoever puts forth his leg will lose his leg…”

This is our first lesson. We hear them say nothing about returning to Phnom Penh. We hear only the words “revolution,” “annihilate,” “temper.” Now we see clearly: They don’t support Sihanouk’s royalist regime as Dad thought. They will squeeze us because we are the people of the two regimes that the Revolutionary Organization must annihilate.

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by Joel | 14 June 2024 · 4:07 pm

Khmer Rouge “Grandpa Snoopy”

From Prisoners of Class: A Historical Memoir of the Khmer Rouge Revolution, by Chan Samoeun, tr. by Matthew Madden (Mekong River Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 76-78:

Starting now, a new administrative structure has been put in place: group, then village, then cooperative. All of the leaders are people who had been living in the liberated zones. My group is led by Pu Et. He is in his sixties, dark skinned, skinny, balding in front, with large eyes and curly hair, about a meter sixty in height. He was born here in Tuol Ampil. He has built a hut about seventy meters to the north of mine. The cooperative cadre who has taken charge of Tuol Ampil is called Phal, a man of about thirty-five who used to live at Boeng Trabek near my house and knows my parents very well.

We are a people who no longer have the freedom to move about or eat as we please. We have become workers who labor as we are ordered, in line with the aims of the Organization, at the appointed hours: from six until eleven o’clock in the morning, and from one in the afternoon until five o’clock in the evening. The Organization provides us with the necessities of survival: rice and salt. Occasionally, we receive a small portion of kerosene. We are to go and receive these supplies at the cooperative headquarters in Tuol Tnaot every day when we return from work at noon.

After the land is divided up, our corn ends up on the common land. We are worried that the Organization will confiscate these crops and make them common property.

I ask the cadre who comes to measure and divide the land, “Excuse me Brother, the corn that I planted before—is it still mine?”

“How much corn is it, Comrade?” the cadre asks.

“About twenty by thirty meters, Brother,” I answer.

“Oh, that’s nothing! You keep it and eat it,” the cadre reassures me. We stop fretting and once again our mouths have spit to swallow.

Each day Dad leads his two granddaughters, Sophal and A-Lin, by the hand to go sit and watch the corn so that cows don’t eat it. The corn is already starting to produce some ears. The rice that we transplanted with Mom in the water in front of the hut is starting to look nice. One day Pu Et, our group leader, comes to my family and says, “The Organization is taking your corn. Don’t touch it!”

This news causes all of us to lose heart and despair, especially my father. He says nothing, and he stops bothering to sit and watch the corn as he used to. One day, as I am going to collect our rice ration at Tuol Tnaot, I ask the advice of the cooperative chairman on the corn problem. He assures me that there is no problem, that we should keep it for the benefit of our own family. His assurance alleviates our anxiety, but with no one to stand guard and protect the corn for a few days, the cows have already eaten nearly half of it.

Pu Et is a very jealous and strict man. He has just arrived from the liberated zones, and he has nothing yet. None of his plants have had time to bear any fruit, so when he sees that others’ plants have already borne fruit, he gets jealous and wants them for himself. If we have better food than he does, he is unhappy. If he catches anyone sneaking off to trade things at the villages along the highway for rice, bananas, or yams, he confiscates their spoils and then “builds” them, guiding them in the way of the Revolutionary Organization, forbidding free movement and trade.

Each day he walks by and pokes his head into our hut at about eight or nine o’clock to see who has what to eat and who hasn’t gone out to work. How we despise this attitude! We, all of the “new people,” give him the name “Grandpa Snoopy.” When we see him coming from a distance, we call out or whisper to each other, “Here comes Grandpa Snoopy!” Both his wife and his daughter act haughty, as though they, too, are our leaders and supervisors.

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by Joel | 13 June 2024 · 3:03 am

Leaving Phnom Penh, 1975

From Prisoners of Class: A Historical Memoir of the Khmer Rouge Revolution, by Chan Samoeun, tr. by Matthew Madden (Mekong River Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 56-59:

Between dawn and 11 a.m., we are finally able to cross the Monivong Bridge, and we continue beyond to the Chbar Ampov subdistrict headquarters building where we stop to rest and prepare food. Here there are tamarind trees with cool shade. My brothers and I go to look for water for cooking rice. We figure that drawing water from the river will be easier than searching for well water at local houses. We walk through Chbar Ampov Market (the old market on the south side of the highway) and head for the river.

This is the first time in my life that my eyes have ever witnessed such an awful scene. Only four days ago, this was a battleground, and large brick-and-cement houses have been demolished, with chunks of brick and cement of all sizes, shards of roof tiles, dishes, pots and pans, tables, and chairs littering the ground all over the road. In the gendarmerie post, the body of a woman lies face up on a desk, naked and swollen, maggots perforating her flesh. Along the riverbank lie the bloated corpses of soldiers, some on the banks, others floating half in and half out of the water. Some bob up and down on the water’s surface, occasionally washing up against the bank. The water here, which appeared from above to be decent, is in actuality covered in a slick of dark-green foam mixed with grease from the corpses. The river water is undrinkable, and we return empty-handed.

…

As our thoughts drift with the smoke into the sky, suddenly the sound of gunshots pierces the air: bang! bang! bang! Startled and shaken, nearly losing my grip on the bicycle handlebars, I look around, worried that someone has just been wounded or killed. I think this because as we rested a little earlier, we heard that this morning a soldier shot and killed two people who took rice from a warehouse on the west side of the river. But I can’t see that anything has happened. The crowd continues walking forward. Then a military vehicle comes driving against the flow of foot traffic with two or three black-clad soldiers sitting on the hood. They are the ones who fired the shots, to open the road. We squeeze together on the right side of the road to allow the vehicle to pass.

We have walked another 200 meters when suddenly a mid-Pisakh [=April/May] rain shower begins to pour down without the slightest warning. Our bundles of bedding and clothes are soaked. We continue forward in the rain until we are nearly to Wat Niroth before finding shelter.

The locals here have all been evacuated. We take shelter in a wooden house with a corrugated iron roof whose owner was a fisherman. Up in the house, there are still several old fishing nets of various types and sizes. We salvage one small net and one larger net to take with us. We rest at the house for two nights until our bedding and clothes are dry and then continue our journey.

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by Joel | 11 June 2024 · 12:10 pm

Evacuating Cambodian Cities

From Prisoners of Class: A Historical Memoir of the Khmer Rouge Revolution, by Chan Samoeun, tr. by Matthew Madden (Mekong River Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 45-46:

I dash into the house and call out, “Dad! Mom! They’re forcing everyone out of the city!” But my neighbors and family are busy celebrating peace and the end of the war and the spoils of victory at the hands of the Organization; they are not interested in what I have to say.

I have just spent a day filled with worry and fear. My family has just spent a day celebrating with a happiness that they haven’t seen for five years. Everything that I had just imagined to myself was all wrong—especially the reaction of my parents. In fact, my parents haven’t worried a bit about my absence. They feel that everything is going wonderfully. They have figured that I was gone all day tasting the joy of the birth of a new Khmer society.

The neighbors who have been going back and forth to gather loot from the Chamkar Mon warehouses know perfectly well that people are being evacuated from the city. But they assume that this matter does not affect them, that they won’t be ordered out by the Organization, because the Organization has allowed them to take freely from the warehouses.

Almost every family goes out to collect loot and stockpiles it in their house. My younger brothers procure three sacks of rice, several cases of beer, two or three mattresses, and large amounts of salt, fish sauce, soy sauce, and soft drinks, and pile them all over the house.

A French proverb says that “a single swallow does not herald the arrival of Spring.” I am but a lone swallow, the one person who desires to instill fear and an awareness of what will come. But no one believes me! They only believe in what is plain: that they have become wealthy without the necessity of effort. Let the neighbors refuse to believe, but I must win over my own family. My mother doesn’t matter; my father is the one who controls the power in the family.

I attempt to speak with my father about what is on my mind, but he objects, saying, “A-Moeun! You aren’t thinking straight. If they have just taken the city, what is the point of forcing us out? Do you remember what happened last year? People in Steung Mean Chey and Boeng Tumpun fell prey to propaganda that they would be forced out, and they fled in the middle of the night all the way to the riverfront by the palace. When they went back home, all of their stuff was gone.”

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by Joel | 8 June 2024 · 9:35 am

U.S. Enlists Mafia to Invade Sicily

From Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, by John Julius Norwich (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 316-317:

When Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, Mussolini declared his support for Hitler, with whom he had concluded the so-called Pact of Steel four months before. He did not immediately declare war—the Chief of the General Staff, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, having warned him that Italy simply did not have enough tanks, armored cars and aircraft. To get involved in the European conflict at this point would, said Badoglio, be tantamount to suicide. Nine months later, however, the situation had changed dramatically. Norway, Belgium and Holland had been invaded; France was falling. On June 10 Italy declared war. Mussolini had hoped to help himself to Savoy, Nice, Corsica, Tunisia and Algeria from the French, but to his disgust Germany signed an armistice establishing the collaborationist government under Marshal Pétain at Vichy, which retained control over southern France and all its colonies.

So far as North Africa was concerned, only Egypt was left; and in September 1940 the Duce sent a large Italian force across the Libyan border. The British troops stationed in Egypt were at first hopelessly outnumbered; their counterattack, however, proved far more successful than expected and resulted in massive numbers of prisoners. So decisive was the Italian defeat that Hitler was obliged to send out his Afrikakorps, under the command of General Erwin Rommel. Only then did the British lose the initiative, ultimately to regain it at the Battle of El Alamein in October–November 1942.

The story of the Desert War is not ours, but it exemplifies the several successive humiliations suffered by Italy between 1940 and 1943. Mussolini’s invasion of Greece in October 1940 once again forced Hitler to send troops to his rescue; and by the beginning of 1943 disaster threatened him from every side. Half the Italian troops serving in Russia had been annihilated; both his North African and his Balkan adventures had been dismal failures. The Italians had had enough. Then, in July 1943, the Allies launched an operation which, as well as giving them a foothold in Europe, promised to remove Mussolini from the scene for good. They invaded Sicily.

For Sicily, hitherto, the war had been disastrous. As an island, it had suffered even more acutely than the rest of Italy. The ferryboats to the mainland were disrupted; the export market largely disappeared, while imports became irregular and uncertain; sometimes the Sicilians had found themselves with virtually nothing to eat but their own oranges. The rationing system was a bad joke; the black market reigned supreme. For the Mafia, on the other hand, conditions could hardly have been better. With a good deal of help from its branches in New York and Chicago, in the last years of peace it had already begun a swift recovery from the Mori reign of terror; and by 1943, whatever Mussolini might have said or believed, it was flourishing.

American intelligence officers, somewhat better informed than the Duce, understood that for the projected invasion to be successful it was vitally important to have the Mafia firmly on the Allied side. They therefore made careful approaches to the dominant boss of gangland crime in the United States, a Sicilian named Salvatore “Lucky” Luciano. He had in fact been in prison since 1936 on compulsory prostitution charges, but was still very much in command. In late 1942, after long discussions, the two sides struck a deal. Luciano would have his sentence commuted; in return, he made two promises. The first was that his friend Albert Anastasia, who ran the notorious Murder Inc. and who also controlled the American docks, would protect the waterfront and prevent dockworker strikes for the duration of hostilities. The second was that he, Luciano, would contact other friends in Sicily, who would in turn ensure that the invasion would run as smoothly as possible.

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Filed under Africa, Germany, Italy, Mediterranean, migration, nationalism, U.S., war

by Joel | 7 June 2024 · 5:50 am

Il Duce Redevelops Sicily

From Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, by John Julius Norwich (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 314-315:

IN 1937 MUSSOLINI PAID his third visit to Sicily. By then Italian troops had invaded and occupied Ethiopia which, together with the already existing colonies of Eritrea and Italian Somaliland and the more recently acquired Libya, constituted a quite considerable African holding; and Sicily, being nearer to Africa than anywhere else in Italy, had thus gained new importance; “indeed,” declared the Duce, “it is the geographic centre of the Empire.” He would, he continued, inaugurate one of the happiest epochs in the island’s 4,000 years of history. This would involve, first of all, the demolition of the vast shantytown outside Messina inhabited by the thousands rendered homeless by the earthquake. (Many of those affected might have been excused for wondering why twenty-nine years had been allowed to pass before any action was taken at all.) The entire latifondo—those vast tracts of land owned by absentee proprietors, still known as “fiefs” and still being cultivated, if at all, by medieval and feudal methods—would be liquidated; and all Sicilians would henceforth be properly and adequately housed. New villages would be built across the island.

It seemed that Italy would never understand. One of these villages was actually built near Acireale, but the local peasants refused to move from the one-room huts in which they had always lived with their livestock, and a whole company of Tuscan peasantry had to be imported to occupy it. With yet another lesson unlearned, eight more villages were constructed—and suffered similar fates. Several meetings were held to decide upon their names; none, as far as anybody remembered, to discuss water supplies or electrification. But by this time the government had other things to think about. The Second World War had begun.

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by Joel | 5 June 2024 · 11:47 am

Sicily’s 1908 Earthquake and WW1

From Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, by John Julius Norwich (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 308-310:

At 5:20 A.M. on December 28, 1908, Messina had suffered the deadliest natural disaster in European history: an earthquake measuring 7.1 on the Richter scale, followed by a forty-foot tsunami along the nearby coasts. More than ninety percent of its buildings were destroyed, between 70,000 and 100,000 people killed. Hundreds more were buried alive, often for a week or more, since all terrestrial lines of communication were shattered; it was several days before the Red Cross and other relief organizations could reach the city. Nearly all the municipal archives were lost—which is why so much of modern Sicilian history has to be told from the frequently misleading point of view of Palermo.

The Messina earthquake resulted in a huge increase in the rate of emigration. Sicilians were already leaving their homeland in greater numbers than any other people in Europe. In the early days many of them had made the relatively short journey to Tunisia, then a French protectorate; but by 1900—though Argentina and Brazil were also popular—the vast majority were traveling to the United States. By the beginning of the First World War, the number of emigrants totaled not less than a million and a half. Some villages, having lost virtually all their male population, simply disappeared off the map. Here indeed was a terrible indictment of the way the island had for so long been governed; on the other hand, many of those emigrants who prospered made regular remissions to the families they had left behind, and reports of their prosperity gave the younger generation new ambitions toward education and literacy. Moreover, the increasing shortage of labor led to a huge increase in agricultural wages.

The war itself created new problems. Sicily’s export markets, on which the island depended, were virtually cut off for its duration. War industries, of the kind which were established elsewhere in Italy, were clearly not indicated in a region in which there was no skilled labor and no efficient transport. The government, desperately needing cheap food, fixed unrealistically low prices for flour; officially declared wheat production consequently declined by about thirty percent over the war years. Black market prices rocketed. As for the Mafia, it had never had it so good. Here the villain was the notorious Don Calogero Vizzini, who somehow escaped military service and made vast sums out of wartime shortages. In 1917 it proved necessary to pass a law against the stealing of animals; thanks to high prices and government controls, whole flocks would disappear overnight. True, there were occasional compensations: men who went to fight in the north would return with new skills and new aspirations—but also with new political ideas. During the years of war, Sicily moved steadily to the left.

Finally, during the postwar years, more and more emigrants were returning in retirement to their old homes, often with considerable savings, and bringing with them all their experience of the New World. Some, admittedly, also imported the latest techniques of gangsterism, but these were only a small minority; perhaps the most important result of the years spent abroad was a new self-respect, and with it an inability any longer to accept the old cap-in-hand approach to the large landowners. Gradually, the people of Sicily were learning to look their masters in the face.

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Filed under Argentina, Brazil, democracy, economics, Italy, labor, migration, military, nationalism, U.S., war

by Joel | 19 May 2024 · 3:23 am

Sicily After Utrecht, 1715

From Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, by John Julius Norwich (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 178-180:

What is generally known as the Treaty of Utrecht, negotiations for which began in 1712, was in fact a whole series of treaties through which the European powers attempted once again to regulate their mutual relations. Only one of the many agreements concerns us here: the decision to transfer Sicily to the Spanish King Philip V’s father-in-law, Duke Victor Amadeus of Savoy. The idea had been accepted largely on the insistence of the British, who were uneasy at the thought of Sicily joining Naples in Austrian hands and who argued that the Duke had deserved a reward by changing sides during the war. The only objection was raised, somewhat unexpectedly, by Queen Anne, who disliked seeing countries being shuffled around without their consultation or consent; but her ministers quickly overruled her.

Victor Amadeus was of course delighted. He arrived in Palermo on a British ship in October 1713, and was shortly afterward crowned King of Sicily—and, somewhat improbably, of Jerusalem—in the cathedral. Over Jerusalem he had of course no power at all; even in Sicily he controlled only nine-tenths of the island, the powers at Utrecht having deliberately left King Philip all his personal estates, which were administered by Spanish officials and exempt from both taxation and Sicilian law. Nonetheless, Victor Amadeus was the first royal presence on the island since 1535. The Sicilian nobility welcomed their new monarch, expecting as they did so that he would settle in the city and set up a proper court there. The people in general received him with their usual apathy. They had had so many rulers over the centuries; this one would probably be no better and no worse than the rest.

He actually made a serious effort to be better. He stayed on the island for a year, traveled fairly widely—though not into the impenetrably deep interior—and tried hard to understand the character and customs of his subjects. He reopened the University of Catania and introduced new industries wherever he could, establishing factories for paper and glass, doing his best to revive agriculture and shipbuilding. But it was no use: he had to contend not only with the rich, who continued to set their faces against any innovations that might adversely affect their privileges, but also—and far worse—with the universal corruption, idleness and lack of initiative that were the result of four centuries of foreign domination. There was also the perennial grievance: just as in former centuries the Sicilians had grumbled about the sudden influxes of Spaniards or Frenchmen who would take over the senior offices of government, so now they protested at the flood of Piedmontese civil servants and accountants whom the King had introduced in an attempt to restore order to the chaotic national finances.

Such protests, Victor Amadeus knew, were inevitable; he could take them in his stride. But he knew too that the Sicilians had rebelled twice in the previous century, and were perfectly capable, if pressed too far, of doing so again. Wisely, he treated the barons in particular with extreme caution. So long as they continued to enjoy their traditional immunities and privileges, they would give no trouble; if, on the other hand, these were in any way threatened, the consequences could be serious indeed. When the time came for him to return to Piedmont, he must have felt that the Sicilian cause was hopeless. Family vendettas were as many and frequent as ever; banditry was everywhere. The people were essentially ungovernable.

Moreover, he had failed utterly to gain their affection. The Sicilians loved color and display; they had long been accustomed to the pomp and splendor surrounding the Spanish Viceroys, representing—as only Viceroys could—one of the richest and most powerful nations in the world. Victor Amadeus was not a man for finery. A natural puritan, he hated ceremonial and dressed more like a man of the people than a monarch, preferring a walking stick to a sword. He was also distressingly parsimonious; gone were the ostentatious parades and the lavish receptions which had been such a feature of life for the aristocracy of Palermo. No wonder that children a hundred years later were still throwing stones at dummies bearing his name.

Soon after his return to Turin, he received another humiliation, this time from the Pope. The origins of the quarrel with Clement XI go back to the old Spanish times and need not concern us here; but the consequence was that in 1715 a papal bull entitled Romanus Pontifex put an end to the six-hundred-year tradition whereby the Kings of Sicily were also automatically the Papal Legates. The Pope also instructed all Sicilian clergy to refuse taxation. Many obeyed, only to be punished by exile or imprisonment and confiscation of their property. Churches were closed, bishoprics left vacant, and all good Christians adjured to defy royal authority. The more sensible naturally ignored the ban; the monks of a monastery near Agrigento, on the other hand, prepared to defend themselves against the King’s representatives with the well-tried weapon of boiling oil, employed for the first time since the Middle Ages. The Sicilians, who had always been proud of their status as Papal Legates, tended to blame the trouble on the House of Savoy rather than the Papacy. To them, it was just another nail in the Piedmontese coffin. To Victor Amadeus, it was just another nail in theirs.

By this time, he was bitterly regretting that he had ever accepted the Sicilian crown; fortunately it soon proved remarkably easy to surrender. In 1715 the recently widowed King Philip of Spain took as his second wife Elisabeth Farnese, the twenty-two-year-old niece and stepdaughter of the Duke of Parma. The new Queen was undistinguished by beauty, education or experience, but she had a will of iron and she knew what she wanted. Instantly, all French influence vanished from the Spanish court; it became Italian through and through. Determined to recover all Italian-speaking territories for Spain, Elisabeth moved first against Sardinia, part of the empire. In August 1717 she sent her fleet out from Barcelona and by the end of November the island was hers. Then, emboldened by this easy success, she directed the ships straight on to Sicily. On July 1, 1718, Spanish troops were landed near Palermo, where—simply because they were not Piedmontese—they received a warm welcome.

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by Joel | 16 May 2024 · 5:20 am

Sicily Under Spain, from 1479

From Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, by John Julius Norwich (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 148-149, 152-153:

The accession of [Aragon’s King John II]’s son Ferdinand in 1479 was of immense historic importance, since Ferdinand was already married to Queen Isabella of Castile. This marriage united the two kingdoms and created a third—that of Spain itself. Sicily thus suffered a further loss of importance. But a worse misfortune lay ahead. In 1487 there arrived the first members of the dreaded Spanish Inquisition. This had been established by Ferdinand and Isabella as early as 1481—with the blessing of Pope Sixtus IV—and remained under their direct control. It was intended principally to ensure the orthodoxy of those who had recently been persuaded to convert to Christianity from Judaism or Islam; and after the royal decrees of 1492 and 1501—which ordered Jews and Muslims to convert or leave the country—it substantially tightened its grip. Few converts slept soundly in their beds for fear of accusations that they were secretly observing the old customs, the punishment for which was burning at the stake.

Both the Inquisition and the expulsion decrees struck Sicily hard. The Muslim population, which had once been a majority in the island, was now relatively small, but the Jews were many; in the cities and towns they may well have constituted more than a tenth of the population. And Sicily needed them: they were active as merchants, as metalworkers and weavers, and especially as doctors and of course moneylenders. Doctors tend to be popular among the people; but moneylenders are less so and there were, after the middle of the century when interest rates climbed above ten percent, occasional outbreaks of anti-Semitism. Nonetheless, the citizens of Palermo appealed to Spain on behalf of their native Jews, protesting that they were doing no harm and begging that they might be allowed to remain. Their request went unheeded.

History shows us all too many cases of Jewish persecution, and in every case the persecuting country ends up impoverished. Spain and Sicily were no exception. We do not know the numbers involved—how many Jews decided to emigrate rather than deny their faith and how many “converted”—although the converts too lost much of their property, and even then were never safe from the Inquisition. But whatever the proportions, there can be no doubt that Sicily—like Nazi Germany in more recent years—lost a vast number of her most skilled, talented and intelligent citizens. And her economy suffered accordingly.

Another somewhat unsettling trend made itself evident during the sixteenth century’s opening decade: a steady increase in royal authority. For well over two centuries the barons had had things very much their own way. Thanks to corruption, carelessness on the part of the authorities, or quite often simply the passage of time, many of them held estates that were technically crown property, or had long since been allowed to forget their feudal obligations. But those days were over. With every passing year it became more evident that King Ferdinand was gradually tightening his grip. This was confirmed in 1509, with the appointment as Viceroy of a general named Ugo Moncada, who was bent on the conquest of North Africa and saw Sicily as the obvious springboard. From the beginning the barons hated him. Not only did he show them no respect; on his arrival he instituted searching inquiries as to their legal positions—in many cases with extremely embarrassing results. Arrests were made, frequently leading to imprisonment; fiefs were confiscated, including several that had been formally claimed by the Church. Meanwhile, the Inquisition was making its presence increasingly felt, particularly after it began burning its victims alive in the public squares.

…

The events of the last decade of the fifteenth century had changed the civilized world. On April 17, 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella had given their formal approval to Christopher Columbus for his voyage, putting at his disposal three tiny caravels—the largest of them little more than a hundred feet long. Moreover, just four years before the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa María set sail, the Portuguese Bartholomew Diaz had rounded the Cape of Storms (renamed by John II of Portugal the Cape of Good Hope); just six years afterward, on May 20 1498, his compatriot Vasco da Gama had dropped anchor at Calicut on the Malabar coast. Not only had he found a continuous sea route to India; he had proved that Portuguese ships were capable—just—of getting there and back.

The stories of these three great adventurers are not ours; what is important to us is the effect they had on the fortunes of the Mediterranean. Henceforth the writing was on the wall. Until now, even if the Turks did not make trouble—as they usually did—all cargoes bound for the further east had to be unloaded in Alexandria or some Levantine port. Thence they would be either transported overland to the pirate-infested Red Sea or consigned to some shambling camel caravan across central Asia which might take three or four years to reach its destination. Now, merchants could look forward to a time when they could sail from Lisbon—or London—and arrive in India or Cathay in the same vessel. Meanwhile, thanks to Columbus and those who followed him, the New World was proving infinitely more profitable than the Old, possessed as it was of fabulous wealth, the lion’s share of which went to Spain—and legally too. Within only seven months of Columbus’s first landfall, the Borgia Pope Alexander VI—himself a Spaniard—had issued the first of his five bulls settling the competing claims of Spain and Portugal over the newly discovered territories; within twenty-five years the galleons were regularly returning to their homeland loaded to the gunwales with loot. No wonder the successors of Ferdinand and Isabella had their eyes fixed so firmly on the west.

It was not immediately apparent that this sudden opening up of the oceans on both sides had dealt trade in the Mediterranean what would prove to be a paralyzing blow. Gradually, however, men realized that, at least from the commercial point of view, the Middle Sea had become a backwater. East of the Adriatic the Turks now allowed passage to western ships reluctantly or not at all. To the west, it was still indispensable to Italy; but France was nowadays finding her northern ports on the English Channel a good deal more useful than Marseille or Toulon, while Spain, now entering her years of greatness, had other, tastier fish to fry. Not for another three centuries, until the building of the Suez Canal, would the Mediterranean regain its old importance as a world thoroughfare.

And Sicily, as always, was the loser.

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Filed under economics, Mediterranean, migration, Portugal, religion, Spain

by Joel | 13 May 2024 · 5:38 am

Chinese in Colonial Vietnam

From The Ethnic Chinese and Economic Development in Vietnam, by Tran Khanh (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, 1993), pp. 21-25:

Two major factors converged to cause an upsurge in Chinese migration to Vietnam in the second half of the nineteenth century. A push factor was the political upheavals in China, which led to its people seeking better conditions overseas. A pull factor was French colonization and the policy of the colonial government to recruit Chinese labour for Vietnam.

After the Treaty of Nanking in AD 1842 forced the Manchu court in Beijing to cede Hong Kong to the British and open five treaty ports to Western powers, it was no longer possible for the Chinese authority to control the movement of their nationals in and out of the country. At that time, the Chinese Government had officially banned travelling beyond the shores of China. Thus China became an increasingly stable source of manpower for labour-hungry Western colonies in Southeast Asia and Latin America. By AD 1860, articles within the Treaty of Peking signed between China and both Britain and France literally compelled the Manchu authorities to recognize the right of Chinese workers to seek a livelihood abroad under contracts they themselves could freely enter into. Dovetailing with this relaxation of laws on emigration was the political turmoil of the times which contributed to the urge to leave. During AD 1850-61 there was a large-scale uprising in the form of the Taiping Revolution. Added to that were the intermittent wars fought with Western powers. The majority of migrants in this exodus were the usual land-deprived peasants and impoverished city dwellers. But there was also a sizeable number of small and middle-scale business men, intellectuals, and military personnel.

France colonized six provinces of southern Vietnam (Nam Ky), which constituted Cochinchina, in AD 1867 and established protectorates in central and northern Vietnam by AD 1884. The two protectorates were named Annam and Tonkin, respectively. From the start, the French colonial administration took measures to regulate Chinese immigration with a mixture of control and encouragement. In AD 1874 a special Immigration Bureau was established in Saigon which allowed Chinese immigrants into the country but only if they belonged to dialect groups already existing in the country and if the groups would provide sponsorship for their own kind. The Bureau was very active, and as early as AD 1897 it had a department that could arbitrarily decide on the suitability of a Chinese immigrant for work; this aroused such an angry protest from the Chinese community that the administration was forced to close it down. After this, streams of Chinese immigrants could cross freely into Vietnam, and they congregated mainly in big cities.

The French colonial administration allowed the Chinese to deal freely in rice, opium, and alcohol. Other legal rights included the right to own land, to travel without restriction within the Indochinese Federation, to establish commercial organizations, to return to China for a visit, and to transfer their wealth out of the country. Such favourable conditions continued to attract Chinese migrants as in the days of the Nguyen dynasty. Within a ten-year span, the number of Chinese in Cochinchina shot up from 44,000 in 1873 to 56,000 in 1889, concentrating mainly in big cities. Cholon in the year 1889 had a population of nearly 16,000 Chinese; Saigon, over 7,000; and Gia Dinh, nearly 3,000. In Tonkin and Annam, the Chinese migrants also gathered in Haiphong, Hanoi, Danang, and the Quang Ninh province, which bordered China. The Chines here were involved mostly in commerce and service.

Chinese immigrants during the period of late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also consisted of labourers contracted by the French to work in Vietnam. They were sent to excavate mines, specifically in Quang Ninh province, to build the railway linking Vietnam to the southern provinces of China or to tap rubber in plantations. By the 1920s, Chinese workers accounted for 7 per cent of the total number of miners and 17 per cent of the total number of industrial workers in Vietnam. The influx of Chinese labourers contributed not only to the country’s manpower but also to the emergence of a working class in Vietnam.

This rapid influx of Chinese migrants continued up till the middle of the twentieth century. Data published during the period AD 1912-22 give their number as 158,000. Between 1923 and 1933, nearly 600,000 arrived from China. Another set of data estimates the number to be 1.2 million between 1923 and 1951, which was a record at any given period of time during the whole history of Chinese emigration. But the traffic was prone to ebb and flow. The figures were high in the years 1925-30, 1936-38, and 1946-48, correlating with the security situation in China. China was experiencing civil wars during the periods 1924-27 and 1946-49. The years 1936-38 saw the beginnings of Japanese military encroachment on China. Going by official statistics, the figure for the Chinese population in Vietnam in the years just before the French left in 1954 would range from 600,000 to 750,000. Variations of this figure for different years are shown in Table 1, estimated to be 2 per cent of Vietnam’s population.

The distribution of population also shows Chinese preference for urban centres and the southern part of the country. Before 1945, some 90 per cent of the Chinese community were residing in Cochinchina, where they made up 7 per cent of the population. The proportions of Chinese in Tonkin and Annam were minimal, 0.5 per cent and 0.2 per cent, respectively. Table 2 illustrates the urban characteristic of the Chinese population in Vietnam.

In 1952 the Chinese population in Saigon-Cholon constituted about 34 per cent of the total population of the city. Their proportions in Hanoi and Haiphong were 4 per cent and 15 per cent, respectively. Besides these three big cities, the Chinese were also found in sizeable numbers in other cities of the South. As mentioned earlier, the border province of Quang Ning in the North also had concentrations of Chinese, as in Cam Pha, Ti Yen, Quang Ha, and Mong Cai. With towns where large numbers of Chinese reside, they would also gather in particular quarters or streets. For example, in Saigon, they are to be found in districts 5, 6, 10, and 11. District 5 is Cholon, where before 1975, 80 per cent of the residents were Chinese. In Hanoi, they were gathered at the Hang Buom and Ma May quarters.

With the division of the country into two halves in 1954, complete integrated statistics were not available for the whole of Vietnam. The South became the Republic of Vietnam (ROV) while the North was the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) and it was not till 1976 that they were united under the name of the Social Republic of Vietnam (SRV). By Tsai Maw Kuey’s data, the Chinese population in the ROV in 1968 reached 1,035,000. The French magazine Le Monde puts it at 1,200,000 in the ROV and 208,000 in the DRV in 1970. Wu Yuan-Li and Wu Chun-Hsi’s figures are 2 million for the South and 175,000 for the North at the collapse of the ROV. According to official figures for 1976, the year of reunification, the Chinese population in Vietnam was 1,236,000, which was about 2.6 per cent of the total population. Summing up these various estimates, it can be concluded that the Chinese population in Vietnam in the middle of the 1970s was around 1,500,000, of which 85 per cent lived in the South. The Chinese community made up 3 per cent of the total population of Vietnam.

The problems of estimating the Chinese population in Vietnam continued after 1975 because of large-scale population movement caused by political changes. When the Saigon regime collapsed in April 1975, some 150,000 people left the country, among whom were high-ranking government and military officials of the old regime as well as Chinese businessmen. Shortly after, beginning in 1978, another exodus of Chinese residents took place, with 230,000 leaving for China and another 220,000 leaving for Southeast Asia by boat. This was the result of the socialist transformation of private capitalist industry and trade in the newly liberated South and tense relations with China. The latter arose because of differences over Cambodia, and Beijing exploited the issue of the Chinese community in Vietnam to complicate matters. From a population of 1,236,000, the ethnic Chinese population shrank to 935,000 on 1 October 1979. By the time of the census in April 1989, the Chinese population had increased to 961,702 but its proportion of the total population had dropped to 1.5 percent. The distribution of this community across Vietnam is given in Table 3. In some areas, the proportion of ethnic Chinese had dropped very significantly. For example, before 1978, ethnic Chinese residents in Quang Ninh province numbered about 160,000, or 22 per cent, of the provincial population. This was about 60-80 per cent of the total ethnic Chinese population in North Vietnam. In the 1980s, Quang Ninh’s ethnic Chinese population dropped to 5,000, or 0.6 per cent, of the provincial population.