Slavery in East Asia

Offers the broadest receptive audience an essentialist survey of the medieval histories of slaving in China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam.

Don J. Wyatt (Author)

9781009001700, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 5 January 2023

75 pages
22.8 x 15.2 x 0.5 cm, 0.15 kg

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.

Preface
Medieval East Asian Slavery in Overview
Medieval East Asian Slavery Defined and Ideologized
Trafficking in Slavery and the Law in Medieval East Asia
Coercive Laboring Economies in Medieval East Asia
Slave Social Organization, Culture, and Identity in Medieval East Asia
Gender, Enslavement, and Trafficking in Medieval East Asia
Family, Age, and Bondage in Medieval East Asia
Enslavement by Outsiders in Medieval East Asia: The Jingkang Incident and Aftermath
Enslavement of Outsiders in Medieval East Asia: China's Inevitable African Slaves
An East Asian Mode of Medieval Slavery?

Subject Areas: Slavery & abolition of slavery [HBTS], Medieval history [HBLC1], Early history: c 500 to c 1450/1500 [HBLC], Asian history [HBJF], European history [HBJD], General & world history [HBG]