Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study
Sweden
fellow
Mònica Ginés Blasi
2024-2025
Home institution
Institut d’Asie Orientale, ENS de Lyon
Country of origin (home institution)
France
Discipline(s)
Modern history; Social and economic history
Theme(s)
Labor, Capital & Innovation; Migration; Regional Studies
Fellowship dates
›
Biography
Mònica Ginés Blasi is a labour historian specialised in Chinese global labour migration and debt bondage in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her research focuses on the international networks that operated Chinese indentured labour migration and child and women trafficking in treaty-port China and beyond. She is particularly interested in the role of intermediaries and the invisibilization of people, knowledge and ideas in history and historiography. She has carried out research as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institut d’Asie Orientale (IAO), ENS de Lyon (2022–2024) and has received numerous research grants, such as a Heinz Heinen Kolleg Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS), a Gerda Henkel Foundation Scholarship
(2019–2021), and a Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship (2017–2019).
She is currently working on two monographs on Chinese indenture and labour migration to Latin America and Southeast Asia. Among her recent publications, she has edited a volume on invisibilization and concealment in Asian history and historiography (De Gruyter) and delved into specific case studies on the trafficking of girls and Chinese labour migrants to Cuba, Southeast Asia and treaty-port China in several articles and edited book chapters.
Research Project
Consuls as Intermediaries of Chinese Indenture: An Integrating Perspective of Diverse Coerced Migration Systems (1830-1940)
etween 1830 and 1940, about 23 million Chinese left their country to be put to work across the globe, often under coerced conditions. The historiography of Chinese migration has suffered from almost complete compartmentalization and has often perceived these different migration systems as separate – even in the work of global labour historians. In her work Blasi provides a desegregated perspective of Chinese migration by pinpointing its entanglements and parallelisms with diverse forms of labour im/mobilization and exploitation. The organization of Chinese migration became an international imperial enterprise central to the Western incursion in China, and it involved strong and peripheral Western nations alike, becoming the single most transversal item of interest of Western imperial colonialism in the nineteenth century. The project investigates the actors that shaped and intervened in these overseas migration systems, and particularly identifies foreign consular staff and government officials as labour intermediaries. Her research demonstrates that they not only had an active role as creators of labour markets but were also central connectors of diverse global migration systems.
Research Interests:
labour history; historiography; Chinese global labour migration; debt bondage; nineteenth century; early twentieth century; intermediaries; international networks; Chinese indentured labour migration; child trafficking; women trafficking; Latin America; Southeast Asia; human trading