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.

Despite its greater extensiveness in comparison to the ferrying of their West African counterparts across the Atlantic Ocean into bondage in the New World, the history of the extraction of East Africans to serve as slaves in the various lands that ring the Indian Ocean is barely known to most of us. Particularly as Westerners, our knowledge of even the sketchiest outlines of the latter phenomenon pales before what we know intimately about the intricacies of the former. Furthermore, unknown altogether to too many is the fact that—from at least as early as the eighth century of the Common Era—these East African slaves were exported as distantly as China. Based principally on the pertinent Chinese sources, this study raises and investigates three fundamental questions concerning this conveyance of East Africans into China. First, who were the original enslavers of these East Africans and thus the prime purveyors of their entrance over the centuries into bondage in China? Second, how—that is, by land or by sea—and under what auspices were these East Africans typically transported from their homelands mainly along the eastern African coastline to a locale as far away as China? Third and finally, what was the probable fate of these East Africans once they had arrived in China? The essay concludes with a consideration of the consequentiality of this largely overlooked and therefore unheralded saga amidst the history of Chinese institutionalised servitude overall.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Portuguese purchased large numbers of people in China as slaves. Many of those people were children. This article considers where those children came from and why they were sold to the Portuguese. During the late Ming period, as social inequality intensified, poor farmers increasingly had to sell themselves and their offspring to rich landowners as bonded labourers. However, some farmers chose to break the law and sell to foreigners instead. Other farmers became bandits, and kidnapped other people's children to sell into bondage. Both of these criminal trends provided the Portuguese with young slaves.

While there are large literatures on both Islamic slave soldiers and the phenomenon of “arming slaves” in the Atlantic world, military slavery in early modern Asia is still poorly understood. Using a variety of Chinese, Latin, Spanish, and Portuguese sources, this article will argue that enslaved labour was frequently directed towards violence across early modern Asia, colonial or otherwise. At the same time, the phenomenon was far from uniform in the vast expanse of land and sea between East Africa and Japan. Rather, it is better to speak of a series of analogous regimes of bondage that interacted with each other across large distances, with the line between enslaved soldiers, mercenaries, and run-of-the-mill trader-raiders being vanishingly thin at times. Finally, all this existed within the context of military infrastructure in the broadest sense of the word that included fortresses, factories, and even war elephants.

Based on Japanese and Portuguese sources, this paper aims at recovering local categories of bondage in order to identify mechanisms by which people were subjected to bonded labour in early modern Japan. The analysis focuses on crossing local forms of bondage, here referred to as genin, and the processes of subjecting individuals to this condition, the so-called called geninka, with the European notion of slavery and enslavement. Local forms of subjection to bondage are drawn from the analysis of early seventeenth-century Tokugawa legislation dedicated to the suppression of human trafficking networks. These documents use a number of labels such as genin, hōkōnin, wakatō, chūgen, hikan, and komono, all references to people subjected to various forms of bondage. At the same time, a crucial debate among members of the Society of Jesus in India offers the opportunity to scrutinise the application of the historical and legal European concept of slavery and enslavement to Japan, a region beyond the secular authority of colonial empires. Ultimately, slavery reveals itself as one of the many categories used by early modern actors to interpret and regulate labour arrangements in the budding Christian communities created by missionaries in the Iberian world.

Over the last twenty years, global history has experienced a considerable boom, breaking with traditional historical approaches that privileged the national framework and very often adopted a Eurocentric perspective. This triumphalist discourse about the field of global history should not, however, obscure the local and national specificities of this field of research, be they epistemological, institutional, thematic, or historiographical, nor the disciplinary, political, and economic obstacles with which researchers are confronted. This conversation explores the intellectual and structural specificities and constraints of global history.

This essay reviews six recent books that explore how revolutionary upheavals pushed imperial and republican projects alike to experiment with novel political ideas and mechanisms. These initiatives came in response to calls for representation and equality throughout the Age of Revolution. In doing so, these books reveal the failures and successes of these projects in responding to these demands. The authors of these works show that republican and imperial processes of state-building and legitimacy-building did not have a predetermined outcome—quite the opposite. To constitute themselves as valid political alternatives, revolutionary, imperial, and republican projects had to adapt to different actors’ expectations, contingencies, and growing geopolitical tensions. By exposing those adaptation processes, the six books under review demonstrate that the Age of Revolution was a period of intense political experimentation across the ideological spectrum.

This article discusses recent work on cross-cultural interactions between missionaries and Central Africans, including Images on a Mission by Cécile Fromont, Religious Entanglements by David Maxwell, and “What Is Religion in Africa?” by Birgit Meyer. These works adopt an entangled approach, examining how Christianisation engendered interconnections between Central Africans and missionaries and between Central Africa and Europe. In this way, the works paint a nuanced image of the cross-cultural interactions that occurred in the framework of the Christianisation of Central Africa, showing us how an entangled approach can help examine such interactions afresh. By contextualising the manifold ways in which Westerners and non-Westerners, the West and the non-West were entangled, we can better understand the (power) dynamics and outcomes of cross-cultural interactions. By reading sources in an entangled manner, we can get a completer view of the wide array of interactions between Westerners and non-Westerners. By acknowledging how historical entanglements shaped the analytical concepts we use, we can decolonise our scholarly practice. This article shows how the study of a fundamentally cross-cultural phenomenon—Christianity in the non-Western world—can inspire global and imperial historians to study cross-cultural interactions in a truly cross-cultural manner.