Review Article Slavery and the African Diaspora Beyond the Atlantic
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English Historical Review
© Oxford University Press 2021. All rights reserved. https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceab274
Review Article
Slavery and the African Diaspora Beyond the
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Atlantic*
Slavery in the Global Diaspora of Africa. By paul e. lovejoy (Abingdon:
Routledge, 2019; pp. 312. £36.99);
Possessed by the Right Hand: The Problem of Slavery in Islamic Law and Muslim
Cultures. By bernard k. freamon (Leiden: Brill, 2019; pp. xvi + 570. €66);
Silk, Slaves, and Stupas: Material Culture of the Silk Road. By susan whitfield
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2018; pp. 376. $29.95);
The Portuguese Slave Trade in Early Modern Japan: Merchants, Jesuits and
Japanese, Chinese, and Korean Slaves. By lúcio de sousa (Leiden: Brill,
2019; pp. xiv + 594. €65);
Ming qing shiqi aomen heiren wenti yanjiu [A Study of the Question of
the Black Presence in Macau during the Ming and Qing Dynasties]. By
peng hui (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui Kexue chubanshe, 2017; pp. 199. ¥48);
Les métamorphoses du travail contraint: Une histoire globale (XVIIIe-XIXe
siècles). By alessandro stanziani (Paris: Les Presses de Sciences Po, 2020;
pp. 330. €24).
Historians have been chipping away at the edges of Atlantic history for
some time now.1 This has produced a vision of the transatlantic slave
trade that is no longer just deeply rooted in the Americas while merely
brushing the surface of Africa. Rather, historians are addressing ever
more seriously the specifically African dynamics of the ocean’s traffic
in human misery, while also acknowledging the mobility and longevity
of African culture.2 Indigenous slavery, too, both pre-Columbian and
colonial, has emerged as a much more widespread and long-lasting
phenomenon than previously thought. This had its own transatlantic
* This review article was written while the author was the recipient of a Direct Grant, Faculty
of Arts, Chinese University of Hong Kong.
1. J. Cañizares-Esguerra and E.R. Seeman, ‘Introduction,’ in J. Cañizares-Esguerra and
E.R. Seeman, eds, The Atlantic in Global History, 1500–2000 (Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2007),
pp. 21–38; D. Eltis, ‘Atlantic History in Global Perspective’, Itinerario, xxiii (1999), pp. 141–61; J.A.
Hijiya, ‘Why the West Is Lost’, William and Mary Quarterly, li (1994), pp. 276–92; D.K. Richter,
Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, MA, 2003);
P.A. Coclanis, ‘Atlantic World or Atlantic/World?’, William and Mary Quarterly, lxiii (2006),
pp. 725–42.
2. J.K. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800
(Cambridge, 1998); J.H. Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-
Portuguese World, 1441–1770 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2003).
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dimension that itself must be understood within the context of the
intra-American slave trade.3 In addition, Jeffrey Fynn-Paul and his
collaborators have argued that we should not overlook the enduring
importance of the Mediterranean, since the transatlantic slave trade
was, they argue, the result of West Africa becoming the Christian
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Mediterranean’s primary ‘slaving zone’ (i.e. an area at the edge of a
polity that enforced an internal no-slaving zone while exploiting
hinterlands). This paralleled other slaving zones in Africa and across
Eurasia that bordered Islamic polities.4
However, slavery beyond the twentieth meridian east and its
relationship to the transatlantic slave trade remains poorly understood.
Admittedly, the study of Indian Ocean slavery is now reaching some
level of maturity, largely thanks to the pioneering work of Gwyn
Campbell, as well as more recent efforts by historians working in Dutch
archives, such as Matthias von Rossum.5 Nonetheless, the connected
and comparative history of Atlantic and Indian Ocean slavery is still
in its infancy, with the rest of maritime and continental Asia lagging
even farther behind. This is despite the long-standing ‘global’ focus of
early modern economic history, which surprisingly has very rarely led
to attempts to understand slavery on the same scale as the trade in silver
or ceramics.6 As a result, much also remains to be done before we have
a complete picture of the African (and other) enslaved diasporas, whose
history is still divided along oceanic, regional and proto-national lines,
with large parts of Asia remaining barely explored.7
Beyond lacking the convenient documentary base of the transatlantic
slave trade, which has prevented the reliable estimation of the number
of the enslaved beyond the Atlantic, a further obstacle to a deeper
understanding of the larger history of slavery remains the perennial
question of defining the object of study itself. Indeed, while exchanging
human beings for either goods or specie is documented from Ethiopia
to Korea, whether every instance was ‘slavery’ per se is arguable. This
is especially true given the divergent concepts of property, community
and freedom in each place, and presumably variation across time
too. Similarly, the degree to which non-Abrahamic religions shaped
3. N.E. van Deusen, Global Indios: The Indigenous Struggle for Justice in Sixteenth-Century
Spain (Durham, NC, 2015); A. Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian
Enslavement in America (Boston, MA, 2016); G.E. O’Malley, Final Passages: The Intercolonial
Slave Trade of British America, 1619–1807 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2014).
4. J. Fynn-Paul and D.A. Pargas, eds, Slaving Zones: Cultural Identities, Ideologies, and
Institutions in the Evolution of Global Slavery (Leiden, 2018).
5. G. Campbell, ed., The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia (London, 2004);
T. Chakraborty and M. van Rossum, ‘Slave Trade and Slavery in Asia—New Perspectives’, Journal
of Social History, liv (2020), pp. 1–14.
6. B. Yun-Casalilla, Iberian World Empires and the Globalization of Europe, 1415–1668
(Singapore, 2019); J.-L. Rosenthal and R. Bin Wong, Before and Beyond Divergence: The Politics
of Economic Change in China and Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2011).
7. S. de S. Jayasuriya and J.-P. Angenot, eds, Uncovering the History of Africans in Asia
(Leiden, 2008).
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attitudes regarding selling people and extreme social degradation,
and the mobility of these frameworks (for example, Confucianism in
Korea), is also rarely explored.8
Those brave few who have attempted to integrate the rest of the
world into the Atlantic story have generally done so by creating
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transhistorical yardsticks for ‘slavery’. To take the most notable example,
the sociologist Orlando Patterson has spoken of the ‘permanent, violent
domination of natally alienated and generally dishonoured persons’.
Conversely, the late Joseph Miller suggested that the dynamic process
of ‘slaving’ not the institution of ‘slavery’ should be the focus, while a
research team in Bonn is currently developing a theory of ‘asymmetrical
dependency’.9 However, such discussions are arguably moot until the
basic historical work has been done. In addition, there is the issue of
how to conceptualise slavery meta-geographically. While a ‘global’
panorama is probably beyond the grasp of any one historian, regional
studies frameworks, cultural spheres, and even the unwieldy category of
‘Asia’ itself are all increasingly recognised to be problematic in their own
way. If the Atlantic world is a construct that elides continental Africa,
by the same token convenient divisions such as the Indian Ocean,
Southeast Asia and the Sinosphere are perhaps just too leaky to serve as
useful historiographical buckets.10
With so many unresolved (and perhaps unresolvable) questions, the
recent publication of the six books discussed here is a very welcome
development. In their own way, each of these excellent and varied
monographs by scholars with backgrounds in African, Asian and Middle
Eastern history treat the early modern trade in people beyond the
Atlantic as a series of interconnected systems, frequently highlighting
the interactions, parallels and divergences vis-à-vis the better-known
transatlantic slave trade. When taken together, they also exemplify
three key scholarly trends that bode well for the future. First, they push
the geographical envelope to include areas and local slave trades that
are frequently overlooked, such as the Japanese slaves sold across the
Iberian world and the presence of ‘black slaves’ (heinu) in Southern
China. Secondly, the books all eschew ahistorical system-building and
easy equivalences, instead paying close attention to the contemporary
terminology and practical realities of the traffic in human beings (often,
but not always, with roots in Africa) on the basis of little-known sources
in non-European languages. Thirdly and finally, to at least some degree
they all look beyond their specific time and place to offer a vision of
8. J.B. Palais, Confucian Statecraft and Korean Institutions (Seattle, WA, 1996), p. 41.
9. O. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA, 1985); J.C.
Miller, The Problem of Slavery as History: A Global Approach (New Haven, CT, 2012). On the new
Bonn Centre for Slavery and Dependency Studies and its approach, see: https://www.dependency.
uni-bonn.de/en.
10. M.W. Lewis and K.E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography
(Berkeley, CA, 1997).
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slavery as a transregional phenomenon. This ambition is captured by
the frequent use of ‘global’ in the title either of the book itself, or of the
series in which it is printed. Indeed, two of the books appear in Brill’s
new Studies in Global Slavery series, which complements the press’s
newly founded Journal of Global Slavery. In these various ways, then, the
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volumes discussed below expand our understanding of slavery beyond
the Atlantic, and highlight myriad opportunities for future research.
I
Among the leading proponents of placing the transatlantic slave trade in
a broader context are some of the leading historians of Africa. In Slavery
in the Global Diaspora of Africa, for instance, Paul Lovejoy expands on
a number of his recent essays on African slavery and diasporic culture.
In so doing, he takes what he calls a ‘global’ (that is, non-Eurocentric
and non-national) approach, with a focus on West Africa as a key part
of the Atlantic system where modernity was forged, while recognising
that East Africa and the Indian Ocean should not be forgotten either,
although he does not treat them in any detail (p. 2). While the resulting
book features occasional digressions and repetitions, it does cohere as a
synthesis of Lovejoy’s ground-breaking approach to the slave trade as the
product of African societies, both Islamic and non-Islamic. His account
unfolds in four main sections. After a methodological discussion, the
book sets out the important features of West African slavery and closely
related institutions (pawning, polygyny, concubinage, etc.) and how
these shaped the transatlantic trade. The second half is then made up
of a series of biographical studies of well-documented enslaved people,
followed by essays on ethnic and religious identities in the diaspora
(including one on the role of scarification), and a final chapter on
Africans’ ‘expectations’ of American slavery based on their experiences
in Africa. Throughout, the focus tends towards the better-documented
eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries, with sources ranging from the
famous treatise on Black slavery by the Islamic jurist Aḥmad Bābā
(1556–1627) to the autobiography of Gustavus Vassa (c.1745–1797) (the
preferred name of Olaudah Equiano) and other ‘freedom narratives’
(the term the author prefers since most ‘slave narratives’ were in fact
written by freedmen and freedwomen).
Near the beginning of the book, Lovejoy offers a careful defence of
his choice of terminology (pp. 17–27). In referring to ‘slavery’ when
describing the dynamics of both Islamic and non-Islamic Africa,
Lovejoy challenges the idea, first articulated by Igor Kopytoff and
Suzanne Miers, that West African (non-Islamic) kinship-based slavery
was fundamentally unlike European property-based slavery.11 Instead,
11. S. Miers and I. Kopytoff, Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives
(Madison, WI, 1977).
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he makes a distinction between the underlying reality of ‘slavery’ and
its ideological explanation. While the ideological underpinnings were
certainly different, the actual structure of domination in European,
Islamic African and non-Islamic African slavery was fundamentally the
same. This was undergirded by a series of elements, including a status
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distinction between ‘slave’ and ‘free’, the constant threat (although
not always manifestation) of coercion, and the treatment of people as
property. Admittedly, there were specificities to West African slavery,
such as the higher proportion of women in slavery, the right of Igbo
masters to sacrifice slaves at funerals, the frequency of pawning leading
to slavery once Europeans became involved in the trade, and different
legal criteria for enslaveability (non-kin in non-Islamic regions, or non-
Muslims and supposed ‘apostates’ in Islamic regions). However, these
differences were accidental, rather than essential.
Another key feature of Lovejoy’s volume is the expansive view of
African slavery. By including case-studies that range from Senegambia
to Sudan, the book provides a panorama that goes far beyond the
traditional boundaries of Atlantic history. In this way, he hints at
the possibility of writing larger histories of early modern slavery.
Particularly perceptive is his account of the overall dynamics of Atlantic
slavery: ‘It was an inefficient labour market, to be sure, inelastic in its
operation; it was regionalized and segmented by mercantilist blockages,
and it stumbled through periods of glut and scarcity that could not
be controlled. But we now know that in important respects it was,
nevertheless, a single functional unit’ (p. 199). In this way, Lovejoy
leaves us with the tantalising question: could the same be said for the
larger global slave trade in the early modern period?
Equally ambitious and provocative is Bernard K. Freamon’s Possessed
by the Right Hand: The Problem of Slavery in Islamic Law and Muslim
Cultures, which addresses the role of law in the formation of the
transregional Islamic slave trade from antiquity to ISIL in the twenty-
first century. This tour de force survey, lucidly written and wide-ranging,
provides an excellent introduction to Islamic slavery and its legal
foundations, modelled explicitly on David Brion Davis’s magisterial
1966 study of the intellectual origins of the transatlantic slave trade.12
Throughout the book, Freamon’s focus is on the greater Indian Ocean
world, thereby deliberately decentring the Ottoman Empire, which is
frequently the focus of studies of Islamic slavery, and challenging the
impression left by much of the early modernist scholarship that the
Portuguese, Dutch and French first brought slavery to the Indian Ocean
and Southeast Asia (pp. 21–3, 77–8). As such, Possessed by the Right
Hand represents a much more granular and wide-ranging counterpart
12. D.B. Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, NY, 1966).
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to Jonathan Brown’s recent more legal-theological study and William
Clarence-Smith’s classic study of Islamic abolitionism.13
Like Lovejoy, Freamon eschews Patterson’s sociological approach
and centres contemporary (mostly Arabic) legal terminology (e.g. ‘abd,
raqaba, ‘possessed by the right hand’, etc.). These describe a set of
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Arabian practices with ultimate roots not only in the Mediterranean
(especially Byzantium), but also in what he calls, somewhat awkwardly,
if descriptively, ‘Afro-Irano-Semitic slavery’ (including Hebrew and
Sasanian slavery). With the rise of the caliphates, this conglomerate
slave law that equated people with property spread across the greater
Indian Ocean world, interacting with pre-existing forms of domination
in Africa, South Asia and beyond. It is during this expansionary period
that Freamon identifies the origins of the fundamental contradiction
in Islamic slave law: the clash between the post-revelatory pietistic
egalitarianism that he associates with the final words of the Prophet
Muhammad and Islam’s later imperialist pro-slavery ideology. It is the
former, he contends, that Islamic jurists should keep in mind if they
wish to abolish slavery once and for all, and undercut the legitimacy of
modern abuses in Mauritania, Nigeria and Syria.
For the readers of this over 500-page study interested in gaining a
holistic understanding of slavery in the Islamic legal tradition, the most
useful section will no doubt be Chapter Six, which provides a taxonomy
of the different categories of slaves: domestic slaves, military and naval
slaves, concubines, plantation slaves and ‘sultanic’ slaves. Here, Freamon
departs in a number of important ways from standard accounts. For
instance, unlike David Ayalon, he does not emphasise the role of jihad
in creating the influential (and non-Quranic) phenomenon of mamluk
slave soldiers. Instead, he argues that this very common class of slaves was
fundamentally the product of ‘loyalty as a tool of governance’ (p. 289).
By rewarding these frequently foreign- and non-Muslim-born slaves
not with freedom but a direct relationship with the ruler and access
to war booty, sultans were able to create a strong form of obeisance
that was more important than juridical ownership. Such loyalty had
its limits, as the mamluks who rebelled and founded slave dynasties
in Central Asia, Northern India and Egypt demonstrate; nonetheless,
its longevity as a system shows its underlying efficiency. Indeed, this
mamluk model would be copied in medieval and early modern Muslim
societies and was mirrored by other groups of ‘elite slaves’ (for example,
concubines and eunuchs), whose lives differed greatly from those of
the African and Baluchi slaves labouring in the date fields of Oman,
the cotton plantations of Egypt and the pearl-rich waters of the Persian
Gulf. All these contexts are treated at least in passing in this panoramic
study, whose assertions specialists in particular times and places will no
13. J. Brown, Slavery and Islam (London, 2019); W.G. Clarence-Smith, Islam and the Abolition
of Slavery (London, 2006).
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doubt challenge at the level of detail, but which will surely remain an
important point of reference for some time to come thanks exactly to
its ambition.
Slavery in the Indian Ocean is similarly taken up by Susan Whitfield,
the former director of the Dunhuang Project at the British Library, in
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her short material history of the Silk Road, entitled Silk, Slaves, and
Stupas. In this echo of Neil MacGregor’s A History of the World in a
Hundred Objects (2010), the focus is on the ‘long’ Silk Road, which
includes not only Central Asia but covers the totality of the various
trade routes between Korea and Ireland from the advent of Islam
to the rise of the Mongols. This expansive approach is increasingly
common, and has recently been taken to its logical conclusion in Peter
Frankopan’s The Silk Roads: A New History of the World.14 As Whitfield
shows, in case-studies that range from Kushan coins found in Ethiopia
to popular Chinese almanacs, objects, people and religions were far
from static in this period. While not commonly known, slavery was
an integral part of this wider system of circulation. This she examines
in detail in Chapter Ten, which offers a suggestive thumbnail sketch of
the practice in this vast space on the eve of the early modern period, for
which there exists no comparable survey.
While Whitfield does not delve into terminological questions, she
does define in passing her object of study, namely the practice of people
being ‘bought, used, and sold for profit … transported long distances
by land and sea to trade in foreign markets’ (p. 250). This trans-Afro-
Eurasian trade in people as commodities is reconstructed using a range
of sources, including Chinese law codes, a Pahlavi compilation of legal
cases from Sasanian Iran, the folk tales collected in One Thousand and
One Nights and contracts in Gandhari, Chinese, Sogdian, Hebrew,
Arabic and Latin. This leads her to the conclusion that Silk Road
slavery had a number of shared features, echoing the argument of the
book as a whole that there were ‘communalities of human experience
among diversity’ (p. xi). Foremost among these were a number of
both legal and extra-legal ways of becoming alienable. In the case of
in-group members of a community, the most common means were
sale by impecunious parents, kidnapping, and various types of debt-
bondage (including surety-bondage, otherwise known as pawning). In
the case of outgroups, Eurasia’s continuous wars of imperial expansion
produced staggering numbers of captives, many of whom were kept as
slaves by the conquerors. This resulted in a great diversity of origins
among slaves, even in places that are frequently considered relatively
homogeneous, as is pre-modern China. For instance, during the Jin
Dynasty the Liao people of Sichuan were frequently targeted as sources
of slaves, alongside Koreans who are known to have been sold at the slave
market in Shandong. Similarly, the continual clashes between various
14. P. Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (London, 2016).
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Chinese dynasties and the Tibetan Empire resulted in both slavery and
ransoming on a large scale. These dynamics were mirrored all along the
Silk Road including in the West, from the sprawling slave market at
Dublin, to the Iberian markets where Jewish merchants traded in Slavic
captives purchased in Prague. Whitfield also notes commonalities in
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the relationship between slavery and gender, from the eunuch slaves
of the Arabs, Byzantines and Chinese courts, to the close connection
between slavery (and especially female slavery) and sex.
While slavery in the Central Asian Khanates leading up to Russian
imperial abolition has recently been studied by Jeff Eden, Silk, Slaves,
and Stupas stands out as providing one of the few accounts of the slave
trade as a connected and comparable set of phenomena that crisscrossed
medieval Eurasia.15 Placed within a richly contextualised history of
the movement of people and objects along Silk Road, the lives of the
enslaved men, women and children discussed in this slim volume invite
historians more familiar with the transatlantic slave trade to imagine
how a larger history of early modern slavery might be written.
II
During the early modern period, the slave trades of East Asia became
directly linked to those of Western Eurasia and the Atlantic world for
the first time. It is the Macau–Nagasaki section of this larger circuit that
is the subject of Lúcio De Sousa’s The Portuguese Slave Trade in Early
Modern Japan. This is the fruit of many years of labour and for the first
time brings together the wealth of surviving evidence in both Japanese
and European languages, building on Thomas Nelson’s foundational
article of 2004.16 As a result, the book offers an encyclopaedic view
of the trade in Japanese, Chinese and Korean slaves within the
context of Iberian Asia and the Iberian world as a whole, replete with
tables documenting every named Japanese (and Korean) slave and a
kaleidoscopic seventh chapter, which treats the Japanese (and again
Korean) diaspora in Asia, Europe and the Americas.
Echoing the historiography on the Spanish Empire that reminds us
that it was not ‘Spanish’ in the strict sense due to the central role of
local elites, soldiers and administrators in its formation and longevity,
Sousa reveals that the Luso-Japanese slave trade was built on pre-
existing markets and relied on local actors, some of whom profited
handsomely, although the presence of Portuguese merchants boosted
demand considerably.17 This, he explains, was facilitated by people
traffickers called hitokadoi or fitovouru who duped or kidnapped poor
15. J. Eden, Slavery and Empire in Central Asia (Cambridge, 2018).
16. T. Nelson, ‘Slavery in Medieval Japan’, Monumenta Nipponica, lix (2004), pp. 463–92.
17. This view is best exemplified by H. Kamen, Empire: How Spain Became a World Power,
1492–1763 (New York, 2003).
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Japanese and then sold them to foreign merchants in Nagasaki. Sale
and debt slavery and the use of children as collateral also contributed to
the supply of people (p. 268), as well as the many wars between daimyō
that punctuated the Sengoku period, and Hideyoshi’s invasion of the
Korean peninsula (1592–8), which resulted in large numbers of captives.
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In total, Sousa estimates that in the 1590s around 1,000 enslaved people
were transported from Nagasaki to Macau by the Portuguese every year.
Relying on contemporary histories and bilingual dictionaries,
Sousa also outlines the terms used on both sides of the Luso-Japanese
slave trade. In Portuguese, these included moço (‘young lad’), cativo
(‘captive’), bicho (‘beast’) and their associated feminine nouns, although
moça (f ) referred specifically to ‘fertile, old enough to marry, female
slaves’ (p. 7). Moço/a was also frequently used as a euphemism for
people subject to the limited-term servitude certificates (or ‘the ballot
system’) that arose in Nagasaki and Macau in this period, at least partly
to get around the 1570 Portuguese and 1587 Japanese edicts banning
the trade in ‘slaves’.18 Importantly, these prohibitions also led to an
important series of provincial councils and consultations, whose rich
documentation show the Jesuit application of natural law theories to
the question of Japanese slavery, which will be of interest to intellectual
historians.19
By producing the first monograph account of this long-ignored
branch of an Iberian slave trade that encircled the early modern
world, Sousa has highlighted just how much remains unknown about
slavery in East Asia. For instance, we know almost nothing about the
merchants from Thailand and Cambodia who traded in Japanese slaves
alongside the Portuguese (p. 271). Poorly understood, too, are the
precise ways in which Japanese, Iberian and other concepts of slavery
and freedom interacted as part of this cross-cultural trade in human
misery. In particular, it is an open question whether the equivalences
recorded in bilingual dictionaries were quite as neat as they appear.
Finally, the Japanese and Korean slaves he identifies (often by name) in
the Philippines, Lisbon, South America and elsewhere, remind us that
the Luso-Japanese trade was part of a series of unevenly overlapping
slaveries that linked the Atlantic to multiple other parts of the globe
that remain to be fully explored.
This said, Sinophone scholars interested in the trade in dark-
skinned slaves referred to as ‘black slaves’ (heinu) from Africa, India and
Southeast Asia can now refer to Peng Hui’s A Study of the Question of
18. R. da Silva Ehalt, ‘Jesuits and the Problem of Slavery in Early Modern Japan’ (Tokyo
University of Foreign Studies Ph.D. thesis, 2018), p. 525; S.M. McManus, ‘Servitutem Levem
et Modici Temporis Esse Arbitrantes: Jesuit Schedulae and Japanese Limited-Term Servitude in
Gomes Vaz’s De mancipiis Indicis’, Bulletin of Portuguese /Japanese Studies, 2nd ser., no. 4 (2018),
pp. 77–99.
19. J.F. Maxwell, Slavery and the Catholic Church: The History of Catholic Teaching Concerning
the Moral Legitimacy of the Institution of Slavery (Chichester, 1975).
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the Black Presence in Macau during the Ming and Qing Dynasties. While
Charles Boxer touched on the issue in his vast oeuvre and Portuguese
scholars have occasionally written on the issue, this is the first study
devoted to the question of slavery and ‘blackness’ in pre-modern China
since the pioneering work of Don Wyatt on the Tang through Ming
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dynasties, although oddly the author does not appear to be aware
of Wyatt’s work.20 At the outset, however, it bears underlining that
readers coming from the anglophone tradition that long ago rejected
physical anthropology in favour of seeing race as socially constructed,
will find Peng’s framing jarring. For instance, the book opens with
a matter-of-fact outline of Linnaeus and Blumenbach’s typology of
the ‘races’ (renzhong) (p. 3), and throughout uncritically accepts the
sources’ categories of ‘black people’ (heiren), ‘black slave’ (heinu),
‘black foreigner’ (heifan) and ‘black ghost’ (heigui). Those familiar with
mainstream racial thinking in modern China and its diaspora will not
be surprised by this.21
Despite such methodological shortcomings, Peng has provided a
useful service by collating (and frequently citing at length) the main
historical and literary sources in Chinese (and to some extent European
languages too) that discuss ‘black people’ in Ming and Qing China.
These unfortunate individuals were usually brought to Macau as slaves,
servants, and sailors and are usually described by Chinese sources
using terms such as ‘black slave’ (heinu), ‘black foreigner’ (heifan) and
‘extremely black foreigner’ (jiheifan) (p. 48), with the older term ‘negrito
slave’ (kunlunnu) also retaining some currency. This is in contrast to the
Portuguese sources, which tend to be more descriptive in terms of origin
and cultural characteristics, e.g. ‘kaffir’ (cafre), ‘dark person’ (cafrinho),
‘Timorese’ (timor), ‘moor’ (mouro), ‘black’ (negro) (pp. 64–80). In
terms of the actual origins of these groups, Peng argues that before
the founding of Macau, the majority of ‘black people’ mentioned in
Chinese sources were from Southeast Asia.22 Following the advent of
the Portuguese, the majority came from East Africa and India with
Africans making up over a third of the population of the city in the
late eighteenth century (p. 66), and small numbers also coming from
Ormuz, which was under Portuguese control between 1507 and 1622.
As the Chinese sources are mostly either travel accounts or
legal documents, the information we have about the dark-skinned
inhabitants of Macau tends to skew towards ethnography and accounts
of criminality. For instance, early Chinese visitors to Macau frequently
20. C.R. Boxer, Fidalgos in the Far East, 1550–1770: Fact and Fancy in the History of Macau
(The Hague, 1948); D.V. Tavares, ‘Macau: Uma sociedade esclavagista, séculos XVI–XVIII?’,
Omni Tempore: Atas dos Encontros da Primavera 2017, no. 3 (2018), pp. 244–69; D.J. Wyatt, The
Blacks of Premodern China (Philadelphia, PA, 2010).
21. F. Dikötter, ‘Forging National Unity: Ideas of Race in China’, Global Dialogue (Nicosia,
Cyprus), xii (2010), pp. 23–35.
22. This is in contrast to Wyatt, Blacks of Premodern China, pp. 5, 69–70.
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compared their skin to lacquer (qi), as well as commenting on their
fearsomeness, their ability to breathe underwater, their loyalty to their
masters even unto death (pp. 52–3), and their role in society, including
undertaking domestic labour, carrying sedan chairs and parasols, being
exploited as concubines, and occasionally acting as translators (pp. 161–
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2). Like early modern western sources, Chinese observers also showed
an interest in racial mixing (p. 58), as well as the particularities of the
songs and dances of these groups (p. 60). Drawing on a wide range of
published sources, the book is full of expected accounts, such as the
references from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to
black slaves sneaking into mainland China to steal food (p. 96) and
selling opium (p. 128). Of most interest to many readers, however, will
be the widespread stories of slaves escaping (or perhaps being sold) into
the service of the famous pirate Zheng Zhilong (pp. 98–110), whose
black battalion was led by a black Christian named Luis de Matos.
While conceptually flawed, the value to historians of Peng’s slim
volume book is that it collects and reproduces at length all the major
accounts of heiren, a little-known chapter in the history of slavery. As
such, it opens up possibilities for better understanding the African
and other diasporas in the early modern world, and building on Frank
Dikötter’s foundational work on Chinese racial thought.23 Furthermore,
thanks to the growing interest in the history of home-grown servitude
in pre-modern China, it hints that we might soon be able to see the
degree to which black slavery in Macau was part of both an Iberian
maritime slave trade and a Chinese system of commodifying people
that stretched from Beijing to the empire’s Silk Road borderlands and
entangled many more people than the trade in Africans in the region.24
III
With the growing number of meticulous studies of little-known facets
of slavery in and beyond the Atlantic, we are slowly seeing a resurgence
in more theoretically driven synthetic scholarship that draws wider
conclusions from these more detailed studies. One particularly
stimulating example is Alessandro Stanziani’s Les métamorphoses
du travail contraint: Une histoire globale (XVIIIe –XIXe siècles). In it,
Stanziani rethinks the history of slavery in terms of labour history,
highlighting both the limits of binary categories such as freedom and
slavery and their multiple overlaps and interactions (‘metamorphoses’)
over time. Moving back and forth between England, France, Russia,
the Congo and the Indian Ocean, he also rejects the idea that there
existed distinctly ‘European’ and ‘African’ ideas of freedom (p. 10), and
23. F. Dikötter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China (Stanford, CA, 1992).
24. P.K. Crossley, ‘Slavery in Early Modern China’, in D. Eltis and S.L. Engerman, eds, The
Cambridge World History of Slavery, III: AD 1420–AD 1804 (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 186–213.
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that ‘colonial’ and metropolitan’ labour regimes were fundamentally
different (p. 15). Instead, he argues, each context must be examined on
its own terms. This nuanced approach to legal and economic sources
leads him to challenge both the Marxian and liberal interpretations
of modern history. Rather than shifts from feudalism to capitalism or
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the onward march of freedom, Stanziani sees the last several centuries
as being characterised by an increasing role for wage labour against
a background of sometimes very heavily ‘constrained labour’ (slavery,
serfdom, indenture, pressgangs, conscription, corvée, etc.). While he
does not give an exact definition of this historically embedded category
of ‘constrained labour’, this is the term that he prefers to ‘slavery’, which
he worries brings with it too many a priori assumptions.
Stanziani’s account abounds in evocative vignettes. Following in
the footsteps of Joseph Conrad, who bookends the study, he spends a
significant amount of time in England. There, he observes the ways the
Statute of Artificers and Apprentices (1562), the Poor Laws (1601, 1834,
etc.), the Vagabond Acts (1547, 1572, 1824) and, above all, the various
Master and Servants Acts (1823, 1867) heavily constrained England’s
archetypal free salaried workers who were not as ‘free’ as one might
presume before the rise of trade unionism. This leads into a discussion
of the constraints created by an overriding desire on the part of the
elite for productivity at the expense of liberty (perhaps best exemplified
by Bentham’s Panopticon, which he hoped to apply to factories).
British abolitionism, which started as a religious crusade before
taking on a Smithian economic tone, is then placed in this context.
Unsurprisingly given his background as an economic historian of the
USSR, Stanziani also devotes several chapters to Tsarist Russia, which
he sees as influenced by the combined forces of the local agricultural
economy and the Anglo-French enlightenment. At the same time, he
notes certain unexpected parallels between Russia and the Atlantic,
including the striking similarities between fugitive serfs in the Caucasus
and maroons in the Caribbean (p. 36).
Similarly, the chapters on France highlight under-appreciated
facets of the history of constrained labour, such as the system of press-
ganging in Marseille, which was fundamentally an extension of the
galley slavery that had caught up Muslim prisoners of wars as well as
criminals, vagabonds and Protestants during the early modern period
(p. 51). Asia also appears in the book in his discussion of abolition in the
Mascarenes. This was an uneven process that resulted in the large-scale
migration of indentured labourers from India and China in the second
half of the nineteenth century. While not ‘slaves’, indentured Asians
were not permitted to leave the plantation during the period of their
contract, a constraint that was frequently legally enforced.
Although it sometimes operates at a high level of abstraction, Les
métamorphoses du travail contraint is a stimulating read that brings
together various parts of the pre-modern and modern worlds, and
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attempts not only to redefine how we think about slavery and freedom,
but to create a new and expansive theoretical framework based on
‘constrained labour’ that transcends these categories, while also
combining the methodologies of economic history with the history of
political thought. As a result, while Stanziani’s account does not feature
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a convenient change from feudalism to free labour, or a firm turning
point with abolition, it does break free from categories ultimately
inherited from Roman law that historians have long complained are too
historically specific to be useful for large-scale analysis. This said, as the
author notes in the autobiographical epilogue, his study is grounded
predominately in sources collected from European and colonial
archives and written in European languages (mainly French, English
and Russian). We are therefore left wondering about the constraints on
labour in the vast countries of origin of Mauritius’s indentured Chinese
and Indian workers, and how its victims conceptualised it.
In sum, the six books reviewed here reveal the degree to which the
transatlantic slave trade was part of an unevenly connected set of
global systems of exploitation built largely, although not exclusively, by
European merchants and their non-European partners in Asia, Africa
and elsewhere. This grew out of a long-standing set of pre-modern
practices premised on the idea that vulnerable people could be bought
and sold that became increasingly common during the early modern
period. This is a sad history that touched Tibet, Japan and South China
as well as West Africa and Ottoman Egypt, and is thoughtfully examined
by the authors with careful attention to sources and historiographies in
local languages. In each case, the terminology and legal frameworks
that regulated the trade were unique to each time and place, although
there is a growing consensus that there was significant overlap between
many of these contexts in terms of what might be loosely rendered
as the concept of ‘people as property’ and ‘extreme subordination’. As
enslavability often overlapped with geographical origin and ethnicity,
this multifaceted early modern slavery was also a significant driver of
the African and other diasporas, such that enslaved, freed and self-
liberated Africans could be found from the Amazon to Nagasaki. Each
in their own way, therefore, these books highlight the potential for
writing transregional histories of those who suffered during the age of
proto-globalisation, although unfortunately, given the linguistic and
other challenges, a global history of ‘slavery’ (however that might be
defined) remains a long way off.
Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong STUART M. MCMANUS
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