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  • The Portuguese Slave Trade in Early Modern Japan: Merchants, Jesuits and Japanese, Chinese, and Korean Slaves by Lúcio de Sousa
  • Geoffrey C. Gunn
The Portuguese Slave Trade in Early Modern Japan: Merchants, Jesuits and Japanese, Chinese, and Korean Slaves. By Lúcio de Sousa. Leiden: Brill, 2018. 594 pages. Hardcover, €180.00/$217.00.

Slavery has taken different forms throughout recorded history and across cultures, though justifiably the traffic in slaves from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries across the Atlantic, from Africa to the New World, and the related plantation slave system have garnered the most attention. Among the European powers involved was Portugal, which indeed pioneered the traffic in Sub-Saharan slaves from the early [End Page 264] fifteenth century. Much less has been written about European slave trading across the Indian Ocean world and in the Western Pacific, and Lúcio de Sousa's study focusing on the Portuguese slave trade with Japan and Macau makes a long-overdue contribution toward filling this gap. The Portuguese Slave Trade in Early Modern Japan spans essentially the period from the arrival of Francis Xavier in Japan in 1549, accompanied by slaves and servants, to the late sixteenth century with the enforcement of proscriptions against missionary involvement in slavery/human trafficking by Catholic missionaries and Portugal's outlawing of the enslavement of Japanese in 1570.

To be sure, any discussion of slavery touches upon issues of definition, and de Sousa notes early on the range of Portuguese euphemisms that sometimes disguised the slave trade, including terms referring more generally to children or racially or religiously inflected terms such as negro or cafres. He understands that the word "slave" carries different valences in different cultures and across time. Obviously Hapsburg terminology is hardly consistent with notions of human bondage in the Confucianized cultures of China, Korea, and Japan, and in the book's concluding chapter de Sousa brilliantly analyzes this clash of legal cultures and values. Readers can thus look forward to discussions of culturally specific and even emic terms covering a range of phenomena from servitude to feudal obligations, captured prisoners, gendered relations, and slavery as defined within Iberian/Catholic theology. Nevertheless, as I understood the book a world of difference separates the branded and dehumanized slaves (mostly African) sent off to New World plantations or mining economies from the Portuguese-trafficked, mostly female Asian Catholic converts sent into domestic servitude in Macau or even as far away as Portugal or Peru, and this should have been acknowledged. Sometimes, where the author highlights "slave trade"—as with the title of this work—other terminology incorporating words such as "bondage," "war captives," or "indentured labor" might also be just as appropriate.

This is a large book, and larger still because at least 150 of its pages are dedicated to tables, which include lists of individuals identified in the text. It is divided into eight numbered chapters, with the first four devoted to Portuguese shipping to Japan and the Philippines and the accompanying increase in the volume of trade in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean "slaves." The latter four chapters focus on the business of "slave trade" at the Japan end, with case studies and life histories of a sampling of slaves transported to Europe, the Americas, and elsewhere. A concluding chapter takes up Hapsburg regulation of Japanese slavery and the trade's eventual decline, which is linked with the first anti-Christian edicts in Japan.

Chapter 1 offers background on the first Portuguese mariners to arrive in Southeast Asia and China (early 1500s) and in Japan (1542–1543) and to establish a permanent settlement in Macau (1557). De Sousa devotes some attention to a supposed Portuguese partnership with local wokou (Jp. wakō), which "literally means 'Japanese pirates and bandits,' though many of them were in fact Chinese" (p. 12). Acknowledging that the Macau-Japan silk-for-silver voyages had been regularized between 1557 and 1568, the author makes the statement that "metal ore was not enough to fill the [End Page 265] spaces that had been previously occupied by silk and other merchandise; hence, the remainder was filled with slaves" (p. 23). This is an evocative statement that conjures up...

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