Stan Neal's intriguing, well-researched book should be essential reading for anyone interested in indenture, nineteenth-century Chinese migration, and wider Anglo-Chinese relations. Neal's central argument is that Singapore served as a test case for free-trade ideology, and its rapid economic success in the 1820s and 1830s led many subsequent colonies to copy both the economic policies and the use of Chinese middlemen and laborers.

Chapter 1, “The Singapore Model,” specifically focuses on explaining this system. Singapore is presented as a crucial contact zone where British men (they are all men) studied the “Chinese character” (7) and developed ideas about the economic usefulness of Chinese migration under superior British moral and economic guidance.

Chapter 2, “The Chinese Character: Race, Economics, Colonisation,” explores the racial tropes which developed to describe the “Chinese character” as economically useful but also prone to gambling and opium addiction. Neal here does a good job of arguing that racial stereotypes about the Chinese rarely stemmed from British visits to China itself, and that many of the stereotypes were already in place before large-scale Chinese migration to settler colonies. This chapter complements the existing scholarship on the “information revolution” that shaped empire in the 1830s and 1840s (45).

The subsequent chapters demonstrate how the “Singapore model” influenced policies in Assam and Ceylon (chapter 3), New South Wales and, to a lesser extent, the Caribbean (chapter 4), and Hong Kong (chapter 5). The focus in these chapters is largely on influential men, such as Gordon Forbes Davidson and John Crawfurd, who used their experiences and contacts in Singapore to promote themselves as experts and to campaign (often for personal gain) for Chinese migrants to be used in newly expanded parts of the empire. Neil provides an array of sources that explicitly reference Singapore in debates about how to develop colonial economies and where to get labor, even in the 1870s and 1880s. There is also an interesting theme throughout about how various indigenous populations were negatively compared to the Chinese, which allowed Europeans to justify the necessity of colonial conquest and economic exploitation.

The sources here are not used to try to uncover Chinese experiences of these processes, but rather to “interrogate the vast colonial records on specific colonial experiments with Chinese migrant labour” (9). Despite this, there are many insights throughout the book into the ways Chinese migrants were recruited, built social networks, profited, and were exploited, offering a richness of material that complements existing scholarship. While occasionally, current historiography is oversimplified, the focus on Singapore allows Neal to bring together some quite disparate historiographical traditions and to make a largely compelling case for the importance of Singapore as a model for later colonial development. He makes very good use of national archives in Britain and Singapore and the records of a selection of private individuals and companies, such as Jardine Matheson, Davison & Company and Tait & Company, and those of newspapers. There is a particularly impressive effort to piece together recruitment networks linking Singapore, Amoy, Hong Kong, and elsewhere from the 1840s (134–35), which emphasizes the importance of individual traders in promoting and facilitating Chinese migration globally.

The book begins and ends with a significantly broader argument, one grounded in current events. Neal argues passionately that current obsessions with evaluating “migrants according to their economic contributions” is “the echo” of the Singapore model (157, 12), one grounded in colonial racial definitions of good and bad. This argument, while compelling, gets to the heart of a continued nagging question raised by the book: Should we be looking even earlier, and not just at Singapore? If we really want to track the origins of the idea of Chinese migrant labor as an economically vital component of colonization, surely those origins would actually be in French, Portuguese, and Dutch colonization in Asia. For instance, when Jan van Reibeeck arrived in the Cape in the 1660s, one of his first diary entries famously longed for Chinese gardeners, as he has used in Indonesia. In fact, the entire language of the “pig trade” used by Europeans to describe Chinese migrant laborers suggests that racial stereotypes had earlier origins. This raises another question: As this was not the first use of Chinese migrant labor by Europeans, to what extent was it significant that this was the first “under British governance” (14)? Similarly, I would have liked to know more about why there is a focus on examples in Cuba and Assam and Australia but not on South Africa, Canada, or elsewhere. Was this simply a practical decision or born out of something within the archival material themselves? Were these linked to Singapore in ways that differed from the places and schemes not explored? Drawing more explicitly from the existing scholarship on indenture would also help develop some of the themes within the book: for instance, the insights into the recruitment of Chinese migrants in chapter 5 could more explicitly engage with the long-standing debate over whether indenture should be considered a form of slavery.

This does not detract from the overall importance of the work, but points to further research still needed to fully bring together scholarship on indenture, the growing body of scholarship about Chinese migration to settler societies, and the still somewhat separate historiographical tradition documenting Chinese migration within Asia. This is especially true if we wish to better understand the long connection between European colonization and Chinese migration. Neal's book is an important milestone in recent efforts to do just this.