Slavery in Asia

[4] The markets for these captives were often in Arabia and Afghanistan; "most of the slave girls employed as domestics in the houses of the gentry at Kandahar were brought from the outlying districts of Ghayn".

In Lower Badakshan, and more distant places, the price of slaves is much enhanced, and payment is made in coin.Amanullah Khan banned slavery in Afghanistan in the 1923 Constitution,[9] but the practice carried on unofficially for many more years.

[10] The Swede Aurora Nilsson, who lived in Kabul from 1926 to 1927, described the occurrence of slavery in Kabul in her memoirs,[11] as well as how a German woman, the widow of an Afridi man named Abdullah Khan, who had fled to the city with her children from her late husband's successor, was sold at public auction and obtained her freedom by being bought by the German embassy for 7,000 marks.

Polities of different sizes and structures such as nomadic confederations,[12] agrarian city-states,[13] and empires[14] all engaged in and at various times promoted the enslavement and trade of people and the exploitation of their labor.

As an area with diverse ethnic, linguistic, and religious demographic, the people who were enslaved and traded in Central Asia came from a variety of backgrounds and spoke many different languages.

For example, Daylam, the northwestern regions of Iran, Gur in central Afghanistan, the Eurasian steppe, and India had long been targeted by Muslim polities for slave raids.

In the Pahlavi Book of a Thousand Judgements, the word tan (body), designates a person who loans oneself or one's relative for a specific period of time to a debtor or creditor as security for a debt.

However, sale contracts indicate that poverty, famine, and other unfortunate circumstances often compelled individuals to sell or loan themselves, their children, and other relatives.

[22] In one recorded case, a man sold his daughter and son in order to raise funds to pay for his father's funeral.

[24] During the first half of the 19th century alone, some one million Persians, as well as an unknown number of Russians, were enslaved and transported to Central Asian khanates.

In the Abbasid empire, the establishment of the Mamluk institution created the preference and demand for young, Turkic male slaves due to their supposedly superior military strength.

After the Southern and Northern Dynasties, due to years of poor harvests, the influx of foreign tribes, and the resulting wars, the number of slaves exploded.

They always had a low social status, and even if they were deliberately murdered, the perpetrators received only a year in prison, and were punished even when they reported the crimes of their lords.

Malays, Khmers, Indians, Negritos, and black Africans were also purchased as slaves in the Tang dynasty[43] during the exchange of the Silk Road.

[44] According to Japanese historians Sugiyama Masaaki (杉山正明) and Funada Yoshiyuki (舩田善之), there were also certain numbers of Mongolian slaves owned by Han Chinese during the Yuan dynasty.

Moreover, there is no evidence that the Han Chinese, who were considered to rank at the bottom of Yuan society by some research, were subjected to particularly cruel abuse.

In his book China Marches West, Peter C. Perdue stated: "In 1624(After Nurhachi's invasion of Liaodong) "Chinese households....while those with less were made into slaves.

I remember instances of parents, rendered destitute by the marauding bands who invested the two southern Kwangs in 1854–55, offering to sell their daughters in Canton for five dollars apiece.

It is a common thing for well-to-do people to present a couple of slave girls to a daughter as part of her marriage dowery [sic].

[66][67][68] The early Arab invaders of Sind in the 8th century, the armies of the Umayyad commander Muhammad bin Qasim, are reported to have enslaved tens of thousands of Indian prisoners, including both soldiers and civilians.

[71][72] Later, following his twelfth expedition into India in 1018–1019, Mahmud is reported to have returned with such a large number of slaves that their value was reduced to only two to ten dirhams each.

This unusually low price made, according to Al-Utbi, "merchants [come] from distant cities to purchase them, so that the countries of Central Asia, Iraq and Khurasan were swelled with them, and the fair and the dark, the rich and the poor, mingled in one common slavery".

Provisions of the Indian Penal Code of 1861 effectively abolished slavery in India by making the enslavement of human beings a criminal offense.

[78][79][80][81] There are an estimated five million bonded workers in Pakistan, even though the government has passed laws and set up funds to eradicate the practice and rehabilitate the laborers.

"Seiko" from historical theories are thought to be as prisoner, slave, a person who has technical skill and also students studying abroad to China.

[94] In the 19th and early 20th centuries, there was a network of Japanese prostitutes being trafficked across Asia, in countries such as China, Japan, Korea, Singapore and India, in what was then known as the 'Yellow Slave Traffic'.

According to a joint study by historians including Zhifen Ju, Mitsuyoshi Himeta, Toru Kubo and Mark Peattie, more than 10 million Chinese civilians were mobilized by the Kōa-in (Japanese Asia Development Board) for forced labour.

Slaves were prohibited from wearing bronze or gold, carving their houses, eating from the same dishes as their owners, or having sex with free women—a crime punishable by death.

"[126] Industries with major problems with human trafficking and forced labor in Southeast Asia include fisheries, agriculture, manufacturing, construction and domestic work.

[126] The child sex trade has also plagued southeast Asia, where "[m]ost sources agree that far more than 1 million underage children are 'effectively enslaved'" as of 2006.