Coolie

A historical term for manual labourers from Asia, particularly China and India. A contemporary racial slur for people of Asian descent, including people from India, Central Asia, etc. Dr. Engelbert Kämpfer described "coolies" as dock laborers who would unload Dutch merchant ships at Nagasaki. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word dates to the mid-17th century.

The word coolie can be traced back to the Hindi word qūlī, which means "(day-)labourer", and perhaps ultimately to Kulī, an aboriginal tribe in Gujarat or to the Tamil word kuli ("wages") (Encyclopædia Britannica). Another form closely related to the Hindi qūlī is the Bengali kuli. It is also closely related to the Urdu term "qulī" or "kulī," meaning slave, which was possibly influenced by the unrelated Ottoman Turkish "qul" or Turkish "köle," also meaning slave.

The Chinese word literally means "bitterly hard (use of) strength." The most commonly used cultural Chinese term is Pinyin: When it first entered the English language, "coolie" was a designative term describing a low-status class of workers rather than a pejorative term for them. However, in the wake of centuries of colonialism and the social inequalities thereof, it has taken on not only the characteristics of a slur in the general sense but also that of a racial epithet.
In this last sense, it has been applied to Asian people regardless of their professions or socio-economic standing with obviously insulting intent. The term coolie was applied to workers from Asia, especially those who were sent abroad to most of the Americas, to Oceania and the Pacific Islands, and to Africa (especially South Africa and islands like Mauritius and Réunion). It was also applied within Asian areas under European control such as Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Shanghai and Hong Kong.