Disputes over Distance: Absentee Banner Masters, Far-Off Slaves, and Ownership Conflicts in 17th-Century Manchuria

This paper studies slavery in a post-migration society in Qing China ruled by the Manchus, a group of ethnic people coming from Northeast Asia who formed their socio-military institution called the Eight Banners. The research traces the aftermath of the Qing conquest of China proper: following the occupation of the former Ming capital Beijing in 1644, two million banner soldiers and their Han Chinese slaves moved from Manchuria to China proper. This relocation brought enslaved people a range of migratory experiences from relocation, returning, and escaping, to remaining. In particular, my paper deals with a set of legal disputes between absentee banner masters and their far-off slaves. After the trans-Great Wall migration in 1644, most banner masters relocated to Beijing, while some slaves remained in Manchuria to take care of landed property and ancestral graveyards. The long-distance relationship with their banner masters in Beijing created new possibilities for remaining slaves in Manchuria. Left-behind slaves outside the Great Wall enjoyed a certain level of autonomy in the absence of their masters, generating many legal disputes with their masters in Beijing. As legal evidence has demonstrated, conflicts centered around the property issue: masters charged their slaves based on the reason that the slaves took advantage of their absence, seized their household property, and even denied their slave status. Through examining legal cases involving masters and their slaves far afield, I argue that the new geographical relationship between masters and slaves was an important factor mapped onto the maintenance of the Manchu slavery institution.