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Podcast: New Books in Medieval History
Episode: Don J. Wyatt, "Slavery in East Asia" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
Description: Today I talked to Don J. Wyatt about his book Slavery in East Asia (Cambridge UP, 2022).In premodern China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, just as in the far less culturally cohesive countries composing the West of the Middle Ages, enslavement was an assumed condition of servitude warranting little examination, as the power and profits it afforded to the slaver made it a convention pursued unreflectively. Slavery in medieval East Asia shared with the West the commonplace assumption that nearly all humans were potential chattel, that once they had become owned beings, they could then be either sold or...