Friday Seminar with Mònica Ginés-Blasi

This week, Mònica Ginés-Blasi, Marie Sklodowska Curie Action Fellow at the Institut d’Asie Orientale of the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon (2022-24) and former BCDSS Fellow, will discuss her project “Trading Chinese Migrants: Networks of Human Trafficking in Treaty Port China (1830-1930s).” This presentation will suggest a comprehensive view of the so-called “coolie trade”, which was an international imperial enterprise central to the Western incursion in China, and it involved strong and peripheral Western nations alike, becoming the single most transversal item of interest of Western imperial colonialism in the nineteenth century. To support this wide understanding of the coolie trade, Mònica will focus on four case studies to challenge the established views in the historiography which situate the trade mostly in Latin America and the Caribbean, within a defined chronology – from 1847 to 1874 – and which portray “coolies” as mostly male and adult, as well as generically Chinese.