Slavery In East Asia

In premodern China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, just as in the far less culturally cohesive countries composing the West of the Middle Ages, enslavement was an assumed condition of servitude warranting little examination, as the power and profits it afforded to the slaver made it a convention pursued unreflectively. Slavery in medieval East Asia shared with the West the commonplace assumption that nearly all humans were potential chattel, that once they had become owned beings, they could then be either sold or inherited. Yet, despite being representative of perhaps the most universalizable human practice of that age, slavery in medieval East Asia was also endowed with its own distinctive traits and traditions. Our awareness of these features of distinction contributes immeasurably to a more nuanced understanding of slavery as the ubiquitous and openly practiced institution that it once was and the now illicit and surreptitious one that it intractably remains.

Slavery and Bonded Labor in Asia, 1250–1900 is the first collection of studies to focus on slavery and related forms of labor throughout Asia. The 15 chapters by an international group of scholars assess the current state of Asian slavery studies, discuss new research on slave systems in Asia, identify avenues for future research, and explore new approaches to reconstructing the history of slavery and bonded labor in Asia and, by extension, elsewhere in the globe. Individual chapters examine slavery, slave trading, abolition, and bonded labor in places as diverse as Ceylon, China, India, Korea, the Mongol Empire, the Philippines, the Sulu Archipelago, and Timor in local, regional, pan-regional, and comparative contexts. Contributors are: Richard B. Allen, Michael D. Bennett, Claude Chevaleyre, Jeff Fynn-Paul, Hans Hägerdal, Shawna Herzog, Jessica Hinchy, Kumari Jayawardena, Rachel Kurian, Bonny Ling, Christopher Lovins, Stephanie Mawson, Anthony Reid, James Francis Warren, Don J. Wyatt, Harriet T. Zurndorfer.

The various manifestations of coerced labour between the opening up of the Atlantic world and the formal creation of Haiti.

"[W]ill be welcomed by students of comparative slavery.... [It] makes us reconsider the significance of slavery in the subcontinent." -- Edward A. Alpers, UCLA Despite its pervasive presence in the South Asian past, slavery is largely overlooked in the region's historiography, in part because the forms of bondage in question did not always fit models based on plantation slavery in the Atlantic world. This important volume will contribute to a rethinking of slavery in world history, and even the category of slavery itself. Most slaves in South Asia were not agricultural laborers, but military or domestic workers, and the latter were overwhelmingly women and children. Individuals might become slaves at birth or through capture, sale by relatives, indenture, or as a result of accusations of criminality or inappropriate sexual behavior. For centuries, trade in slaves linked South Asia with Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. The contributors to this collection of original essays describe a wide range of sites and contexts covering more than a thousand years, foregrounding the life stories of individual slaves wherever possible. Contributors are Daud Ali, Indrani Chatterjee, Richard M. Eaton, Michael H. Fisher, Sumit Guha, Peter Jackson, Sunil Kumar, Avril A. Powell, Ramya Sreenivasan, Sylvia Vatuk, and Timothy Walker.

This book is a history of Asian slaves in colonial Mexico and their journey from bondage to freedom.

Using newly-uncovered archival evidence, Jeff Eden sheds unprecedented light on the lives of slaves ensnared by the Central Asian slave trade.

The abolition of slavery in and around the Western Indian Ocean have been little studied. This collection examines the meaning of slavery and its abolition in relation to specific indigenous societies and to Islam, a religion that embraced the entire region, and draws comparisons between similar developments in the Atlantic system. Case studies include South Africa, Mauritius, Madagascar, the Benadir Coast, Arabia, the Persian Gulf and India. This volume marks an important new development in the study of slavery and its abolition in general, and an original approach to the history of slavery in the Indian Ocean and Asia regions.