China Colloquium Series: Entangled Encounters: The Transnational Repercussions of Rural Pacification in China, 1869-1891

The Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University presents a talk with Melissa Macauley as a part of the China Colloquium Series.

The Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University presents a talk with Melissa Macauley as a part of the China Colloquium Series.

The emigrant communities of southeast coastal China maintained strong connections with sojourning Chinese, and local events rarely remained exclusively local for long. Events had repercussions that rippled back and forth across the seas, illustrating the intimately shared historical experiences of people living within a vast maritime space. This presentation will explore the transnational effects of General Fang Yao’s campaign of village pacification in Chaozhou prefecture from 1869 to 1891. General Fang was officially charged with ridding this region of its powerful criminal underworld; collecting unpaid taxes; and imposing a militarized social order. His violent campaign of rural pacification not only transformed the social landscape of coastal Chaozhou, it had a significant impact on Shanghai and the British Straits Settlements. The lecture will apply the transnational scale of analysis to show how events can generate historical transformations in multiple sites.

Melissa Macauley (Ph.D. Berkeley, 1993) is the Fitzgerald Professor of Economic History at Northwestern University. She specializes in late imperial and modern Chinese history. Her research interests include social history and legal culture; the port culture of the South China Seas region; the problem of transnational crime in the context of migration and trade; and the transformation of non-Western law in the age of colonialism and imperialism. Her first book, Social Power and Legal Culture: Litigation Masters in Late Imperial China (1998) was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Book in 1999. Her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Education (Fulbright-Hays), among others. She has also served as the An Wang Postdoctoral Fellow in Chinese Studies at Harvard University; a member of the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, NJ); and a Senior Research Scholar at the Institute for Qing History at Renmin (People's) University (Beijing). She is currently working on a book titled Crime and Migration in the South China Seas, 1854-1937. She was awarded a Distinguished Teaching Award in 1999 and named a Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence in 2004.

For more information:
http://www.history.northwestern.edu/people/macauley.htmlern University.