History Research Seminar Series: ‘My Father Sold Me’: Listening to the Voices of Enslaved Girls in Republican China

Dr Isabella Jackson (Trinity College Dublin) 

‘My Father Sold Me’: Listening to the Voices of Enslaved Girls in Republican China 

Abstract

In republican China (1912-1949), it was common practice for poor parents to sell daughters to wealthy families via middlemen for unpaid domestic labour. Being female, poor, cut off from their natal families, and performing menial work, these were some of the lowest status and most vulnerable children in society. Yet the voices of a small number of such girls speak from police records, newspaper reports, oral history records and memoirs, while many more remain voiceless. By examining what they said, we gain new insights into their own understanding of their lives. And by interrogating why some could not speak, we reveal how age dictated who enjoyed personhood under the law and in the public realm.

Speaker Biography

Dr Isabella Jackson is Assistant Professor in Chinese History at Trinity College Dublin. She is Principal Investigator on the project, CHINACHILD: Slave-Girls and the Discovery of Female Childhood in Twentieth-Century China, which is funded by an Irish Research Council Laureate Grant. Together with a team of researchers, she is researching how controversies over keeping unpaid domestic servants (binü婢女 or mui tsai) reflect changing and expanding conceptions of Chinese childhood. Dr Jackson’s previous publications focus on the global and regional networks that shaped the treaty ports, which were opened to foreign traders by force in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including her monograph, Shaping Modern Shanghai: Colonialism in China’s Global City (Cambridge University Press, 2017), and her work on interconnections between China and the British World, especially her research on Sikh policemen who worked in the Settlement. She is also editor (with Robert Bickers) of Treaty Ports in Modern China: Law, Land and Power (Routledge, 2016).

Registration

To attend, please register at: https://forms.office.com/r/4xyESpkWNw

This event will take place online, via Zoom: https://nuigalway-ie.zoom.us/j/99212470960.