Frontiers in Late Imperial and Modern Asia: From Inner Mongolia to the East Asian Sea

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel Proposal Application

Abstract

This panel brings together scholars who are engaged in the reconstruction of frontier studies in late imperial and modern Asia. The panelists share the starting position that a frontier approach to the historical process in Asia is necessary. Owen Lattimore makes this concern vigorously central to his work, which highlights a variety of frontier interactions between the core of China and the farthest nomadic pastures. Summarizing his remarkable monograph "Inner Asian Frontiers of China" published 75 years ago, Lattimore argued that a frontier is not only a defined territorial boundary, but a spectra of variation that is tied to the organization of the territory and the economic activities of given populations. However, as nation-states took precedence in historical analysis in the past few decades, Lattimore’s nuanced depiction of frontier tended to be overshadowed by national histories, which follow national lines, that fail to capture the competing narratives on boundaries, the changing nature of frontiers over time, as well as the impacts of the transformations of the landscape and seascape on frontier regions. This panel seeks to give a new impulse to Lattimore's approach by exploring how frontiers not only evolved temporally, but how the very changing and contested nature of frontiers challenges received views of ethnic boundaries, territorial divisions, sea trade pattern, imperial expansion, as well as the conceptualization of ruling and governing.

Area of Study

• China and Inner Asia

Session Organizer

• Chung Yam Po, McGill University

Chair

• Helen F. Siu, Yale University

Individual Presentations

• Landscape Transformation on the Chinese Borderlands: The Shift from Pastoralism to Intensive Agriculture in Modern Eastern Inner Mongolia - Anne-Sophie Pratte, Harvard University

• The Lüsong Trade: Chinese Junks and Cross-Cultural Merchants in Eighteenth-Century Manila - Guillermo Ruiz-Stovel, University of California, Los Angeles

• Mapping the Maritime Frontier: A Study on the "Qisheng yanhai tu" in the Late Eighteenth Century - Chung Yam Po, McGill University

Discussant

• Loretta E Kim, The University of Hong Kong