Talk by Peter Lavelle (Associate Professor, Department of History University of Connecticut)

In the 1850s, when the Taiping Rebellion threw the finances of the Qing Empire into disarray, officials scrambled to prevent their empire from crumbling. In Xinjiang, they enacted a raft of measures to urgently make up for the loss of financial support from Beijing. These measures ranged from the liquidation of state-owned livestock herds to the widespread impressment of Turkestani Muslims in agriculture and mining. Conventional histories of the Taiping-era financial crisis have often linked it to the long-term institutional development of the modern Chinese fiscal state in the context of world history. By contrast, this paper takes a short-term and regionally-focused view of history in the mid-nineteenth century, showing that the financial crisis led to distinct patterns in the exploitation of people and resources in Qing Central Asia.

Peter Lavelle is a specialist in Chinese history during the long nineteenth century. His research focuses on topics related to the environment, agriculture, science and technology, and colonialism. He is currently working on a book about Chinese agricultural science and development in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His research has been supported by funding from a variety of sources, including the Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies and the Fulbright Program. He received his B.A. from Grinnell College and his Ph.D. from Cornell University. Before joining the faculty at the University of Connecticut, he was a member of the History faculty at Temple University.

Speaker: Eric S. Lee, Cornell University

Accidental Status: Reassessing Protection Privilege in Northern Song (960-1127)

Lee writes:

Much of what we have been told about governance during middle and late imperial China revolves around the narrative of a meritocracy created and maintained by the civil service examination system. Against an earlier emphasis on the emergence of social fluidity in the tenth and eleventh centuries, this project contributes to the current scholarship by revealing alternative systems underpinning the social reproduction of the ruling elite and explores their far-reaching consequences for the state-society relationship. In particular, this project analyzes the role of the protection privilege system, or yinbu 蔭補, in northern China during the Northern Song (960-1127). As a primary channel of bureaucratic recruitment, the protection privilege granted hereditary access to political status and social privilege to family members of qualified officials. By a rough estimate, its recipients constituted at least one-third of the entire Song official roster. However, for such a statistically significant method of social reproduction, protection privilege has yet received attention proportionate to its social implications in English, Chinese, and Japanese scholarship.

The group meets monthly during the semester to explore a variety of classical Chinese texts and styles. Other premodern texts linked to classical Chinese in Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese have been explored. Presentations include works from the earliest times to the 20th century. Workshop sessions are led by local, national, and international scholars. Participants with any level of classical Chinese experience are welcome to attend.

At each session, a presenter guides the group in a reading of a classical Chinese text. Attendees discuss historical, literary, linguistic, and other aspects of the text, working together to resolve difficulties in comprehension and translation.No preparation is required; all texts will be distributed at the meeting.A light dinner will be served.

Come to the LRC to practice your language skills and meet new people. Conversation Hours provide an opportunity to use the target language in an informal, low-pressure atmosphere. Have fun practicing a language you are learning! Gain confidence through experience! Just using your new language skills helps you learn more than you might think. Conversation Hours are open to any learner, including the public.

Come to the LRC to practice your language skills and meet new people. Conversation Hours provide an opportunity to use the target language in an informal, low-pressure atmosphere. Have fun practicing a language you are learning! Gain confidence through experience! Just using your new language skills helps you learn more than you might think. Conversation Hours are open to any learner, including the public.

Come to the LRC to practice your language skills and meet new people. Conversation Hours provide an opportunity to use the target language in an informal, low-pressure atmosphere. Have fun practicing a language you are learning! Gain confidence through experience! Just using your new language skills helps you learn more than you might think. Conversation Hours are open to any learner, including the public.

Nuclear weapons and associated technologies have been primarily developed by and for Global North nations, often using the labor and natural resources of indigenous populations around the world, and often doing violence to those populations and their environments. As a result, many scholars analyze the development of nuclear technologies–including uranium mining, the processing and production of fissile materials, nuclear weapons testing, and use–as a form of colonialism. But as a state-centric framework, colonialism does not always capture practices that transcend national boundaries; radioactivity does not respect borders. This panel will elucidate the uses and limitations of the colonial framework for understanding the social and political implications of nuclear technologies. The panel will discuss how nuclear technologies have been developed in ways that are both locally specific and globally-interconnected, and the implications of this history for social and environmental justice.

Virtual panel discussion with-

Vincent Intondi, PACS Domestic Affiliate Scholar

Myrriah Gomez, Associate Professor at University of New Mexico

Mary Mitchell, Assistant Professor at New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers Newark

Magdalena Stawkowski, Assistant Professor at University of South Carolina

Hirokazu Miyazaki, Former Director of the Einaudi Center, Professor at Northwestern University

Register here.

Host
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies