Harriet T. Zurndorfer
· 2020
Abstract
In this ambitious book, Lúcio de Sousa has three aims: to reconstruct the system of trafficking Japanese, Chinese, and Korean slaves from Japan circa 1550-1650, to apprise readers of Japanese communities in the Hapsburg empire, and to analyze Iberian legislation regarding the Japanese slave trade.The majority of the book's eight chapters focus on the first goal.One chapter is centered on the second, and one on the third.On the face of it, the book should appeal to a wide range of historical interests, including global slavery, East Asian economic and social history, Iberian seaborne empires, and missionary expansionism, but its execution leaves much to be desired.This is unfortunate, since Portugal's engagement in Asian slavery is less well-known than its slaving enterprises in Africa or Brazil.Without much knowledge of East Asian history, readers may find the first three chapters on the "stages" of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean slavery difficult to follow.According to the author, the Chinese stage begins not in the first decades of the sixteenth century when Portuguese and Southeast Asians were known to profit from a Guangzhou-based illegal commercial network exporting slaves all over Asia, but in the 1560s as a result of Wokou (pirate) raids along the Chinese coast that brought Chinese male and female slaves to Kyushu in western Japan, where the Portuguese bought them (24-26).From the 1570s, Portuguese traders in Japan acquired slaves directly-it was during this stage that the Macao-based merchants Domingos Monteiro and Bartolomeu Vaz Landeiro expanded their extensive commercial dealings into the purchase of Japanese slaves whom they sold all over Asia.Both of these men were also involved in the highly lucrative trade of Chinese silk for Japanese silver, and thus found convenience in the establishment of the trading port of Nagasaki by Christian-converted daimyōs who allowed European Jesuits to proselytize.In 1587, the Japanese warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi seized Nagasaki and banned the foreign doctrine but allowed the Portuguese merchants to carry on with their commercial activities, including the slave trade.Their human trafficking expanded into the third stage, as Hideyoshi's invasion of Korea in 1592 sent thousands of Koreans to Japan's slave markets.Chapter Four focuses on the period from 1600-1614 when Portuguese traders concentrated on importing Asian slaves, and in particular those of Chinese origin, via Macao and Malacca to the Philippines.The author attempts to substantiate his claim of this shift from Japanese and Korean slavery with a forty-six-page table registering the names and some biographical details of such Asian slaves,