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This essay seeks to explore the representation of Asia in Jose Joaquin Fernandez de Lizardi's "El Periquillo Sarniento" (1816), which is often considered the first novel produced in Latin America. Although many scholars have examined the picaresque element as well as the nationalist aspect of the novel, the Asian presence in Fernandez de Lizardi's narrative has not received the attention that it deserves. My analysis focuses on the main character's voyage to the Philippines and the fictional Pacific island of Saucheofu, two places through which the author envisions an alternative model of society for colonial Mexico. The Philippines represents an ideal space in two ways: first, the protagonist begins the process of becoming an upright individual in Manila; and second, the discourse of antislavery can be articulated in an Asian country while it is prohibited in Mexico. Furthermore, Saucheofu symbolizes the idea of "utopia" to some extent, because of its exemplary system of productivity and the highly controlled mechanism of law and punishment. By studying the importance of these countries in the Far East, I propose a reading of "El Periquillo Sarniento" as the first transpacific novel in Latin American literature. (Contains 7 notes.)

With an estimated 27 million people enslaved around the world, academics at a recent international conference on human trafficking explored ways they could help end the shameful practice. Professors, students, non-governmental organizations and others gathered at the Conference on Religion, Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery, held at the University of Denver, to share information about human trafficking in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and the United States. They brainstormed ways that universities and individuals can help fight human trafficking, including forming anti-slavery societies on campuses, incorporating the topic into a wide range of courses, buying products from companies that don't use slave labor and making more people aware of the problem. Trafficking has grown alongside free trade, globalization and other economic and social trends. Victims are often abducted, lured with false job offers, sold by relatives or sometimes enter into slavery voluntarily to help their families. Slave trafficking comes in a staggering array of forms around the world, with slaves engaging in the sex trade, agriculture, construction, domestic work and factory work, among others. While the problem remains difficult to eradicate, there have been some bright spots. Human trafficking cuts across virtually all subject areas, and students and faculty members would be invigorated by studying it and working against it.

Wherever and whenever systems of slavery existed, enslaved people struggled to attain freedom. Spanning various imperial contexts from 1750 to 1920, this special issue convenes a team of scholars to investigate the aftermath of emancipation. What did freedom from slavery entail in deeply unequal colonial societies? This issue explores diverse experiences, from maroon communities in the Caribbean wilderness to the forced resettlement of freed slaves in European colonies in Africa, and the legal emancipation of slaves in segregated colonial port cities in Asia. Enslaved people encountered 'freedom' with its attendant threats and opportunities in myriad ways. Building on the rich historiographical tradition of slavery studies, this special issue aims to broaden the scope of historical research from the slave trade and the lives of enslaved individuals to their post-emancipation existence. However, even recent literature often treats freedom after abolition and manumission as distinct phenomena, representing different legal paths to freedom—one associated with the early modern period and the other with the nineteenth century. This special issue re-evaluates this presupposition by foregrounding the post-emancipation life events of formerly enslaved individuals. It questions whether and how these different transitions from slave status to freedom can and should be structurally compared in slavery studies. By tapping into previously unexplored sources, re-examining older datasets with fresh perspectives, and employing record linkage to uncover forgotten slave histories, the authors seek to assess the living conditions of formerly enslaved people and their direct descendants after emancipation. In doing so, we aim to explore how past experiences of enslavement influenced future life choices and opportunities, thereby questioning the so-called afterlives of slavery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In the course of my academic research labour bondage after the abolition of slavery has been a recurrent theme in my writings on the colonial past and the postcolonial present. In the context of the globalizing economy, the role of capitalism as a dominant mode of production has been of pivotal importance in the perpetuation of confined labour relations. This argument does not concur with the conventional wisdom that the transition to capitalism was the start of an emancipatory trend for labour. Expressed in the liberation from extra‐economic coercion, the trope of a double freedom contends that the working poor although dispossessed from means of production were at least free now to sell their labour power. The gradual reversal taking place is addressed in what became known as the social question, which led to an improvement in the terms of employment and social security. This article is concerned with aspects of sourcing coolies wide and far and confined labour relations in Asia from colonialism until today. It traces the radically different trajectories of labour and welfare in the Global North and South and argues that cooliehood is directly linked to capitalism and its globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study aims to present an institutional analysis of modern slavery to understand the accountability status for domestic workers in the West Asian context, notably Lebanon. This study also aims to explore how today's modern age – where Internet technologies and social media platforms are highly dominant – affects modern slavery. Design/methodology/approach: The study is based on conversations and secondary data such as previous studies, Internet websites and media reports published in the West Asian region, especially Lebanon. Findings: The study found a context where different institutional factors are influential with no specific definition of accountability. The context specificities, including the misuse of Internet technologies, contributed to the migrant domestic workers' precarious life and the absence of resistance and actions from the domestic workers' side (account holders). Further, weak institutional settings and indigenous cultural factors have contributed to the lack of accountability and responsibility from power holders such as households and employers' governments. Originality/value: This study provides insights to researchers and other stakeholders concerned with socioeconomic issues in West Asia. Further, it has a social implication by highlighting the humanitarian problem of marginalised migrant domestic workers traveling from poor African and South Asian countries to West Asian countries and indicating to the broader society's social responsibility or duty concerning this problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whereas partus sequitur ventrem ("the birth follows the womb") laws and their effects on the lives of enslaved women and their children are well understood in the Atlantic context, they remain entirely unstudied in the case of the slave trade in Asia, in particular Portuguese Asia, the string of entrepôts between India and Japan. Focusing on Portuguese Asia between c. 1550 and 1750, this article relies on a little‐known corpus of manuscript treatises on slavery alongside baptismal records, manumission letters and other archival documents to argue that Jesuit missionaries built on the longstanding and varied legal tradition that they had inherited to create a mixed descriptive‐prescriptive framework for understanding and regulating the hereditability of slavery in Asia, which simultaneously admitted departures from partus sequitur ventrem, including Chinese, Japanese and Mughal slavery. This theoretical framework reflected (and to some degree created) the reality on the ground, although the lives of enslaved women were inevitably also shaped by factors that the Jesuits did not fully comprehend, such as Chinese conventions surrounding female bondservants and the seemingly divergent manumission rates of different ethnic groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rapeepong Suphanchaimat and colleagues present the plight of migrant workers in the fishing industry in Southeast Asia and discuss challenges in providing for their health and safety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the role of forensic medicine in the colonial civilizing project of East Asian imperial power on the Korean Peninsula. It does so by focusing on how state-sponsored projects of forensic medicine forged a link between Confucian conjugal practice (i.e., early marriage), savagery, and the affliction of the subaltern female subjects, which in turn helped construct the colonial burden to "emancipate" suffering female subjects from indigenous patriarchy and the legacies of Confucian rule in colonial Korea (1910-1945). At the intersection of feminist theory and the postcolonial history of medicine, I examine the medical discourse of emancipation and civilization in the context of global colonialism. To do so, I draw on Gayatri Spivak and other postcolonial studies scholars who powerfully reflected on the British colonial construction of the White men's burden to save brown women from brown men and patriarchal practices such as sati (widow immolation) in colonial India. I propose to interrogate how Japanese imperialism and its discourse of forensic medicine constructed the Yellow men's burden to save Yellow women from "fellow" Yellow men and exploitative early marriage allegedly perpetuated by indigenous Confucian patriarchy. I delineate these points through a case study of the Japanese physician Kudō Takeki (1879-?) and his forensic medical studies on young Korean women and female slaves in 1920s and 1930s Korea. This paper also draws attention to how uncritically the Korean community adopted, appropriated, and incorporated Kudō's racialized colonial frameworks into their own production of knowledge on women's crime and early marriage. Kudō's study presented then cutting-edge scientific theories and methods to advance his agendas. In contrast, indigenous Korean scholarly investigations were not perceived as being grounded in biomedicine or scientific-statistical methods. This gap was exactly the one through which the colonial medical scientist chose to navigate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on child trafficking which is rampant in Asia. Child trafficking is characterized as the recruitment, transfer, and harbouring of persons for the sole purpose of exploitation and refers to sexual exploitation, slavery, forced labor, and removal of organs. It presents the case scenarios on child trafficking from the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) survey. It discusses the encountered troubles in dealing with the identification of the problem wherein it is based on the international law for human rights. It focuses on addressing the factors which influence child trafficking through the improvement of justice systems, social welfare systems, and social behaviour change systems.

The article discusses human trafficking in the 21st century. By one estimate the number of persons in India alone who are forced to work, detained via fraud, or labor under threat of violence may total 20 million. The International Labor Organization claims there are over 9 million forced laborers in Asia. Efforts by governments and international groups to stem trafficking focus more on cross-border trafficking than on ending slavery itself. Although not as prevalent as other types of slavery, sex trafficking receives an inordinate amount of global attention.

In March 2007, Japan's 'national atonement project' for survivors of military sexual slavery was officially concluded. The atonement project that was implemented by a Japanese government-established non-governmental organization - the Asian Women's Fund - has distributed its fund to a number of survivors in the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan and the Netherlands since its inception in 1995. Over the years, intense politicization around the project has made it extremely difficult for most observers to assess whether the project was successful or not. Several prominent scholars in Japan and South Korea have called for a more compassionate and positive assessment of the project's good intentions, while feminist activists continue to critique the project's negative interventions in the process of redress and reconciliation in Asia. This essay is an attempt to open up a space to rethink the felicitousness of the atonement project by focusing on the ways in which the project told its own story of war, violence, and gender. By juxtaposing stories told by Filipina survivors of the 'comfort women' system with one that has been told by the atonement project implemented by the Asian Women's Fund, it seeks to find a way to reassess whether the project acknowledged the survivors' claims for justice and compensation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unlike the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade the transportation of slaves from Africa to Asia and the Mediterranean was of great antiquity, but the intense historical interest in the Trans-Atlantic Trade for the past two hundred years has over-shadowed the study of the Asian slave trade which, until this past decade, has been largely ignored despite the fact that the total number of Africans exported to Asia was spread out over thousand years (between 800 AD and 1900 AD) but has been estimated at approximately the same as the number of Africans sent to the Americas in four and a half centuries i.e. 12,580,000. This paper describes the African slave trade to Asia across the Sahara Desert, over the Red Sea, and from the coast of East Africa, and how this trade was conducted in each of these regions. History is not a social science, but a member of the humanities family. It is the search of every available source using any discipline to narrate a story and not bound by any rigid theoretical or methodological concepts. In the compilation of this essay, I have employed the latest information and interpretations on the African slave trade to Asia to write the history of that institution as to what happened, where, when, how and why. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since Joseph E Harris' The African Presence in Asia: Consequences of the East African Slave Trade (1971) there has been a growing scholarly interest in the possibility of an African 'slave' Diaspora in the Indian Ocean world similar to that of the well-documented African Diaspora of the Americas. However, while the number of studies on communities of African origin has blossomed, there has been little attempt to evaluate if those communities fit the criteria – well-established for the Americas – of a victim diaspora. In pursuing such an exercise, this paper concludes that in the Indian Ocean world the criteria for the historical or current existence of an African Diaspora of slave origin are not met. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the factors leading to the failure of the administration justice for Asia's comfort women by the international community. Recognition of the absence of prosecution of the crime subjugating women into a system of sexual slavery after World War II; Citation of the efforts of legal scholars in articulating the principles of international humanitarian law; Overview of the history and background of the comfort system and the continuing political and legal challenges of the survivors.

Comments on slavery, forced labor and resistance in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia. Forced labor policies of colonial regimes; Slavery and other regimes of servitude in the regions; Complexity and overlap between slave and non-slave systems of servile labor; Assumption that violence is universally employed in order to extract labor from slaves; Class consciousness amongst slaves and bonded labor; Development of the legal structure for manumission; Slave revolt in the Indian Ocean Africa and Asia.

Focuses on the forms of prostitution and slavery in Asia. Globalization of capitalist market economy; System of slavery; Analysis of global processes.

When the enslaved were emancipated across the British Empire in 1834, slave-owners received cash compensation, and four years of unpaid labour as the former slaves became apprentices. In the Cape Colony, appraisers assigned a value to the former slaves. To investigate this, we transcribed 37,411 valuation records to compile a novel emancipation dataset. This gives us a new picture of the enslaved population in the Cape at the time of the emancipation. Some of our findings, for example that slaves from south-east Asia were assigned lower valuations than Cape-born slaves, are in contrast to those of an earlier literature. To distinguish between what the former slave-owners should have received and what they actually received, we matched the valuation records to the compensation claims. We argue that the uneven allocation of compensation had important implications for the distribution of capital after emancipation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the relationship between slavery and plant knowledge for cultivational activities and medicinal purposes on Isle de France (Mauritius) in the second half of the eighteenth century. It builds on recent scholarship to argue for the significance of slaves in the acquisition of plant material and related knowledge in pharmaceutical, acclimatization, and private gardens on the French colonial island. I highlight the degree to which French colonial officials relied on slaves' ethnobotanical knowledge but neglected to include such information in their published works. Rather than seeking to explore the status of such knowledge within European frameworks of natural history as an endpoint of knowledge production, this essay calls upon us to think about the plant knowledge that slaves possessed for its practical implementations in the local island context. Both female and male slaves' plant-based knowledge enriched - even initiated - practices of cultivation and preparation techniques of plants for nourishment and medicinal uses. Here, cultivational knowledge and skills determined a slave's hierarchical rank. As the case of the slave gardener Rama and his family reveals, plant knowledge sometimes offered slaves opportunities for social mobility and, even though on extremely rare occasions, enabled them to become legally free.