Chenxi Luo

This book is a study on the history of booi slavery—household slavery—in Qing China. It investigates the lived experiences of about one million Han Chinese men and women enslaved under Manchu households in the seventeenth century. This project employs the concept of “intimate others” to examine the social relationship between Han slaves and Manchu masters at the power nexuses of ethnicity, gender, and status. The book argues that enslaved Han people were important players during the hegemonic rise of the Qing regime, who manufactured their hybrid identity, mediated between two ethnic hostile groups, and negotiated the institutional, social, and cultural boundaries between the conquerors and conquered in early Qing China.