The Commensurability of Slavery in Macau and South China

abstract:On September 12, 1672, an eighteen-year-old Chinese slave called Ângela was sold by a low-level Qing official to a Portuguese merchant at Macau’s northern gate, or so her limited-term servitude certificate claims. At that moment, Ângela moved from one part of a loosely integrated global market to another, crossing linguistic and cultural boundaries that shaped both her legal status and lived experience. This move was facilitated by fundamental similarities in the ways human beings were commodified in the Iberian world and early Qing China, which were in turn undergirded by overlapping ideas about degraded status and loosely equivalent customs surrounding property and contracts. As a contribution to the global history of early modern slavery, this article makes extensive use of both Chinese and Western sources to explore the limits of such commensurability and what it might have meant for Chinese women like Ângela who were sold in Macau.摘要:1672 年,一位十八歲的中國女子被賣予澳門葡萄牙商人為奴,從跨越語言文 化的中國邊界到達地球的另一邊的伊比利亞世界,但兩處對以人類為財產的概念 與習慣卻有着不少相似之處。本文將利用中外史料探討這種相似性的局限,以更 進一步了解當時被賣奴隸的人生。