Empire, Commerce and Mobility in Qing China's Southern Arc

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel Proposal Application

Abstract

Recent studies have examined in detail the breadth of commercial growth that occurred in late imperial China, 1500-1900. At the same time, many scholars have explored the Qing empire (1636-1912) and its expansion into borderland areas. Much attention has focused on Qing expansion into Central Eurasia during the eighteenth century, and, although a few path-breaking studies have combined an analysis of commercial growth with a focus on Qing empire-building, we still do not fully understand the relationship between merchants, markets, migrants, and empire. This panel brings together scholars who study the connections between mobile people, commerce and empire-building in the Qing empire’s “southern arc”: the borderlands from Amdo-Kham in the West, to the partially incorporated provinces of Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou, and Guangxi in the southwest. In these regions, the topography, climate, ethnic diversity, and social organization combined to present Qing empire-builders with fundamentally different challenges from the “northern arc” in Central Eurasia. To investigate commerce and empire in the “southern arc” is to enrich our understanding of the Qing empire and its legacies. How did commerce and geographical mobility intersect with imperial expansion in these regions? How did global commerce influence the historical development of communities in the “southern arc”? What did this mean for China in the twentieth century? By focusing our attention on mobility (state/commerce/human) in the “southern arc”, our papers hope to offer an alternative perspective to the prevailing “northern arc” paradigm that informs much of our current understanding of Qing imperial expansion.

Area of Study

• China and Inner Asia

Session Organizer

• John Herman, Virginia Commonwealth University

Individual Presentations

• The Bazi-based Transportation System and Extension of Mule Caravans on the Sino-Burmese Borderland: The Case of Zhaozhou in Western Yunnan - Jianxiong Ma, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

• The Incentives of Empire: Qing Officials and Land Reclamation Policy in the Southwest Prior to 1750. - John Herman, Virginia Commonwealth University

• Mountain Medicine: Migrants, Markets, and the State in the Nineteenth-Century Cassia Trade - Steven B. Miles, Washington University in St. Louis

• Yunnan’s Cosmopolitan Villagers: Merchants and Modernity in the Late-Qing and Republican Borderlands - Pat Giersch, Wellesley College

Discussant

• David Faure, The Chinese University of Hong Kong