Trading Chinese Migrants: Networks of Human Trafficking in Treaty-Port China (1830-1930s)

Despite the excellent work of historians in the past three decades to provide a comprehensive history of the Chinese coolie trade, the trafficking of women and children remains still underrepresented.

This innovative project will use cutting-edge data technology to track, for the first time, the networks operating the trade in children, women, and male labourers in an integrative perspective.

It will trace how the private sector, such as intermediaries and companies, and the nations involved shaped the history of international forced migration in nineteenth-century China.

Relying on my supervisor's technical expertise, I will mobilize a wealth of quantifiable data accessible on international human transportation in the form of an openly available database to analyse and depict the systems connecting these various forms of bondage.

In the past four years as a postdoctoral researcher, I have collected an outstanding amount of data from unpublished multilingual source material, scattered in archives in Europe, Asia and America.

During the MSCA-PF, I will undertake further research in Cuba, the UK, France, Spain and Germany to gather the sources needed to complete the datasets and to publish the results in a monograph and a journal article.

The data collection will convey a novel contribution to the existing database project Exploring Slave Trade in Asia (ESTA), an international collaboration by the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) de Lyon, the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS) and Linnaeus University.

The database will be the structure for a future document preservation project to pursue in more advanced grants.

My training at the ENS and the BCDSS will strengthen my specialization as a sinologist, integrate me in state-of-the-art scholarship on Asian bondage, and equip me with the technical and academic abilities needed to boost my career prospects.