While there are large literatures on both Islamic slave soldiers and the phenomenon of “arming slaves” in the Atlantic world, military slavery in early modern Asia is still poorly understood. Using a variety of Chinese, Latin, Spanish, and Portuguese sources, this article will argue that enslaved labour was frequently directed towards violence across early modern Asia, colonial or otherwise. At the same time, the phenomenon was far from uniform in the vast expanse of land and sea between East Africa and Japan. Rather, it is better to speak of a series of analogous regimes of bondage that interacted with each other across large distances, with the line between enslaved soldiers, mercenaries, and run-of-the-mill trader-raiders being vanishingly thin at times. Finally, all this existed within the context of military infrastructure in the broadest sense of the word that included fortresses, factories, and even war elephants.

尽管有大量关于伊斯兰奴隶兵和大西洋世界“武装奴隶”现象的文献，但现代早期亚洲的军事奴隶制仍然知之甚少。本文使用各种中文、拉丁文、西班牙文和葡萄牙文资料，论证在现代早期的亚洲，无论是殖民地还是其他地区，奴役劳工经常被导向暴力。与此同时，在东非和日本之间广阔的陆地和海洋中，这种现象也很不统一。相反，更好的说法是一系列类似的奴役制度，这些制度在远距离上相互作用，被奴役的士兵、雇佣兵和普通的商人掠夺者之间的界限有时微乎其微。最后，所有这一切都存在于最广泛意义上的军事基础设施的背景下，包括堡垒、工厂，甚至战象。