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Human Trade and Slavery in and Beyond China

CHUS #3. Human Trade and Slavery in and beyond China, 1600–1900
Saturday, January 4, 2025: 10:30 AM-12:00 PM
New York Hilton, East Room

Session Organizer: Chenxi Luo, Reed College

Chair(s):
Qin Fang, McDaniel College

Papers:
“Barbarian Women” on the Riverbank: Ethnicity, Prostitution, and Human Trafficking in Qing Southwest China
Chaoran Ma, University of Toronto

Across the Boundaries: Human Trade and the State in Qing Southwest Sichuan
Hong Song, Stanford University

Disputes over Distance: Absentee Banner Masters, Far-Off Slaves, and Ownership Conflicts in 17th-Century Manchuria
Chenxi Luo, Reed College

Kitad: The Dual Meaning of “Chinese” and “Slave” in Qing Mongolia
Sam Bass, University of Toronto

Comment: Qin Fang, McDaniel College

Panel Description

Our panel centers its attention on the most invaluable commodity: human beings. Specifically, we focus on the human trade and slavery in China and beyond from the early modern to the modern period and situate the lived experience of sold people in local and global contexts. Chaoran Ma’s article deals with sex trafficking of ethnic minority women in Qing Southwest China who were abducted and sold into prostitution. It argues that regional imbalances, gender inequality and frontier governance played important roles in shaping the network of trading women. Hong Song pays attention to the traffic in women in the context of mobility and legal pluralism in Qing southwest frontiers. By illustrating how the women survived in negotiations between polyethnic institutions and communities, his paper reveals how the local order of frontier societies relied upon a multi-layered legal system. Shifting from South China to Northeast Asia, Chenxi Luo’s work inspects legal disputes on slave ownership in Qing Manchuria. Her research shows that the division of banner households, due to a military migration, caused difficulty in reclaiming faraway slaves among banner masters. Sam Bass shifts the discussion to terminology by tracing out the use of the Mongolian word kitad (Chinese) as a term of enslavement in the northern frontier of the Qing empire. He argues that the term became taboo, at least in writing, due to the conflation of the ethnic terms “Manchu” and “Chinese” in the Mongolian language. Together, this panel brings various perspectives, including race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and mobility, to illuminate the practice of trafficking and the institution of slavery from a non-Western perspective.

Paper Abstracts

“Barbarian Women” on the Riverbank: Ethnicity, Prostitution, and Human Trafficking in Qing Southwest China

 Chaoran Ma, University of Toronto

This paper aims to reveal a hidden commercial network that involved abduction and forced prostitution of ethnic minority women, including underage girls, in southwest China during the Qing Dynasty (1636-1912). It will highlight how bureaucratic control (gaitu guiliu), regional imbalances, and gender inequality contributed to turning women from the southwestern borderlands into highly profitable commodities. Meanwhile, the article will indicate that Chongqing, Sichuan Province emerged as a major hub for human trafficking and sex trafficking in southwest China. On the north bank of the Jialing River, there was even a place known as the “Barbarians’ Camp” where a large number of ethnic minority women were sold and forced into prostitution. Despite the the legislations and campaigns by the Qing central and local governments to outlaw and combat human trafficking, this practice was never completely eradicated and was even tolerated with tacit approval. By drawing from both central and local government archives, this article also seeks to restore the life experiences and voices of women who fell victim to human trafficking and forced prostitution. Furthermore, it will explore how issues of gender and sexuality can be integrated into the study of late imperial China’s empire-building, frontier policies, and ethnic dynamics.

Across the Boundaries: Human Trade and the State in Qing Southwest Sichuan

Hong Song, Stanford University

In 1782, Jiang Shi, a Han peasant woman was kidnapped by four yi and Han men near Mianning County and sold to a yi family in Liangshan in southwest Sichuan. Only after a year did Jiang Shi find a chance to escape. She spent six days walking across mountains and returning home. Jiang Shi’s experience reveals the danger that the local people encountered in southwest Sichuan. While scholars have mainly focused on human trade as family strategies or marriage forms in China Proper, little attention has been given to the frontier. This paper focuses on the phenomenon of human trade involving both Han and yi in southwest Sichuan and the state’s efforts toward it. Relying on legal cases from the Mianning County Archive and the First Historical Archives, gazetteers, and ethnographies, I examine how human trade developed in the local circumstance of frequent border-crossing mobility and ethnic exchanges and challenged the state’s designed political boundaries. Resolving human trade then often involved power negotiations between the state’s and the local population’s ideas and practices of boundary-making. By investigating how the phenomenon of human trade suggested the multiplicity of boundary-making in southwest Sichuan, this paper contributes to the future scholarship that explores the extent and limits of the state’s governance out of complexities of political geographies in frontier societies.

Disputes over Distance: Absentee Banner Masters, Far-Off Slaves, and Ownership Conflicts in 17th-Century Manchuria

Chenxi Luo, Reed College

This paper studies slavery in a post-migration society in Qing China ruled by the Manchus, a group of ethnic people coming from Northeast Asia who formed their socio-military institution called the Eight Banners. The research traces the aftermath of the Qing conquest of China proper: following the occupation of the former Ming capital Beijing in 1644, two million banner soldiers and their Han Chinese slaves moved from Manchuria to China proper. This relocation brought enslaved people a range of migratory experiences from relocation, returning, and escaping, to remaining. In particular, my paper deals with a set of legal disputes between absentee banner masters and their far-off slaves. After the trans-Great Wall migration in 1644, most banner masters relocated to Beijing, while some slaves remained in Manchuria to take care of landed property and ancestral graveyards. The long-distance relationship with their banner masters in Beijing created new possibilities for remaining slaves in Manchuria. Left-behind slaves outside the Great Wall enjoyed a certain level of autonomy in the absence of their masters, generating many legal disputes with their masters in Beijing. As legal evidence has demonstrated, conflicts centered around the property issue: masters charged their slaves based on the reason that the slaves took advantage of their absence, seized their household property, and even denied their slave status. Through examining legal cases involving masters and their slaves far afield, I argue that the new geographical relationship between masters and slaves was an important factor mapped onto the maintenance of the Manchu slavery institution.

Kitad: The Dual Meaning of “Chinese” and “Slave” in Qing Mongolia

Sam Bass, University of Toronto

This presentation explores the use of the Mongolian word kitad, which means “Chinese” or “China,” as a term of slavery in Mongolian literary and administrative contexts from the 16th and 19th centuries. While kitad originally referred to Kitans of the medieval Liao Dynasty, and then later China and Chinese people, it also took on the meaning of “slave” in the early modern period after the dissolution of the Mongol Empire. I trace out the use of kitad as “slave” in Mongolian language literary works, legal codes, lexical works, and archival records related to emancipation and fugitive capture. I suggest that the diminishing use of kitad as “slave” in literary and official contexts in the 18th century was due to Qing literary censorship as the term was not only associated with the Chinese but also with the Manchu ruling house, making it a potentially anti-Manchu and anti-Qing term and therefore taboo. Nonetheless, use of the term persisted in records of colloquial Mongolian and in Buryatia in the Russian Empire. By examining language as a site of contestation at the intersection of ethnic and hierarchical categories, this paper complicates formalistic approaches to social histories of slavery in the Qing and draws our attention to the complexities of trans-lingual practices in imperial frontiers.

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Book Reviews in the Age of Internet

CHUS #1  Book Reviews in the Age of the Internet (Roundtable)
Friday, January 3, 2025: 3:30 PM-5:00 PM
New York Hilton, East Room

Session Organizer: Qin Shao, College of New Jersey

Chair(s):
Qin Shao, College of New Jersey

Panel:

  • Nicholas Popper, College of William & Mary and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture
  • Yuanchong Wang, University of Delaware
  • Gina Anne Tam, Trinity University
  • Gillian Frank, Trinity College Dublin
  • Qin Shao, College of New Jersey

Session Description:

In the fall of 2023, a 20-page, critical review of a book on the Qing dynasty caused a small shock wave in and beyond the China field. By December, this review had more than 70, 000 full text views, a record for an academic book review. This phenomenon illustrates at least two issues relevant to academic book-reviewing: the conventional book-reviewing practice is outdated, and the learned societies, scholars and the educated public alike, are hungry for a change.

This roundtable aims to critically assess the state of book-reviewing and explore if a paradigm shift is finally on the horizon, considering the impact of the internet and social media. The advent of the internet in the past half century has reshaped every aspect of society, including scholarly research, but mainstream academic book-reviewing has largely remained unchanged. The roundtable examines the nature of book-reviewing and, with that, its functions and purposes in the age of internet.

Book-reviewing is conventionally considered a “service” to the profession. It introduces a new book, often chapter by chapter, with a light touch on the book’s merits and flaws. Such book reviews follow a predictable format without much impact. But the internet has taken over much of the function of such book-reviewing. Publishers’ webpages, commercial book sites, e-publishing, and authors’ own social media can instantly make available of a book’s main contents. All this constitutes a challenge to the standard book reviews.

This challenge requires nothing less than a redefinition of book-reviewing practice. Instead of being an afterthought of academic publishing, academic book-reviewing itself can be a scholarly activity, and a book review essay can be a piece of scholarship, if it critically and creatively analyzes the book from the large issues to the source material. Indeed, analysis should be the main function of book-reviewing. Book-reviewing must also serve as a gatekeeper and standard-bearer for academic integrity and quality. In other words, book-reviewing should be an integral part in the creation and production of new knowledge.

The problems with the standard book reviewing are well-known. Some editors have abandoned book reviews; others have called for journals’ book review section to become a “change agent”; and still others have questioned the dominance of book reviewers from the U.S and U.K. There have also been changes. Some platforms feature more substantive book reviews, provide panel reviews, and engage in a dialogue with authors. But they are in the minority.

The five speakers on the roundtable come from diverse backgrounds in the fields of European, American, and Chinese history. Some of them are current and former book review editors and book and blog editors. Together they will explore issues such as the evolution of book-reviewing, the importance of source-checking, the impact of social media, and the possibility to utilize long-form reviews and digital humanities platforms to improve the quality of book reviews.

Speakers’ Abstracts

Nicholas Popper, College of William & Mary/Omohundro Institute Book reviews themselves have a long and somewhat surprising history. While most surveys of the genre have focused on literary book reviews from the nineteenth century to the present, the form was developed and pioneered in the European republic of letters in the late seventeenth century. This book-obsessed, trans-imperial community corresponded relentlessly about books, sharing knowledge of new or rare publications whose acquisition would often entail considerable expense and energy. The initial form of book reviews, published in the periodicals flourishing across Europe, responded to this environment by balancing a variety of purposes. Not only did such reviews announce the publication of new books, but they often included significant extracts from them – providing a sample to allow readers to judge whether it was worth the effort to try to acquire them. This publicity function was at least as important in these early book reviews as the critical assessment and contextualization that historians today associate with the form.

As this suggests, book reviews respond to their broader communications environment, and in my contribution to this roundtable, I will use a brief survey their history — along with my experience as Book Review Editor of the William and Mary Quarterly, the flagship journal in early American History, and as Editor of Books at the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture – to reflect on the possible directions for book reviews in our current media climate. Above all, I will argue that their role as post-publication peer review is more important than ever, and that re-thinking the structure and distribution of book reviews to emphasize this aspect may point toward broader changes in terms of venue, authorship, timing, length, and editorial practice.

Yuanchong Wang, University of Delaware

There has been a glaring gap in the expectations and practices of reviewing academic historical books. On the one hand, the AHA emphasizes the importance of evaluating “the honesty and reliability with which the historian uses primary and secondary source materials” as a standard professional conduct. On the other hand, most book reviews do not check such source materials. Filling in this gap is an assumption, or a trust, that the author has both the necessary training and integrity to use and interpret the sources correctly and the book is an honest piece of scholarship. Academic book reviews in the history field have largely been run on this assumption. Indeed, the challenge for source-checking is daunting. The limited length that academic journals offer to book reviews makes it impossible for any meaningful engagement with either primary or secondary sources. The increasing popularity of a multilingual approach to historical studies makes the examination of primary courses even more challenging. But the pitfall of skipping source-checking is also obvious. Given that the internet age has made a large number of digitized historical materials available online, this presentation proposes a new type of cooperation between academic journals and book reviewers in which the former requires the latter to write a more substantiative piece that includes a close examination of the source material.

Gina Anne Tam, Trinity University,

Social media has sharply transformed the world of academic book reviews. From #twitterstorians to Facebook groups, Goodreads to booktok, social media has created new forums in which we, as scholars, can publicize the books we write as well as offer our own endorsements, critiques, and opinions about the books of others. Social media as a medium also promotes unprecedented reach and urgency; it allows for fast, real-time discussion of books and reviews of them that include audiences formerly omitted from academic discourses. Together, these realities have created new opportunities and risks for academics in discussing the afterlives of books, opportunities and risks that are often unique to different platforms, different subjects, and different audiences.

My goal in this presentation is to address a series of ways in which social media has affected academic book reviews. I contend that social media has created a double-edged sword for both authors and reviewers. On the one hand, it has allowed for both reviewers and authors to reach new audiences, gain new feedback, and engage in more robust, diverse, and sustained conversations about academic work than ever before. For junior scholars in particular, this can be a particularly rewarding part of the review-writing and book-writing experience. On the other hand, the immediacy of social media, and the fact that nearly all social media platforms purposefully bolster content that is controversial and emotionally laden, creates new risks. From the possibility of “going viral” for writing or receiving a negative review in a way that is unprecedently public, to the possibility that emotionally-charged fast responses can create a “pile-on” effect that spirals and causes long-lasting misunderstandings, social media can also create a chilling effect for both authors and reviewers that can hinder innovative scholarship and rigorous critique.

Gillian Frank, Trinity College Dublin

At their best, academic book reviews help scholars learn about new scholarship, contextualize this scholarship within broader disciplinary conversations, and think through the limits and possibilities of each work’s interventions, methodologies and evidence. But too often, journals have difficulty finding volunteers to perform this important and time-consuming task. It is an open secret that the readership for such reviews is limited and that many reviews–whether out of politeness or deference–follow a stultifying form: chapter summary, contextualization, tepid critique, and (bold) praise. 

This presentation maps the structural and formal limits and possibilities of the written book review genre. It then makes a case for supplementing written book reviews–especially by using digital humanities platforms–with other types of public conversation and exchange that might spur critical engagement among scholars and between authors and readers.

Qin Shao,  College Of New Jersey

Conventional book-reviewing has largely functioned as a news release—in about 600-1,000 words, the review announces the publication of a new book and introduces its main contents. But the internet has rendered such a function unnecessary, as numerous websites and social media accounts, by the publishers, the booksellers, and the authors, are doing exactly the same job. Academic book-reviewing must redefine itself to justify its relevance.  How can the mainstream book reviews evolve from a much-diminished service role to an invigorating force for scholarly and intellectual pursuit in the academic community? The long-form review essays, often more than 5,000 words, published by The New York Review of Books (NYRB) and other such literary platforms, may serve as an inspiration. Those review essays are often themselves an expansive study of the subject matters. For instance, a review of two books on privacy in NYRB (March 9, 2023) starts with a story about a robotic vacuum cleaner taking photographs of a woman using the toilet and goes on to a detailed study of the evolution of privacy law in the U.S. While the essay engages with larger historical and legal issues, it also offers critical insights about the values and shortcomings of the two books. Such a review contributes to the depth and breadth of the subject matter and becomes an indispensable reading itself on privacy rights. Academic book-reviewing can also become an integral part of scholarship if it redefines its functions and purposes and invests in the necessary time, energy, and other resources.