Conference Note: Early Modern China in the Late Imperial World

In mid-October, with the generous support of the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation’s Inter-University Center for Sinology, the Department of History and the East Asian Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University convened a workshop titled Early Modern China in the Late Imperial World in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of this journal and its parent society. Bringing together scholars of China, France, Madagascar, and the United States, the conference featured conversations grounded in new empirical work on the themes of governance, commercial contacts, court culture, and information in circulation. By placing work on Ming and Qing China side by side with work on other national and regional contexts, the workshop challenged conventional labeling and emphasized shared methods and themes. By asking panelists to comment on each other’s papers, the workshop invited discussion both among the panelists and with the audience. This resulted in a lively, informal, and collegial atmosphere—and a series of extraordinarily productive conversations.

The first panel invited François Furstenberg, a historian of the United States, to reflect on the idea of empire as it as been deployed in the historiography of early modern North America. The appearance of the term “early modern” in his title spotlighted the novelty of applying the vocabulary of both “early modern” and “imperial” to the colonial North American context, and his paper illuminated a broader Anglophone historiographical context for recent work on the Qing as empire. Sociologist Ho-fung Hung’s paper, “The Familial State in China’s Age of Commerce, 1644–1939,” focused on the broad trajectory of China’s early modern/late imperial period with a focus on the issue of patrimonialism as a hallmark of Chinese governments from the Age of Commerce through the present Reform Era. The ensuing conversation referenced Chinese and American exceptionalism and the utility (or lack thereof) for historians of both countries of terms such as “revolution,” “genealogy,” and “empire.”

In a panel on governance, historians William T. Rowe and Pier Larson focused on issues of state building during the nineteenth century in China and Madagascar respectively. Rowe’s paper, “Reform of the Qing Salt Monopoly in Comparative Perspective,” foregrounded the ideas of Bao Shichen, an early nineteenth-century reformer who, in spite of the fact that he did not hold official office, offered practical suggestions for the reform of the imperial Salt Monopoly, which were eventually adopted. Larson’s paper, “Circulation and Mobility in the Military Bureaucracy of Madagascar, 1820–60,” grounded in pioneering archival research, focused on Antananarivo, a new imperial state that developed in Madagascar in the early nineteenth century. Animated by the question “What kind of state produced this kind of archive,” the paper featured a discussion of such topics as military organization, issues of numeracy and literacy, the power of lists—whether accurate or instrumental—and interactions with European maritime empires. The open discussion explored the applicability of the term “late imperial” to the nineteenth-century world, the ways in which both the Qing and the Antananarivo empires might be considered land empires or gunpowder empires in a world increasingly dominated by new maritime empires, and the role of paper and/or literary technologies in state formation.

The panel on commercial contacts emphasized interactions on the maritime frontier, especially dynamics between, on the one hand, militarized non-state or nascent-state actors on the margins, and central governments on the other. Xing Hang’s paper, “The Leizhou Pirates and the Making of the Mekong River Delta, 17^th–18^th Centuries,” considered the migration of Cantonese fortune-seekers to the Mekong Delta in the seventeenth century. During this period, piracy became politicized; smugglers navigating the margins of collapsed political orders sought legitimacy, either through alliances with Southeast Asian courts, or claims to the legacy of “Ming loyalism,” or through proxy wars fought in territory identified today as Thai or Vietnamese. In effect, these migrants sought to create their own territorial regimes in Southeast Asia in the late seventeenth century, in a context increasingly defined by consolidating empires. In his paper, “The Global Underground: Asian Contraband in Early Modern Europe,” Michael...