PMJS Publication Announcement: September 2025
Abigail MacBain
Dear colleagues,
Below please find our monthly bulletin compiling information on publications by and recommendations from PMJS members. All details below were submitted through the PMJS Publication Announcements online form.
Publication type: Book Chapter
Title: Whither Slavery? Decentring and Conceptual Asymmetries in the Study of Bondage in Early Modern Asia
Author: Rômulo Ehalt
Affiliation: Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, Researcher
Citation: Ehalt, R. (2025). Whither Slavery? Decentring and Conceptual Asymmetries in the Study of Bondage in Early Modern Asia. e-Journal of Portuguese History (published online ahead of print 2025). https://doi.org/10.1163/16456432-bja10010
Summary: This paper challenges traditional scholarship on slavery in Asia by decentring slavery as a solely European legal institution and examining its multifaceted forms of coercion and dependency within Asian contexts. By critiquing the conventional approach of equating Asian forms of bondage with the concept of slavery, it argues that such comparisons diminish the term’s nuanced meanings. The paper advocates for a provincialized understanding of slavery that recognizes the complex interactions between local labour practices and European colonial influences. Through an analysis of Iberian empires, particularly the role of Jesuit missionaries in Japan, this study calls for a broader investigation of labour relationships defined by violence in Asia. Moving beyond the conventional historiography of slavery, it seeks to deepen our understanding of the intricate dynamics between dependency and violence in the early modern period.
Release Date: 28 July 2025
DOI: 10.1163/16456432-bja10010
Contact:Ehalt, Rômulo romul...@gmail.com
Publication type: Book
Title: Soto kara mita Edo jidai no shoseki bunka/ The book culture of Edo-period Japan seen from afar
Author: Peter Kornicki
Affiliation: University of Cambridge, Professor
Publication details: Bensei Shuppan, 2025
Language: Japanese
Summary: The first three chapters are updated versions of articles published earlier, but the central five chapters constitute an extended and new examination of manuscript books in Edo-period Japan. I consider their typology, how and by whom they were produced, and why all readers handled manuscript books as well as printed books. My argument is that the labelling of the Edo period as a 'shuppan bunka' (print society) is misplaced, for in fact there were more manuscript books than printed books in circulation. Print is only part of the story: manuscript books offered much that printed books could not, including access to news, illicit information, local history, secret knowledge traditions, many of the writings of Ogyu Sorai and other thinkers, and much more.
Release Date: 30 July 2025
Website: https://bensei.jp/
Contact: Peter Kornicki pk...@cam.ac.uk
Publication type: Article
Title: 「戯作塵劫記」の諸相―時太郎可候（北斎）作画『胸中算用嘘店卸』を中心に―; The World of “Gesaku Jinkōki”: With a Focus on Tokitarō Kakō’s (Hokusai’s) Muna-zan’yō uso no tana oroshi
Author: Joseph Bills
Affiliation:Independent Researcher
Language: Japanese
Summary: This paper introduces the early modern corpus of texts known as “Gesaku Jinkōki”, i.e. those that parodied, mimicked, satirized or otherwise played with the mathematical textbook of the same name. It provides both an updated bibliography of these texts and interrogates the techniques authors used when turning a didactic textbook into an object of entertainment. In particular it focuses on one example of what I argue is a piece of “mathematical fiction”: Hokusai’s Muna zan’yō uso no tana oroshi. Alongside spotlighting an unusual example of Hokusai’s prose, this analysis shows how literature and mathematics combined in early modern Japan, reframing Jinkōki and its reception as a whole.
Release Date: July 2025
Website:http://www.kinseibungakukai.com/doc/kinseibungei.html
Contact:Joseph Bills; jab...@cantab.ac.uk
To recommend a title for the October announcement, please fill out the online form no later than September 30. Submissions can be submitted by authors themselves or by PMJS members who are eager to share other scholars’ recent publications.
For any questions or comments on the submission format, please contact Abigail MacBain (abigail...@ed.ac.uk). Note: Please do not email requesting a publication to be posted; only those submitted through the above form will be listed.