Zoom-Link: https://univienna.zoom.us/j/65470650042?pwd=KOhSKVFwb0aIkBuXSeMwOkzdaYYTbP.1
Meeting-ID: 654 7065 0042 | Kenncode: 218011
In the history of global labour migration, intermediaries are essential pieces in the circulation of information and of people, actively shaping migration flows. In this presentation, I expand the concept of intermediaries to include consuls in treaty-port China – merchant-consuls, general consuls, vice-consuls, and other consular staff – who operated alongside other intermediaries, such as brokers, and sometimes acting as immigration agents themselves. Focusing on their roles and social networks, I examine how these actors facilitated the international organization of Chinese indentured migration and related coerced labour systems along the nineteenth-century southeast China coast. Using a global micro-historical approach centred on Western merchant-consuls and immigration agents, I highlight the transnational and multifaceted nature of intermediaries in coerced labour migration. In particular, I show how they strategically leveraged regulatory loopholes across overlapping legal frameworks. Aligning with recent studies on brokers in contemporary labour markets, my research argues that intermediaries were not merely facilitators of labour relations but active creators of migration systems, shaping and commercializing labour markets.
Mònica Ginés Blasi is a labour historian specialised in Chinese global labour migration and debt bondage in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
