Strange Articulations: The Many Economies of Slavery in Mainland Southeast Asia, Mid-18th to Mid-19th Centuries

Discussing slavery in Southeast Asia requires pluralization unnecessary in the Atlantic World context because ‘unfreedom’ took multiple forms with many and varied economic roles. We must speak of slaveries—war captives, debt slaves, and corvée labor—and economies. In the mainland, slavery was mostly disconnected from commodity production. Rather, unfree labor was often attached to producing social capital, work enhancing the symbolic and sacral power of the elite, or infrastructure projects. For this reason, slavery was peculiarly articulated to changes in the global economy. For example, the global forces that accelerated intra-Asian trade, c.1780-1840, also increased state power and promoted centralization. The result, regional conflicts that increased war captivity. Industrialization’s twin effects, greater European penetration into Southeast Asia and increases in global commodity production, stimulated declines in slavery. European territorial gains boxed in Thai and Burmese expansionism, unintentionally ending war slavery. Near simultaneously, expanding imperial networks increased Thai access to Chinese migrant labor. Corvée declined as a result, and Chinese laborers, not slaves, were employed to exploit commodities like tin and sugar. The same global economic forces that produced the Atlantic’s ‘second slavery’ had surprisingly different results in Southeast Asia.