The International Trafficking of Chinese Children and its Conflicting Legalities in Mid-Nineteenth Century Treaty-Port China

This article focuses on the international trafficking of Chinese little girls taking as a point of departure a single shipment from Ningbo in the British vessel Inglewood. The story of the Inglewood helps connect the trafficking of children to other forms of human trade coexisting in mid-nineteenth century China which have usually been studied separately, namely, with the trafficking of women and the international circulation of male adult indentured labourers to Latin America and to Southeast Asia. Despite the outstanding work of historians on the trafficking of indentured labourers to Latin America, the variables of age and gender still remain understudied. This article suggests an entangled perspective of this trade to other forms of human trafficking while identifying the international legal conditions behind their development and prosecution. Based on a variety of multilingual sources, this article traces how different legal structures intersecting in mid-nineteenth century China facilitated webs of heterogeneous human trade connecting southeast China, Southeast Asia and the Atlantic.