RCCS is co-hosting this talk with Global Medieval Studies.
Description
During the age of their intersecting eras of medievalism, from approximately the years 500 to 1500 of the Common Era, both China and Europe, after having maintained entrenched systems of enslavement for centuries, witnessed incipiencies presaging what we can think of as our modern conception of abolitionism. Moreover, in the Chinese case, surprising intimations along abolitionist lines are discernible even as early as the immediate centuries prior to what corresponds to Western late antiquity (CE 150-750). Oftentimes, whether in China or in Europe, what we find expressed in this vein in the records is less anti-slavery sentiment in the abstract than an objection to illegal enslavement—in other words, incredulous resentment that a free person has somehow incurred the fall into bondage. To be sure, such attitudes retarded the development of authentic abolitionist thinking, such that—at least as it arose in Europe as well as in the Americas—abolitionism, as a full-fledged movement opposed to ensconced conventions of slavery, was largely the product of only as recently as the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Arguably, in China, it would be delayed even longer. Yet, this comparably shared deferment notwithstanding, abolitionism as a mindset in West and in China is perhaps always thought of as having stemmed from different impetuses. Upon analysis, we find that these contributing factors of difference in themselves elicit numerous consequential questions, with not the least of these being whether true abolitionism everywhere and always necessitates a moral imperative or, at the very least, an ethical component.
Bio
Don Wyatt (A.B. Beloit; A.M., Ph.D. Harvard) has taught at Middlebury College since 1986. Most of his courses are cross-listed with Philosophy. He specializes in the intellectual history of China, with research most currently focused on the intersections of identity and violence and the nexuses of ethnicity and slavery. He is the author of The Blacks of Premodern China, the past editor of the Journal of Song-Yuan Studies, and the former concurrent president of its Society for Song, Yuan, and Conquest Dynasties Studies. During successive sabbaticals in 2004 and 2010, he was in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Among his most recent publications are chapter essays in the medieval volumes of both the Cambridge World History of Violence and the Cambridge History of Slavery as well as in Slavery and Bonded Labor in Asia, 1250-1900. Articles have recently appeared the Journal of Religion and Violence and in Mediaevalia as well as in Itinerario and China and Asia: A Journal in Historical Studies. His latest books are the Cambridge Element in the Global Middle Ages series, Slavery in East Asia, and the shortly forthcoming, Song China and the World. He is co-executive editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas, chair of the newly established Diversity and Equity Committee of the Association for Asian Studies, and a mentor of early career award recipients for the Luce/ACLS China Studies Mentoring Project.