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Don Wyatt. The Blacks of Premodem China. Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Encounters With Asia series. 198 pp. Maps. Photographs. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $65.00. Cloth.
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...