Johanna S. Ransmeier. Sold People

In China, the emergence and persistence of human trafficking is deeply intertwined with the singular importance of the family. This is the centerpiece of Sold People, Johanna S. Ransmeier’s compelling new social history of five decades of human trafficking in North China, from the 1870s to the early 1930s. Ransmeier emphasizes the “transactional” (2) nature of Chinese families, which were built through a quintessential exchange of money for people, arrangements usually made through intermediary brokers. This was true regardless of class, whether a woman entered a family as a legitimate wife, a desired concubine, a lowly child-bride, or a serving maid, or whether she arrived at a brothel to work as a prostitute. To secure any of these female reproductive, sexual, or domestic services required the help of a matchmaker, who was also often a woman. The potential profit to be gained from human procurement meant that the practice often slid into murkier criminal territory, including kidnapping, coercion, entrapment, and outright violence.

China · Coercion (linguistics) · Criminology · Economics · Human trafficking · Management · Political science · Procurement · Profit (economics) · Sex trafficking · Sociology · Transactional sex · Wife · Demography · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies