Sam Niu

Samuel Niu is a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University, where he studies emancipation, immigration, and labor in the nineteenth-century United States and Atlantic World. His dissertation, “Chinese Labor in the Post-Emancipation United States South and British Caribbean, 1852-1880,” is a social history of Chinese labor on plantations in the Atlantic World in the immediate aftermath of slave emancipation. It considers the British experiment with Chinese indentured labor alongside the history of Chinese labor in the American South, and situates both as crucial elements of Atlantic labor in the age of emancipation. His project centers Chinese laborers and offers original analysis of the challenges that planters across the Atlantic World faced in mobilizing this allegedly docile labor force. Exploring the integral role that Chinese immigrant laborers played in this moment of transition, Sam's dissertation offers a new understanding of the global political and economic transformations, labor arrangements, and mechanisms of control that emerged post-slavery in both the Atlantic and Pacific worlds.