Beyond Slavery: Dependency in Asian History

Central Aim

The Research Group is committed to two principal tasks:

1. By exploring slavery and dependency in East Asia in all their historical depth and complexity, the Research Group intends to lift the veil on what remains an overlooked area of the global history of dependency – one where "slavery" is often regarded as having been "mild" or "non-economic".
   Taking dependency as a "total social fact" that impacts the whole political economy of "premodern" Asian societies, the Research Group potentially tackles any aspect and dimension of "slavery and dependency". Its primary concern nonetheless focuses on the exploration of institutions (legal, political and economic, as well as cultural, religious, and domestic), the various and often competing sets of norms and practices, and the circulations of dependent individuals, groups, and even norms and concepts, at various spatial levels (from the local to the transnational). In so doing, the Research Group is dedicated to the task of methodically deconstructing the structures of dependency throughout East Asia. 
2. By taking "East Asia" as its basic research unit the Research Group also aims at providing a substantial contribution to the writing of a new "grammar of dependency". Looking at dependency in Asia as a whole allows to de-compartmentalize entities (the changing, artificial, and plural constructions subsumed in contemporary nation-states) which shared strong conceptual and normative similarities, but also gave rise to highly divergent practices of dependency. Doing so therefore allows to play more broadly on scales, to initiate new comparisons, to explore regional interactions and global entanglements, etc. Moreover, looking at dependency from Asia provides an entry-point to decenter the perspective and to "provincialize" Western historical experiences. It also helps to question the relevance of the concepts and categories of human bondage we tend to regard as universal and encompassing by acknowledging that they are the specific products of historically situated contexts.

Therefore, the issue of the Research Group is to set aside the familiar binary frameworks – the "slavery—freedom" or "free—unfree" analytical pairs, the "West and the rest" comparative approach, or the "internal—external" choice in the translation process. We want to ask what these experiences and configurations have to say about the relevance, the singularity and universality of the West in the global history of dependency. Taking Asia as a center point also allows to engage in a dialogue with a wider variety of geographical areas and historical fields, a task which is crucial to the elaboration of a new "Grammar of dependency".