Mònica Ginés Blasi (Incoming Fellow 2024-25)

Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Fellow, Institut d’Asie Orientale, ENS de Lyon

During her time at SCAS as a Barbro Klein Fellow 2024–2025, Dr Ginés Blasi will work on the project
 “Concealing Intermediaries: Global Networks of Chinese Indenture and Human Traffic (1830–1930s)”,
which will provide a new methodology to overcome the much-debated binary opposition ‘slavery versus
freedom’ in global labour history. This project focuses on the international networks of intermediaries
handling the global trade in Chinese migrants – particularly, on the role of intermediaries as ‘concealing
agents’, who either invisibilized others or concealed their own obscure activities from their contemporaries.
Drawing from an interdisciplinary approach which brings together global, economic and social history,
social sciences and Chinese studies, and leaning on multilingual source material, this project will throw
new light into the entanglements between different forms of labour coercion.