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Book Reviews / Journal of Early Modern History 16 (2012) 81-94 87 Wyatt, Don J. Blacks in Premodern China (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 308 pp., $65.00, ISBN 978 0 812 24193 8. Don J. Wyatt’s new book explores the relations between China and east Africa prior to the coming of the Europeans to the South China Sea in the sixteenth century. Based on a synthesis of previous studies as well as his own readings of Chinese primary sources, Wyatt deals with three related topics—formation of the Chinese racial stereotype of Africans, African slavery in China, and the production of Chinese geographical knowledge of Africa. In so doing, this book offers the general and the academic audi- ence a coherent picture of a little known but nonetheless important part of global history “before European hegemony.” Wyatt’s points on the three topics converge into a rather striking argu- ment. That is, from the beginning of Sino-African relations in the Tang period, the institution of slavery and an almost racist thinking associated with it dominated the relations, although by the time of the coming of the Europeans in the sixteenth century, the Chinese practice of African slavery was discontinued, at least in historical records. Thus, Europeans bringing African slaves into South China did not represent the first introduction of African slavery into the world of the South China Sea, but merely a replace- ment of one form of black slavery with another. Chapter one traces the history of the name by which the Africans were called—Kunlun. Tracing the change of the connotations of the word Kunlun from the name of a mythical place to black-skinned people, espe- cially black slaves, Wyatt argues that the term began as a neutral if exotic label that increasingly acquired connotations of race and inferiority. Thus, Wyatt concludes, the Chinese had already associated blackness with slav- ery for several centuries before the Europeans brought African slaves with them to the South China Sea in the sixteenth century. Chapter two explores African slavery in South China’s port city, Guang- zhou, during the eleventh century, through a detailed analysis of an almost incidental record left by a Chinese gentry. Challenging the previous schol- arship that identifies these Kunlun slaves as Southeast Asian Malay “blacks” primarily owned by Arab merchants, Wyatt argues that they were in fact Africans owned by wealthy Chinese, who had originally hailed from Afri- ca’s east coast. In so doing, Wyatt suggests considering African slavery as a crucial part of the social and economic structure of South China. Chapter three investigates the evolution of Chinese geographical and ethnographic knowledge of Africa from the Tang period to the late Ming © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012 DOI: 10.1163/157006512X624137 88 Book Reviews / Journal of Early Modern History 16 (2012) 81-94 period. Examining Chinese travel writing on the Indian Ocean (in the traditional Chinese term, the Western Sea) that contained records on the eastern African coast, Wyatt shows that the initial fixation on black skin in the writings subsided as contact with the Africans in Southeast Asia increased. In addition, after the first direct Chinese exploration of Africa by the fifteenth-century Zheng He expedition, African slavery eventually disappeared from Chinese soil both as a economic reality and as a image associated with Africans due to the convergence of various developments. As a whole, Wyatt’s argument—even the central point that black slaves in Guangzhou were not Southeast Asians but Africans and that their own- ers were not Arab merchants but rich Chinese—is highly speculative and to that extent invites certain skepticism. However, given the paucity of the primary sources regarding the story, a speculative argument is probably the best thing Wyatt, or any other modern historian for that matter, can come up with. However, if one can suspend some skepticism for a moment, Wyatt’s argument that African slavery had already existed in China’s southern coast, experiencing a full cycle from formation to disappearance, even before black slavery in Europe and America began its cycle in the sixteenth century, is indeed provocative and intriguing. This is not least because if it could be proven that African slavery in South China existed on a substan- tial scale, it would provide an unmistakable parallel between Sino-African relations (from the seventh to fifteenth centuries) and early modern West- African relations. However, Wyatt unfortunately stops short of articulating what the implication of such a parallel would be for our understanding of a broader trajectory of premodern, or early modern, global history in maritime Asia. What was the role of African slavery within a broader economic and social structure of the maritime regional economy that included not only the South China coast but also Southeast Asia? Did the institution of African slavery in the regional economy play a similar role to slavery in the trans- Atlantic world? Or do we find a divergence? These inquiries are important ones that may open the possibilities of a new understanding of the global interconnectedness of the Asian maritime economy before the arrival of Europeans, which has been too often understood in terms of circulations of goods and specie but not through the circulation of human laborers. Indeed, the most striking point that Wyatt’s story of Chinese-African relations “before the Europeans” illuminates is that this was not a con- tained story of Chinese-African relations at all. The real protagonist was .

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