AHL 1100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Night Soil, Labour Power, Fictive Kinship

• School: University of Ottawa
• Department: Interdisciplinary Study in Arts
• Course: AHL 1100
• Professor: Eric Allina, Meredith Terretta, Jan Grabowski

Document Summary

Slavery was not wrong because people hurt slaves, slavery doesn"t have to be cruel. Violence and cruelty is incidental but not essential to slavery. The practical problem with slavery is that the history and sources for slavery were not written/created by slaves. The emperor ruled via a very well developped state (courts, military, beurocracy). Slavery was a state concern and in some respects the state depended on slavery and regulated it. Slavery was not a total loss of personhood. The idea of freedom did not exist, people had mant obligations and claims (no strong autonomy). The idea of freedom in the west emerged as a reaction to peoples reaction to slavery. This prayer illustrated the different kinds of work which slaves engaged in, but not the full spectrum. Different kinds of slaves would do different work. Slavery was also important to the state and qing was a conquest state and had been expanding since the beginning.