The project was focused on a very specific question: the participation of European religious members in a largely understudied local network of movement of Chinese girls across the South China Sea. The study of this phenomenon has made three crucial contributions to the field. Firstly, it has contributed to the creation of a new history of early modern Christianity in China by (1) demonstrating the purchase of children in the slave market by Mendicants to later be raised in the Christian faith or sent as domestic servants; (2) assessing the transformation of the evangelization project in the mission field which combined ideas of charity, humanity, profit and pragmatism (3) demonstrating the existence a missionary culture of collaboration between members of all religious orders overcoming the traditional perspective of reading the Chinese mission through the Chinese Rites Controversy (4) providing the first quantitative approximation and gender-aware approach to this phenomenon; and (5) attesting for the creation of a mission network between Canton, Macao and Manila. Secondly, UNSILENCE project has advanced in the identification of the multiple forms of dependency by (1) incorporating completely unknown “small slaveries” in cross-Pacific networks overcoming the Atlantic-centered perspective in slavery studies; (2) understanding the complex reasons behind actions of infanticide, abandonment and exposure that help us to explain the mechanisms of dependencies behind situations of coercion; and (3) contributing to the understanding of local dynamics in the South China Sea that affected the Christian sociability in those areas. This new approach challenges traditional associations between Chinese Confucian culture and female infanticide and help us to add nuance to a multifaceted reality. Thirdly, this project has helped to reconsider the frontiers in South Asia, and in the Iberian Empires in Asia by (1) adding new elements to ongoing debates on the construction of identity, agency and intercultural encounters in the big South China Sea (2) questioning the traditional idea that ideas, knowledges, or norms in Asia were produced and systematically imposed by central authorities such as the Emperors, the Roman authorities, the officials, or the Iberian Monarchies’ mandates, and, on the contrary propose missionaries, nuns, merchants, and captain’s agency as the creators of new social, political, or legal outcomes to be implemented in the field (3) moving the focus of law from the centre of empire towards its peripheries overcoming the traditional idea of law tied to the metropolitan image of empire and demonstrating that law in the Ancient Regime incorporated different normative textual traditions not only from the centre but also from the so-called peripheries; (4) and discussing about the role of missionaries, Propaganda Fide, and the Spanish crown in a context of competition between the universalism of the Church and the defence of the Royal Patronage’s rights by Iberian monarchies in Asia.
From the dissemination point of view, UNSILENCE has decisively contributed to explain to a general public how missionaries, captains, girls, or nun’s actions and networks help us to understand today’s sensitivities towards poverty and exclusion, and call to action to end trafficking and violence against women and children, as stated by United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda (1. No poverty; 5. Gender equality).
