WI: Large-Scale Asian Immigration to the Thirteen Colonies?

What if, with a POD of 16th century and 18th century, what if the British (Possibly by the EIC) import Asian Immigrants, to increase the makings of products that usually come from Asia.

Chinese immigrants imported to the Thirteen colonies for porcelain and ceramic products production, and
Indian immigrants imported for textiles production.

(Note: I made a post about this before, but that was months ago."
 
Then there would a small Asian population, most likely in New England.

Bringing people from Asia to North America is a time-consuming and costly venture that wouldn't be worth it. You'd be shoving people from one completely different climate into another, which would make many ill and probably kill them. It happened to slaves coming over from Africa, probably would happen to Asians leaving India or China.
 
Then there would a small Asian population, most likely in New England.

Bringing people from Asia to North America is a time-consuming and costly venture that wouldn't be worth it. You'd be shoving people from one completely different climate into another, which would make many ill and probably kill them. It happened to slaves coming over from Africa, probably would happen to Asians leaving India or China.
Eastern China has a pretty similar climate to the East Coast of the U.S., but you would have to cross through tons of different climate zones on the stupidly long voyage.
 

jocay

Banned
You had Indian indentured servants brought to the American colonies by the EIC in the 1600s. Perhaps in lieu of OTL's racialized American chattel slavery, you would have the EIC importing Indian indentured servants to work the plantation fields.
 
I think it's tough.

For cotton textiles, to be worth it to bring in either, you would need the production of southern cotton to be more than in OTL advanced, while British/American cotton manufacturing techniques were retarded relative to India. That would make it worthwhile to bring in artisans to produce cotton goods. Historically I believe both kept pace and proto-industrialisation eclipsed Indian production in time.

And that's on the EIC side; it would also have to be worth it in wages for the Indian workers to take the big penalty of moving into a foreign, Christian dominated (even toleration was largely toleration of different Christian faiths), quite xenophobic society, without eroding the competitive any cost advantage of producing outside India.

For porcelain, I would think it's basically likewise; differences would be that there's probably a longer window of Chinese technological advantage, but there are other difficulties on the reverse - porcelain producers are probably even more likely to be prosperous artisans than textile producers so the incentives have to be higher, and on the other, I believe the Qing state was quite protective of porcelain as a state economic secret (and had it been otherwise, the knowledge would have transferred earlier and faster, without as many European experiments to try and duplicate the qualities).

Basically it seems like it would be hard to get a competitive industry in both cases.

Some of these problems might be assuaged if you had a radically different history where minorities in India and China who were already Christian were specialized in porcelain and textile, and had a good "incentive" to move. State persecution, aka something akin to a "Chinese/Indian Huguenots"?
 
You had Indian indentured servants brought to the American colonies by the EIC in the 1600s. Perhaps in lieu of OTL's racialized American chattel slavery, you would have the EIC importing Indian indentured servants to work the plantation fields.
Not many, if any
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Caribbeans
gives it an effective start date of 1838, which is AFTER slave traffic ended. And afaik as a result of that.
So, way too late.
 
You had Indian indentured servants brought to the American colonies by the EIC in the 1600s. Perhaps in lieu of OTL's racialized American chattel slavery, you would have the EIC importing Indian indentured servants to work the plantation fields.
The British brought many Indians both Hindu and Muslim to Guyana and Suriname aswell.
 
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