Friday, February 18, 2022
1:00 PM - 4:00 PM
6275 Bunche Hall
The Case of the Qing Dynasty
This talk offers an overview of how several interlocking research projects undertaken in the previous decade and planned for the next decade provide a new lens for understanding the development of the Qing dynasty and its relationship to the modern Chinese state. At the center of this research agenda is the figure of the "case (案)" of the Qing dynasty. Anyone who has worked in a local Qing archive can attest to the fact that these repositories of government documents are full of "cases." But what is a case, and how did they determine the way that the empire came together? In this talk, Dykstra will review how the technologies of case-making not only slowly began to link together local administrative offices with overseers in the central bureaucracy of Beijing, but also forged ties of accountability and information-sharing that played a pivotal role in late nineteenth-century political developments, the constitutional crisis of the early twentieth century, and even in political institutions after the 1911 Xinhai Revolution.
After graduating from the UCLA History Department in 2014, Maura Dykstra accepted a position in the Caltech Division of Humanities and Social Sciences. Over the years she has held visiting fellowships and postdoctoral appointments at the Max Planck Institute for Legal Theory and Legal History, the University of Tokyo Faculty of Law, Taiwan's Center for Chinese Studies, the Harvard Fairbank Center, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Her first book, scheduled for publication with the Harvard University Asia Center Press in the summer of 2022 and titled Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine: The Administrative Revolution of the Eighteenth-century Qing State, documents the first hundred years of Qing central state efforts to supervise the territorial bureaucracies. Her current book project, State as Bond: The Making and Unmaking of Peoples on the Southwestern Frontier of the Late Empire, offers an administrative and institutional perspective on the colonizing projects of the Ming and Qing dynasties.
A Line in the Sea: the Cartographic Construction of the Maritime Border in 16th Century China
In the sixteenth century, Chinese coastal areas were incorporated into emerging transnational trade networks. In response, several hardliner officials strictly enforced the policy of restricting maritime trading and criminalized private traders as smugglers. This policy provoked violent responses from merchants and caused great chaos in the lower Yangzi basin. In order to enhance defense capacities against these smugglers-turned-sea raiders or so-called “Japanese” pirates (wokou), both officials and local elites collaborated on creating maps of coastal regions. By seeing maps as both outcomes from and political statements with the ongoing negotiations among historical actors, Lee’s talk will show how maps played a crucial role in defining territorial and ethnic boundaries between Ming self and cultural others.
Lee’s visual analysis will demonstrate that these maps promoted a new idea of the coastline as a second defensive border, following the Great Wall on the northern frontier, protecting the Ming homeland from foreign invasion.
Sunkyu Lee received her PhD from University of California, Los Angeles in 2021 and has been working as a lecturer at Loyola Marymount University. Her research interests lie in history of maps, frontier and ethnic history. Her dissertation, titled "The Cartographic Construction of Borders in Ming China, 1368-1644," traces how geopolitical, socioeconomic and cultural changes interplayed with cartographical practices to create the image of the Ming Empire with clear borderlines around its territory. Recently, she is revising a journal article on the war against piracy and maritime cartography in sixteenth century China.
Sponsor(s): Center for Chinese Studies, Department of History