The Blacks of Premodern China by Don Wyatt (review)

This slender book is a provocative piece of writing, or at least it seeks to be, both in terms of the theses the author sets out to defend and the way he expresses his ideas. The author presents three main theses: (1) that there were black slaves in premodern China; (2) that some of these blacks were of African origin; and (3) that these black slaves were owned by Chinese. All three theses have the ultimate aim of implicating China as an entity that, like the United States and other Western countries, once took part in one of the most horrendous events in human history: the buying and selling of Africans as slaves.

With respect to highlighting the historical fact that there were black slaves in premodern China, the book is groundbreaking. Throughout the book’s three chapters (“From History’s Mints,” “The Slaves of Guangzhou,” and “To the End of the Western Sea”) the author sifts various pieces of historical evidence and queries and problematizes key words such as Kunlun and heiren. These terms, the author claims, point to the fact that the premodern Chinese had interactions with blacks and that there were asymmetrical relations between the two populations, suggesting that many of these black people served the Chinese as slaves.

But does the fact that one can ascertain the presence of blacks in premodern China indicate that these blacks were African? Whereas the book is very successful in signaling the presence of blacks, it does not appear, in my opinion, to have achieved the same amount of success in showing that any of them were of African origin, let alone that the Chinese of that era owned African slaves. For example, as the author himself acknowledges frequently, the Chinese of that era and even to this day often refer to ethnicities in South and Southeast Asia such as the Malays as “blacks.”

The author’s third thesis, that the Chinese of premodern China owned African slaves, is supported by the proposition that since the Arabs of the era traded in African slaves, and since the Chinese traded with the Arabs, the Chinese could have bought African slaves from the Arabs. But again this thesis, arguably, is not proved sufficiently by the available historical evidence.

In fact, the historical data in the book suggest an alternative thesis: that whereas Africa’s relations with Europe were mostly those of master and slave (i.e., the trans-Atlantic slave trade), Africa’s relations with China were altogether different. There was neither a trans-Indian nor a trans-Pacific slave trade involving the buying of Africans by the Chinese. As I have argued in my own book (Africans in China, Cambria Press, 2012), Africans and Chinese met for the first time in the fifteenth century, on equal footing for the most part, and Africans and Chinese never owned each other on any large scale or in any systematic manner. Several studies (e.g., by Lila Abu-Lughod, Richard Gould, and Louis Levathes) suggest that this first-time meeting between Africans and Chinese came about following the wreck of a ship captained by Admiral Zheng He, a Ming-era seafarer on the East Coast of Africa, with the Africans helping the Chinese to land on shore. There are no available records suggesting that Zheng He sent back slaves to China, even though he sent many African goods and acquisitions, including giraffes and African spices.

Unfortunately, readers of Wyatt’s book may be left with the impression that many groups of people in the world—from East to West—owned Africans as slaves in the past, even though Wyatt does not state this explicitly and may not have even intended to suggest this. Perhaps inadvertently, however, the book bolsters a conceptualization of African history and of Africa’s historical connections with the rest of the world as a history of slavery, as we see in far too many...