Scholarship on slavery and slave trading in Asia is a scarce commodity in a field of study dominated by research on the Americas and Africa. Studies of European involvement with Chinese, Japanese, and Korean slaves are even rarer, a historiographic reality that makes Lúcio de Sousa's work on the Portuguese slave trade in Japan during the early modern era a welcome addition to our knowledge about slavery in East Asia and the nature and dynamics of the global traffic in chattel labor in which Europeans engaged between the early sixteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries.

This volume, the seventh in Brill's Studies in Global Slavery series, begins with a short introduction that includes brief discussions of existing scholarship on slave trading in Asia, the terminology that can complicate attempts to reconstruct the Portuguese trade in Asian slaves, and the book's structure. The first three chapters examine the Portuguese involvement with Chinese, Japanese, and Korean slaves during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Chapters 4 and 5 focus, respectively, on the Portuguese trade's reorganization during the early seventeenth century and the structure of Portuguese slavery in Japan. A sixth chapter reconstructs the life histories of individual Chinese and Japanese slaves, while chapter 7 explores the Japanese diaspora to Macao, the Philippines, Goa, Mexico, Peru, Argentina, and Portugal. Chapter 8, which examines Japanese slavery and Iberian legislation during this era, is followed by a brief conclusion that seeks to summarize the book's principal findings.

This volume has a number of commendable qualities, foremost of which is the impressive body of research upon which it rests. De Sousa draws on documents housed in no fewer than twenty-three different archives in Japan, Macao, Mexico, Peru, Portugal, Spain, and Vatican City. His careful examination of these sources and the richness of the information he has extracted from them is readily apparent in his meticulous reconstructions of the activities in which various persons engaged, and the detailed and extensive tables he includes in the text. Tables 2.1, 3.1, and 4.4, to cite especially noteworthy examples, include the kind of information about individual Chinese, Indian, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, and even Mozambican slaves—their names; gender; country of origin; date of birth and death; residence in various locales; owner, marital, and legal status; profession; and personal biography—that will make any historian of slavery envious. Equally impressive is the author's willingness to draw on a large body of published scholarship in English, French, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish, as he reconstructs Portuguese activity in early modern Japan.

These qualities make de Sousa's study an important resource that scholars working on slavery and slaving in East Asia will mine for many years to come. So, too, will those interested in slave trading in and beyond the wider Indian Ocean world. Sadly, however, de Sousa's attempt to wed micro- and macro-history to reconstruct Portuguese activity in early modern Japan is less successful, since he fails to contextualize his research and discussions as fully as he might have done. While he notes, for example, that scholarship on Japanese slavery and its diaspora during the second half of the sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth centuries does not exist, it remains unclear how his study contributes to the history of slavery in general, not only in Japan but also in China and Korea, both of which supplied slaves to the Japanese market. Similar shortcomings plague his discussions of other topics that need to be discussed in more fully developed local, regional, pan-regional, and comparative contexts: debt slavery, Jewish involvement in slave trading, slave confraternities, Asian slaves in Portugal and elsewhere in Europe, the Jesuit presence in Asia, and the ways in which Portuguese activity in Japan illuminates how and why the Éstado da India functioned the way that it did. This problem, made manifest in the detailed, sometimes numbingly so, narrative approach that de Sousa adopts in much of his book stems, at least in part, from his apparent reluctance to let any of the archival riches he has uncovered remain hidden from view. The net result is, unfortunately, a failure to see the forest for the trees, a failure that deprives us of an opportunity to deepen our understanding of the complex human experience with bonded and coerced labor, especially in Asia, in even more meaningful ways.