K001: Capture, Slavery, Bondage, and Forced Relocation in Asia (1400-1900), Part 2

Organizer(s)

• 

  Jennifer Gaynor

  State University of New York, Buffalo, United States

Chair(s)

• RY

  Robin Yates

  McGill University, United States

Paper Presenter(s)

• 

  Don Wyatt

  Middlebury College, United States
• SF

  Siyen Fei

  University of Pennsylvania, United States
• 

  Nicolas Weber

  INALCO, France

Discussant(s)

• RY

  Robin Yates

  McGill University, United States

Session Abstract: This second part of a two-part panel focuses on forced relocations, interactions between groups, and the perceptions of others.

Recent research suggests that the scale of slavery in Asia's past rivals that of the Atlantic world. Yet slavery, bondage, and forced relocation in Asia were more complex: multidirectional, diversely motivated, and frequently obscured by terms of kinship, friendship, and alliance. A reinvigorated and expanding field, fresh research on capture, slavery, bondage, and forced relocation clarifies basic questions about numbers, routes, and forms of asymmetrical dependency. It also addresses more complex questions about historical causality that involve competing, overlapping, and cross-cutting structures of interest, whether for economic gain, heightened social status, religious merit, subsistence security, or political advantage.

What needs and desires motivated specific captures in time and place? Why were people removed from settings familiar to them and relocated? Why did some enter bondage or servitude voluntarily? And what ramifications resulted from these various relocations? Did formulations of friendship and real or fictive kinship euphemize and perhaps ameliorate a sense of suffering, or of causing, social offense? How did actual kin relations formed through captures perpetuate conflict, or transform war into peace, as in the story of the early Roman abductions of Sabine women?

While labor remains a vital part of the questions we hope to elucidate, other aspects of social relations call for analysis as well, whether in colonial contexts, non-colonial settings, or situations simultaneously structured by both.

Presentations:

• Dispatched at Sea: Chinese Notices on the Maritime Trafficking in Slaves between the Thirteenth and Sixteenth Centuries
  

  Paper Presenter: Don J. Wyatt – Middlebury College
• The Crossing: Captivity, Slavery, and Migration in the 16th century Ming-Chinese Maritime Frontier
  

  Paper Presenter: Siyen Fei – University of Pennsylvania
• Cham Forced Migrations and Relocation in mainland Southeast Asia: Perspectives from Modern Historical Sources
  

  Paper Presenter: Nicolas Weber – INALCO