The Abolition of Slavery and the Status of Slaves in Late Imperial China

Abstract

Chevaleyre explores ‘slavery’ in late imperial China by focusing on two commonly overlooked elements. First, he explores the original abolition process that emerged from Sino-Western confrontations in the context of the Shanghai Settlement and its Mixed Court in the first decade of the twentieth century. Second, he attempts to shed light on the conceptualization of ‘slavery’ as it surfaces from early Ming legislative sources and to question its impact on the shaping of social practices. In so doing, Chevaleyre considers ‘China’ as a global normative space and approaches the issue of ‘slavery’ in this global space ‘from above’, that is, by focusing on the abstraction of ‘slavery’ rather than on the concrete situation of ‘slaves’.