Arming Slaves in Early Modern Maritime Asia

Abstract

While there are large literatures on both Islamic slave soldiers and the phenomenon of “arming slaves” in the Atlantic world, military slavery in early modern Asia is still poorly understood. Using a variety of Chinese, Latin, Spanish, and Portuguese sources, this article will argue that enslaved labour was frequently directed towards violence across early modern Asia, colonial or otherwise. At the same time, the phenomenon was far from uniform in the vast expanse of land and sea between East Africa and Japan. Rather, it is better to speak of a series of analogous regimes of bondage that interacted with each other across large distances, with the line between enslaved soldiers, mercenaries, and run-of-the-mill trader-raiders being vanishingly thin at times. Finally, all this existed within the context of military infrastructure in the broadest sense of the word that included fortresses, factories, and even war elephants.