History Workshop: Wang, "From Highland to Sea"

March 7, 2:30pm - 4:00pm
Mānoa Campus, Sakamaki Hall A201 Add to Calendar

Professor Wensheng Wang, "From Highland to Sea: Border-Crossing and Frontier Protest in Qing Dynasty China" --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Abstract: The last quarter of the eighteenth century witnessed a crescendo of social protests, which rocked China’s last dynasty—the Qing (1644-1911)—and engulfed much of the empire. This paper focuses on the White Lotus rebellion (1796-1805) and south China piracy (1790s-1810), which were the climax to this escalating wave of upheavals. It places the two crises in their frontier contexts, giving centrality to the local, supra-local, or transnational logic of collective action and popular politics. It examines the internal borderland of the Han River highlands (astride the provincial border of Hubei, Sichuan, and Shaanxi) as well as the external maritime frontier of the South China Sea (across the Sino-Vietnamese water world), exploring how fluid ecology and socioeconomic patterns interacted with rigid and weak political establishments to create a sort of nonstate space that precipitated the dual upheavals.


Event Sponsor
History Department, Mānoa Campus

More Information
Suzanna Reiss, (808) 956-6768, sreiss@hawaii.edu

Share by email