Introduction: The Widespread Invisibility of Slavery in Early Modern Asia

Abstract

S constitutes one of the darkest chapters in the human saga on planet Earth due to its temporal longevity and global dimension. Although this phenomenon is universal, it is also particular in its manifestations. Hence, we need to understand and include those particularities in order to trace how slavery has developed over time in different geographic spaces. In this introduction, I reflect on the factors that likely contributed to slavery’s widespread invisibility in early modern Asia. I consider the potential impact of Asia’s invisibility on global slavery studies and suggest how Asian particularities could inform global slavery narratives, especially given the many Asian social practices related to slavery and the multiplicity of terms across linguistic and cultural contexts. It was in the early modern era that slavery in East, Inner, and Southeast Asia became connected with the expansion of the European empires.1 Although it is possible to identify significant records of Asian communities in Lisbon, Seville, Mexico City, and Lima as early as the sixteenth century, the massive presence of enslaved Africans in Western societies simply eclipses this presence. Consequently, early modern Asian slavery and its connections with the West are often understood as a field of study remote or even separate from modern social tensions inherited from the transatlantic slave trade. Although historians specializing in slavery know of and recognize the existence of the practice in early modern Asia, the overwhelming focus on the