Governors,Provincial Administration,and Local Self-Government in Late Imperial Russia

After long neglect in the Soviet period, the study of Russia's provincial governors and local institutions of self-government is attracting new interest among contemporary historians, who struggle with questions that preoccupied their late imperial predecessors.     

Imperial versus National Discourse: The Case of Russia

Abstract. It is inaccurate and misleading to apply the term ‘nationalism’ to Russia prior to the present day. Both Tsarist and Soviet leaders sought to maintain an empire and not a nation‐state, and their national consciousness was imperial rather than national. The lack of Russian nationalism was crucial for Russian history since it explains the failure of both Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union. Modern societies cannot be successfully constructed upon the basis of imperial thinking. The absence of Russian nationalism also has significance for nationalism theory. Russia possessed the social, political and cultural characteristics that have been adduced as ‘causes’ of nationalism by a wide variety of scholars, yet Russia failed to develop a nationalist movement. This suggests that what is crucial to modem nationalism is the appearance of a particularist, secular ideology, since the most notable aspect in which Russia differed from Europe was Russia's universalistic, religious and imperialist discourse of national identity.     

Assembling the Iron Age Levant: The Archaeology of Communities,Polities, and Imperial Peripheries

Archaeological research on the Iron Age (1200–500 BC) Levant, a narrow strip of land bounded by the Mediterranean Sea and the Arabian Desert, has been balkanized into smaller culture historical zones structured by modern national borders and disciplinary schools. One consequence of this division has been an inability to articulate broader research themes that span the wider region. This article reviews scholarly debates over the past two decades and identifies shared research interests in issues such as ethnogenesis, the development of territorial polities, economic intensification, and divergent responses to imperial interventions. The broader contributions that Iron Age Levantine archaeology offers global archaeological inquiry become apparent when the evidence from different corners of the region is assembled.     

Precarious Territory: Property Law,Housing, and the Socio-Spatial Order

Most of us access shelter over land over which other people have legally sanctioned dominant interests and powers, creating systemic relations of security and vulnerability that I term precarious property. We all live inside the territory of property, but do so under different terms. Rather than thinking of the territory of property as an exclusive space of insiders and outsiders, I think of it as a relational technology that organises forms of conditional spatial access. Territorialised expressions of law play a crucial role in organising such relations through a “property space” that frames property’s participants, their interactions, their alternatives to transacting, and the meanings of property itself. Thinking territorially about precarious property offers us both analytical and ethico-political insights, I suggest.     

Chen,Li.Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes: Sovereignty,Justice and Transcultural Politics

Inspired by comments released in the British press following the 2009 execution in China of a British citizen,Chinese Law in Impenal Eyes seeks to understand the roots of the dominant Western interpretation of Chinese law,one that in part still echoes the comments expressed over the case of the ship the Lady Hughesin 1784.Focusing on several pivotal moments in the Sino-Western encounter (mainly between Britain and China) between 1740 and 1840,the author depicts the ways in which the image of Chinese law was created and shaped,and how it acquired such lasting power.     

Coming of Age: Law,Sex and Childhood in Late Colonial India

This article revisits child‐marriage legislation in colonial India between 1891 and 1929 to re‐envision the ‘child’ as a subject constituted by laws governing sex, rather than as an a priori object requiring protection from patriarchal sexual norms. Focusing on the digital construction of the child in the twentieth century, this essay introduces a new angle from which to examine recent conclusions regarding child‐marriage reform in India. By drawing attention to an understudied figure, this article demonstrates the ways in which the problem of the child might transform understandings of the nation and its women; the universe of rights and the location of culture and the place of age as number in the formulation of legal subjectivities, colonial governmentality and humanitarian accounting in late colonial India.     

Comprehending the Qing Empire: Building Multilingual Competence in an Age of Imperial Rivalry, 1792–1820*

Abstract

European knowledge of the four dominant languages of the Qing Empire, Chinese, Manchu, Mongolian, and Tibetan, was transformed between 1792 and 1820 as a consequence of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Although these conflicts did not dramatically alter European political relations with the Qing Empire, they inaugurated a series of more subtle changes that collectively produced this surge in linguistic ability. First, this period saw unprecedented European interest in, and access to, the inland frontiers of the Qing Empire. Such access convinced some that China was newly accessible through the empire’s diverse Inner Asian territories, leading them to plan bold ventures in diplomacy, trade, proselytization, and academic research. These ambitious projects, although rarely accomplishing their goals, stimulated research by seeming to demand new linguistic capabilities for their execution. The fact that they often envisioned crossing Inner Asia to reach China explains why progress in Chinese occurred together with Manchu, Mongolian, and Tibetan. Another factor promoting a sudden surge in multilingual competence was the speed with which breakthroughs could now be communicated through imperial and trans-imperial networks. Printing, evangelical and learned societies, and new professional opportunities, gave European scholars unprecedented access to advances made on or near the Qing frontier.