Category Archives: Central Asia

Thursday, May 3rd: Mark Frank “A Land ‘Without History to Speak of’: The Rise (and Fall and Rise) of Xikang Province”

Mark Frank

PhD Candidate in East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

” A Land ‘Without History to Speak of’: The Rise (and Fall and Rise) of Xikang Province”

Thursday May 3rd, 4:00-6:00 PM

John Hope Franklin Room [SSR 224]

Discussant: Kenneth Pomeranz, University Professor of Modern Chinese History and in the College, University of Chicago

Please join the East Asia: Transregional Histories workshop in welcoming Mark Frank as he presents a draft of his dissertation chapter, titled “A Land ‘Without History to Speak of’: The Rise (and Fall and Rise) of Xikang Province.” He has provided the following abstract:

In 1939 the Republic of China fixed borders around the Kham region of eastern Tibet and declared it to be “Xikang Province”. This chapter chronicles the rise of that province as the hybrid outcome of an enduring political vision and a convoluted series of historical accidents. Sichuan officials first conceived of converting the Kham region into a province named Xikang (Kham-in-the-west) after the murder of a Qing imperial representative there in 1905, but their provincial project was derailed by the Chinese revolution of 1911. The notion of a potential Xikang Province circulated in Chinese discourse for decades, even as warlords battled the Tibetan army and each other for control of the Kham region. Chinese writers floated all manner of fantastical ideas about Xikang—that it was a vast virgin waste whose development would “benefit the country and enrich the people”; that it could be a springboard for the liberation of India from British rule, or a last bastion against Japanese invasion. The eventual founding of Xikang Province was a marriage of convenience between the wartime desires of the Nationalist government and those of the embattled warlord Liu Wenhui. In spite of very disparate notions of what Xikang should look like and what it meant for China, this essay contends that the fantasy of colonizing it with Han farmers persisted from the last years of the Qing through its eventual founding, and beyond.

 

Mark’s Paper can be found in the post below.

As always, first-time attendees are welcome. Light refreshments and snacks will be served. If you have any questions or require assistance to attend, please contact Robert Burgos at rburgos@uchicago.edu or Spencer Stewart at sdstewart@uchicago.edu.

Friday, October 27th: Scott Relyea “‘A Fence on Which We Can Rely’: Asserting Sovereignty in Early Twentieth Century Southwest China”

Scott Relyea

Assistant Professor, Appalachian State University

‘A Fence on Which We Can Rely’: Asserting Sovereignty in Early Twentieth Century Southwest China

Friday, October 27th, 4:00-6:00 PM

John Hope Franklin Room [SSR 224]

Discussant: Tian Yuan, PhD Student, University of Chicago History Department

Please Join the East Asia: Transregional Histories Workshop in welcoming Scott Relyea [Appalachian State University] as he presents one of his current works-in-progress. Titled “Indigenzing International Law in Early Twentieth Century China: Sovereignty in the Sino-Tibetan Borderland,” Professor Relyea provides the following abstract:

This paper analyses the introduction of international law into China during the Qing Dynasty’s last decades and the first few years of the Republic of China. It explores the influence of two international law texts, the translation Wanguo gongfa (The Public Law of All States), published in Beijing in 1864, and perhaps the first indigenously written international law text in China, Gongfa daoyuan (The Origins of International Law), published in Chengdu around 1899. Building on scholarship exploring the global circulation of knowledge, which focuses largely on political and intellectual centres, this research offers an alternative perspective from the borderlands of Asia, from the interstices of global power where states and empires met and were transformed by the norms and principles of international law, especially territoriality and sovereignty. I argue that local Qing officials overseeing the Kham borderland of eastern Tibet during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries adopted the conceptual basis of international law, whereas central Qing government officials were slow to do so. It was in such contentious borderlands that theoretical claims to sovereignty under international law intersected with the actual exercise of authority, where Sichuan Province officials, influenced by these two texts, adapted the norm of territorial sovereignty to both exert and assert absolute Qing authority in Kham as a stepping stone toward the whole of Tibet. During these tumultuous years in China’s transition from imperial to state form, the actions and successes of these borderland officials in Kham fostered a more thorough adoption and application of international law principles by central government officials, especially during the first years of the Republic of China. This manifest in Republican Chinese negotiators referring to these actions in Kham as substantiation for appeal to the international law principle of ‘effective occupation’ at the Simla Conference (1913-14).

Professor Relyea’s paper can be found at the post below

As always, first-time attendees are welcome. Light refreshments and snacks will be served. This event is Co-Sponsored with the East Asia Workshop.

If you have any questions or require assistance to attend, please contact Spencer Stewart at sdstewart@uchicago.edu or Robert Burgos at rburgos@uchicago.edu

Thursday, October 19th : Kyle Gardner “Communication: Roads, Regulation and British Joint Commissioners”

Kyle Gardner

PhD Candidate, University of Chicago

“Communication: Roads, Regulation and British Joint Commissioners” Along the Hindustan-Tibet Road and Leh-Yarkand Treaty Road

Thursday, October 19th 3:00-5:00 PM

John Hope Franklin Room [SSR 224]

Discussant: Usama Rafi, University of Chicago History Department

Please join the East Asia: Transregional Histories Workshop as we welcome our own Kyle Gardner, who will be presenting a draft chapter titled “Communication: Roads, Regulation and British Joint Commissioners” from his dissertation. This chapter explores the particular histories of the Hindustan-Tibet Road and Leh-Yarkand Treaty Road from the mid 19th century onward, considering their development as regulatory mechanisms of empire as well as their status as means of both conveyance and restriction along the frontier.

Kyle’s Paper can be found in the post below.

As always, first-time attendees are welcome. Light refreshments and snacks will be served. If you have any questions or require assistance to attend, please contact Robert Burgos at rburgos@uchicago.edu or Spencer Stewart at sdstewart@uchicago.edu.

 

WED 11/30 5 PM : Kyle Gardner

Kyle Gardner

University of Chicago

“The Space Between: Trade, Cosmology, and Modes of Seeing in Independent Ladakh”

WED, Nov. 30th 5:00-7:00 PM

John Hope Franklin Room, SSR 224

Discussants:

Matthew Lowenstein, University of Chicago History Department

Please join us for Kyle Gardner’s presentation of a chapter from his dissertation on Wednesday, November 30th at 4 PM in the John Hope Franklin Room (SSR 224). In addition to providing historical background of the making and demise of Ladakh (a region in the northwest Himalayan mountain range), “The Space Between: Trade, Cosmology and Modes of Seeing in Independent Ladakh” explores how four indigenous modes of viewing space–cosmological, political, linguistic, and material–created multiple modes of seeing that space.

Kyle’s paper can be accessed through at the East Asia: Transregional Histories workshop website. The password is “cosmology”

As always, first-time attendees are welcome. Light refreshments and snacks will be served.

If you have any questions or require assistance to attend, please contact Jessa Dahl at jdahl@uchicago.edu or Erin Newton at emnewton@uchicago.edu.

Thursday Nov 17 at 4PM : Liping Wang

Liping Wang

Assistant Professor, University of Hong Kong

“Legal Pluralism or Jurisdictional Nexuses: The Transformation of Jurisdictional Boundaries in China-Inner Mongolia, 1900-1930”

Thursday, November 17 4:00-6:00 PM

John Hope Franklin Room, (SSR 224)

Discussant:

Yuan Tian (PhD Student, Department of History)

The East Asia: Transregional Histories workshop is delighted to host Professor Liping Wang of the University of Hong Kong next Thursday, November 17. Please see the below abstract for the work.

“This presentation comes from one chapter in my book under work. In this chapter, historical examples from eastern Inner Mongolia will illustrate the hazy jurisdictional boundaries between Mongol banners and Han Chinese migrant communities, a structure that formed under the Qing Empire. Multiple frontier agents, including banner nobles, civilian county magistrates, frontier governors, and local representatives of Lifan yuan, all participated in judicial processes that sometimes involved Mongols and sometimes mixed ethnic groups. Frontier legal jurisdiction was therefore not a whole cloth. Frontier agents, who represented the state or the local Mongolian interests to varying degrees, diversified the expression of legal authority. This structure evokes the question: can we conceptualize the multiple legal orders operating/cooperating in the Qing Empire as a case of legal pluralism? Legal pluralism is a term introduced in colonial studies and reformulated to stress the multiplicity of legal practices in empires as opposed to the legal uniformity characterizing nation-states. Moreover, these rather diversified legal jurisdictions in the frontier were being shattered in the early twentieth century. System decay started with the transformation of Lifan yuan, which destabilized the balance between different agents, and triggered their competitions to augment their respective jurisdictional scopes. Based upon a variety of sources (including the official memorials, local gazetteers, the archives of the Department of Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs, and sources collected from the Archives of the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region), this chapter pinpoints the most important changes that transformed the frontier jurisdictional divisions, which directly propelled the formation of confrontational ethnic relationship in China-Inner Mongolia in the early 20th century.”

As always, first-time attendees are welcome. Light refreshments and snacks will be served.

If you have any questions or require assistance to attend, please contact Jessa Dahl at jdahl@uchicago.edu or Erin Newton at emnewton@uchicago.edu.

Frontiers Across Eurasia: A Faculty Forum — October 13, 4:00 PM

Please join the East Asia: Transregional Histories Workshop for our first meeting of the Fall Quarter.

Frontiers Across Eurasia: A Faculty Forum

Thursday, October 13, 4:00 – 6:00 PM

CEAS Room 319 (1155 E 60th St)

Presenters:

Kenneth Pomeranz (University Professor of Modern Chinese History and in the College; Member of the Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge) “From ‘Civilizing’ to ‘Modernizing’: Late Imperial and 20th Century Projects to Remake Chinese Frontier Communities”

and

Faith Hillis (Assistant Professor of Russian History and the College) “Frontiers and the Relationship between Center and Periphery in Russian History.”

Discussants:

Robert Burgos (PhD Student, History, University of Chicago) and Alexander Hubert (PhD Student, History, University of Chicago

______________

As participants in EAT Histories’ first-ever faculty forum, Professors Pomeranz and Professor Hillis will each give a brief presentation on their recent work frontiers on opposite ends of the Eurasian continent. During the subsequent discussion we hope to draw connections between these two seemingly disparate sites of analysis and explore the boundaries of the frontiers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

There is no pre-circulated paper for this event, and first-time attendees are welcome. Light refreshments will be served.

If you have any questions or require assistance to attend, please contact Jessa Dahl at jdahl@uchicago.edu or Erin Newton at emnewton@uchicago.edu.