Date: February 19, 2025 (Wednesday)
Time: 4:30–6:30pm
Venue: CRT-4.36, 4/F., Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU
Speaker: Professor Kenneth Pomeranz, Department of History, the University of Chicago
Respondent: Prof. Loretta Kim, Global and Area Studies, the University of Hong Kong
Abstract:
After the Panthay Rebellion in Yunnan (1856-73), the Guizhou Rebellion (1854-73), and French incursions in 1884-85, prospects for more thorough integration of the Southwest into a weakened Chinese state seemed slim. Yet the next 50 years saw a sharp decline in ethnic violence in these provinces, and greater bureaucratic control of “native chieftains” (tusi). Valuable resources in ethnically mixed areas, especially mines, were exploited on an increasing scale, and often helped fund provincial state-building projects, which were coopted by the Nationalists from the mid-1930s onward. This paper examines demographic, ideological, and political-economic roots of this development, as well as the inadvertent contributions of foreign powers to this consolidation. Comparisons with the Northwest will help pinpoint the particularities of the southwestern story.
Speaker’s Bio:
Professor Pomeranz is University Professor of Modern Chinese History and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, 2000), The Making of a Hinterland: State, Society and Economy in Inland North China, 1853–1937 (California, 1993), both of which won the American Historical Association's John K. Fairbank Prize. He is also the author of many other books, articles and edited collections.
All are welcome. No registration is required.
For enquiries, please contact us at smlc@hku.hk
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