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Regimes of Bondage: The Encounter between Early Modern European and Asian Slaveries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 November 2023

Stuart M McManus Open the ORCID record for Stuart M McManus [Opens in a new window]  and
Rômulo Ehalt Open the ORCID record for Rômulo Ehalt [Opens in a new window]
Stuart M McManus*
Affiliation:
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
Rômulo Ehalt
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, Frankfurt am Main, Germany
*
*Corresponding author. Email: smcmanus@cuhk.edu.hk
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Abstract

This special issue focuses on the broader context and interconnectedness of different slave regimes in early modern Asia. Various transnational commercial and imperial projects influenced the waxing and waning of individual slave regimes, while internal and interpersonal conditions within polities also played important roles. The well-known European seaborne empires of Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, and England were major drivers of this early modern slavery, but they coexisted and competed with other groups of trader-raiders. These included merchants from the Islamicate world and Chinese coastal regions, which connected Southeast Asia, Japan, Korea, and other regions. These extensive markets linked different regions together, such as the Malabar Coast with East Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Red Sea. While the focus is on the Iberian expansion and its impact on the slave trade, this special issue acknowledges that slavery in Asia should be understood as a result of multiple overlapping and interacting regimes. Each article examines a particular regime while emphasizing its interactions with neighboring regions during the early modern period. The main focus is on the encounters between different slave regimes facilitated by early modern commercial networks. The history of slavery in early modern Asia involved clashes and cross-pollination between disparate slave systems. A further contribution relates to the terminology used to define and understand slavery in non-European contexts, which is still a subject of debate. The concept of “regimes of bondage” is adopted as an umbrella term to encompass the various forms of coerced, subaltern, and dependent labor in Asia during this period. Finally, by using local categories and sources, including European and non-European language materials, the special issue aims to recover marginalized perspectives and highlight the complexity and challenges of studying slavery in Asia.

Keywords

slaveryslave regimesEast AsiaSoutheast Asia
Type
Introduction
Information
Itinerario , Volume 47 , Special Issue 3: Regimes of Bondage: The Encounter between Early Modern European and Asian Slaveries , December 2023 , pp. 289 - 296
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Research Institute for History, Leiden University

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Footnotes

Article last updated 19 December 2023

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