Imperial Formation Research Articles

Unraveling late Pennsylvanian brachiopod assemblages from the San Rafael Basin (Argentina): Biostratigraphic implications to southwestern Gondwana

New and previous fossil remains and resulting biostratigraphy of the El Imperial Formation at Arroyo del Imperial, Quebrada de La Horqueta, and Cañón del Atuel key sections are analyzed, while the faunal relationships among them are clarified. Two diachronnous faunas, the pTS and TSAIII associations, relatives to the Tivertonia-Streptorhynchus assemblage are recognized and constrained to early late Bashkirian and Moscovian ages, respectively. These age assignments are supported by statistical analyses and available palynological and radiometric dating. Previous mentions of brachiopods from Arroyo del Imperial and Quebrada de La Horqueta are elucidated with the identification of Buxtonia cf. riojanae (Leanza), Streptorhynchus inaequiornatus Leanza, Spiriferellina? sp., Septosyringothyris (Precosyringothyris) aff. jaguelensis Lech, Septosyringothyris (Precosyringothyris) cf. feruglioi (Amos), Saltospirifer guevarai Cisterna and Archbold and Pericospira sp. A new marine fauna from the upper part of the Cañón del Atuel section (Cabecera del Cañón Member) is reported. It includes the brachiopods Argentiella cf. A. stappenbecki Archbold, Cisterna and Sterren, Oehlertella annae (Feruglio), Orbiculoidea saltensis Reed, Calytrixia piersoni Taboada, Coolkilella aredesi Taboada, Costatumulus sp. and Septosyringothyris? sp. A bio-chronostratigraphic correlation scheme, including key lithostratigraphic units and biozones of central-western Argentina is updated.

The European Seaborne Empires: From the Thirty Years' War to the Age of Revolutions

The European Seaborne Empires: From the Thirty Years' War to the Age of Revolutions

THE COSMOPOLITAN HISTORIOGRAPHY OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY FEDERALISM

AbstractThis article examines the historiographical debate over federalism between the 1930s and 1960s. In their most sweeping iterations, revisionists have sought to unravel the history of the nation-state, by using the history of anti-colonial federalist demands for equal incorporation into imperial states as evidence against a teleology of nationalist independence. In perceiving the democratic potentialities embedded within imperial state forms, revisionists argue that anti-colonial federalists therefore belong within a cosmopolitan tradition of seeking democratic supra-national governance beyond empire and nation. Some iterations of ‘post-colonial cosmopolitanism’ have unfortunately channelled debate into an opposition between federalism and nationalism, while also generating methodological republicanism, the tendency to view proto-republics within imperial formations. This review challenges these interpretive shortcomings and argues instead that federalism ought to be understood as part of a contest about the state as such. By integrating scholarship on French and British imperial federalism with recent work on regional federalisms in European and African contexts, this essay centres a whole range of ideological variations of ‘cosmopolitanism’ that adapted federalism to their critiques of the state. Ultimately, this reframing of federalist historiography enables new insights into contests about, and not just over, twentieth-century states.

Homelessness Regulation and Neoliberalism’s Imperial Past: The Janus Face of Anti‐Homeless Urbanism and Tokyo’s Modern Socio‐Spatial Development

AbstractUsing historical ethnography and a systematic review of research on homelessness in modern Tokyo (1868–2019), I illustrate how imperial formations, or historically established asymmetrical relations of power, are bound up in homelessness regulation. I argue that the delegitimisation of unsheltered existence—seen in multiple policy fields across history—is a vessel for imperial formations that necessarily propagate anti‐democratic limitations on rights and protections. Moreover, I advance that this continuous invalidation of the right‐full existence of persons experiencing homelessness serves as a platform for paternalistic Janus‐faced interventions co‐constituted from corrective, compassionate, and middling ambitions. This research seeks to amend false dichotomies of a chiefly punitive past and a compassionate complex present, and redirects attention from presumed policy intent to the actual legal and social roots of urban injustice.

Education as a site for the Imperial project to preserve whiteness supremacy from the colonial era to the present: a critical analysis of international education policy in Canada

ABSTRACT Using Canada as a case study, we historically trace the imperial formation of whiteness supremacy in education from the colonial era to the current internationalisation of education in Western nations. In a global knowledge economy, knowledge has replaced resource extraction as a significant source of nation building. We argue that the internationalisation of education which is hosted by Western nations, positions English language and western education as globally superior, and perpetuates the imperial formations of inequality, hierarchization of difference and unequal rule. Drawing from scholarship on postcolonialism and whiteness, we argue that the race to recruit the best and the brightest to support the knowledge economies of the west has become a site to maintain imperial whiteness supremacy concealed in neo-liberal rhetoric while (re)producing the disparity between the global north and south, and between the global west and east.

The elephant and imperial continuities in North India, 1200–1600CE

This paper builds on my earlier study of the relationship between the elephant and imperial sovereignty in north India, extending the argument from 1200 to 1600ce. The ritual and military use of the elephant signalled a self-conscious imperial formation, based on the Ghaznavid model, with the emperor as king-of-kings and elephant-master, ruling over subjugated tributary monarchs. However, new conditions in the sixteenth century led to the rise of a centralised and expansive state, now armed with gunpowder weapons, and thus no longer dependent on tributary relations or the elephant. The elephant, which formerly stood for divine or satanic power, was now humanised, and the emperor’s status was elevated above it as the closest living being to God. In short, studying the imperial formation in the north through its use of elephants renders meaningless the characterisation of linear evolution from a more orthodox Islamic state (‘Delhi Sultanate’) to a tolerant one (‘Mughal Empire’).

Introduction

Introduction

Transforming Inner Mongolia: Commerce, Migration, and Colonization on the Qing Frontier by Yi Wang

Reviewed by: Transforming Inner Mongolia: Commerce, Migration, and Colonization on the Qing Frontier by Yi Wang Peter C. Perdue (bio) Yi Wang. Transforming Inner Mongolia: Commerce, Migration, and Colonization on the Qing Frontier. Lanham, MD, and London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021. xvi, 334 pp. Hardcover $105.00, isbn 9781538146071. Epub $99.50, isbn 9781538146088. The word "colonization" in the subtitle of Yi Wang's book has deceptively radical implications. It puts the Qing in a class of imperial formations that includes the Western and Japanese empires of the nineteenth century. This comparison has flourished among Western scholars of modern China in recent years. Previously, China was described as a "semi-colonial" formation, a partial victim, not a perpetrator of imperialism. Indeed, the unequal treaties and large indemnities heavily compromised its sovereignty. Owen Lattimore, however, observed over fifty years ago that the Qing concurrently practiced "secondary imperialism" on its own Central Asian frontiers, expanding Han settlement at the cost of Mongols, Turkic Muslims, and others. Now, a wave of new studies has come full circle back to Lattimore, swinging away from simple victim narratives to a new recognition of the vast commercial and political power embedded in the Han majority. Yi Wang's study of Inner Mongolia, the primary victim of Qing expansion, is a welcome addition to the literature. Thoroughly documented with sources from Mongolian and Chinese archives, it provides a powerful analysis of Qing colonialism as an active participant in the formation of global capitalism.1 Prof. Wang's story highlights three aspects of integration of Inner Mongolia into this system: the flow of silver and commodities since the sixteenth century, Qing expansion, and European imperialism. Han migrants as settler colonists engaged with all three trends. The migrants brought capital to clear land and create exports, they supported Qing influence, and they introduced and responded to European imperial demands. During most of the eighteenth century the Qing tried to limit migration, but by 1800 one million Han migrants had already penetrated the region; by 1912, there were over 1.5 million compared to 900,000 Mongols. Today only seventeen percent of Inner Mongolia is Mongolian; the indigenous Mongols have been swamped by the Han. Each of Wang's core chapters centers on one aspect of this integrative process. She describes, first, commercial penetration by Shanxi merchants, followed by agricultural clearance, investment in irrigation, the role of the Catholic Church, and the major policy changes of the Qing state after 1900. Her discussion includes attention to ecological impact, cultural change, legal conflicts, and personal experiences of migrants. We do not hear much about the dispossessed Mongols themselves; their voices are much scarcer in the archives [End Page 148] than those of the Chinese. But we learn much indirectly about what they gained and lost. Chapter 1 stresses the "multilayered boundaries" characterizing interactions between steppe pastoralists and settled farmers, as opposed to a simple dichotomy. Pastoralists historically practiced agriculture as a supplementary livelihood, and settlers often entered into personal and commercial relations with nomads. The Manchu conquerors included Mongol allies and Chinese agriculturalists in their banner system, so from the beginning the Qing elite was a multicultural coalition. Several Qing policies, however, substantially weakened Mongol power. Qing divide-and-rule policy fragmented the Mongols among separate banners, and Qing promotion of monasteries in the steppe drained much of the Mongols' wealth, while also creating a literate class of Buddhist monks who legitimized Qing rule. Although the Qing at first tried to maintain the purity of Mongol culture by forbidding immigration, beginning in 1724 it relaxed many of its restrictions. Migrants from China rented land from Mongol nobles, and many of them married Mongol women. Mongol elites welcomed the rental income, but the Mongols had very different views of land than the Chinese. Mongols worshipped an earth that was "boundless" and "expansive" while Chinese saw virgin soil as simply unproductive wasteland (pp. 46-47). The Mongols kept some areas for extensive cultivation as a backup to pastoralism, but avoided intensive agriculture that would interfere with the needs of their animals. The Qing rulers regarded this extensive agriculture as wasteful and the Mongols as indolent "reckless cultivators" (p. 49). The stage was set already...

Introduction to the Special Issue “Parliamentary formations and diversities in (post-)imperial Eurasia”

Addressing the entangled histories of deliberative decision making, political representation, and constitutionalism in several geographic and temporal contexts, this Special Issue offers nuanced political and intellectual histories and anthropologies of parliamentarism in Eurasia. It explores parliaments and quasi-parliamentary formations and the designs of such in the Qing and Russian Empires, the late Soviet Union, Ukraine, the Russian Far East, and the Russian-Mongolian borderlands (from Buryat and Mongolian perspectives) in seven contributions. Apart from the regional interconnections, the Special Issue foregrounds the concepts of diversity and empire to enable an interdisciplinary discussion. Understanding empires as composite spaces, where the ambivalent and situational difference is central for the governing repertoires, the articles discuss social (ethnic, religious, regional, etc.) diversity in particular contexts and the ways it affected the parliamentary designs. The multitude of the latter is understood as institutional diversity and is discussed in relation to different levels of administration, as well as the positions of respective parliamentary formations within political systems and their performance within regimes. The contributions also investigate different forms of deliberative decision-making, including the soviet, the Congress of People’s Deputies, and the national congress, which allows to include conceptual diversity of Eurasian parliamentarisms into the discussions in area and global studies. The Special Issue highlights the role of (quasi-)parliaments in dissembling and reassembling imperial formations and the ways in which parliaments were eclipsed by other institutions of power, both political and economic.

Наследственная аристократия и ее владения в структуре и политике царства Цинь в IV–III веках до н. э.

The paper discusses the question of existence of hereditary aristocracy in the ancient Chinese state of Qin during the period of 4th – 3rd BC, as well as the question of its role in the domestic political process. The paper shows the dynamic of political change on the materials of received sources as well as on that of the paleographic texts. It also shows that the traditional perception of Shang Yang’s reforms is false. This perception is based on the sources, composed largely during the Han era, which predetermined their bias towards the history of Qin. Based on these sources the research to date usually depicts the reforms of Shang Yang as an act of dismantling the order based on hereditary aristocracy and transforming Qin into a bureaucratic state, divided uniformly into counties and commanderies. However the reality, as shown in the sources contradicts this view, as the hereditary aristocracy after the reforms of Shang Yang neither ceased to exist, nor lost the decisive grip over the political process in the state of Qin. The research shows a dependence of the power transition stability and the ability of the hereditary aristocracy to align with the monarch and also shows that the process of imperial formation put this model of stability in jeopardy. It has also become clear that the very process of reproducing conflict between the aristocratic and bureaucratic groups within Qin’s elites was driven by the changing interest of the monarch, who, in his different period of reign aimed at different goals, thus being the variable that propelled the political change within a framework of constants. This change led inevitably to the transformation of connection between the ruler and the hereditary aristocracy, the initial type of which being that of a hereditary lineage system of ties, and the final being that of an imperial state system, where the groups of hereditary aristocracy within the imperial court no longer needed to have kinship with the ruler, but played the role of agents for the local elites, influencing imperial politics.

Conceptual History and South Asian History

This review article provides an overview of important, recent approaches to conceptual history from scholarship on South Asia. While conceptual history is not a consolidated field in South Asia, the colonial encounter has greatly stimulated interest in conceptual inquiries. Recent scholarship questions the uniformity even of well-researched concepts such as liberalism. It is methodologically innovative in thinking about the influence of economic structures for the development of concepts. Rethinking religious and secular languages, scholars have furthermore stressed the importance of smaller communicative units such as genre or hermeneutical practices to shape ideas e.g. of the political. As part of global and imperial formations, scholars are well aware of the link between power and colonial temporalities. Lastly, they have suggested new sources for conceptual history, such as literature, film, and sound.

World Poetry: Commonplaces of an Idea

Abstract This essay offers a philological career of the term world poetry as poets and scholars employed it and close cognates across the twentieth century (the century in which it first appeared). This career emphasizes trajectories in three of the West’s imperial language formations—poésie mondiale in French, poesía mundial in Spanish, and world poetry in English—but also highlights kindred trajectories in non-Western languages, such as sheʿr-e jahān in Persian and shiʿr fi al-ʿalam in Arabic. Corroborating Édouard Glissant’s claim that “the amassing of commonplaces is, perhaps, the right approach to my real subject—the entanglements of worldwide relation,” the essay argues for an understanding of world poetry as the accumulated philological history of poetic folkways, habits of use, sociological institutions, formations, and conjunctures that group around the term itself.

The CCJ decolonizing Caribbean constitutionalism

The Caribbean Court of Justice was conceived to further the Anglophone Caribbean’s decolonization process. Decolonization included not just transitions from colony to independent statehood but also the repudiation of imperial formations. The Court’s capacity to do this is evident in the McEwan Case. Using bold approaches to interpretation, the CCJ effectively erased the general savings law clause (which was previously treated as effective in immunizing colonial laws from inconsistency with the Bill of Rights) and affirmed the fundamental rights of trans persons. Since those clauses tethered post-independence constitutionalism to colonial era legal arrangements, erasure has the effect of bringing the Constitution forward and home. I argue that erasure is the result of proper methods of interpretation and not overreach since savings clauses are now functionally obsolete. The CCJ also signalled its decolonising capacity by articulating Caribbean identity in inclusive terms. It rightly affirmed that trans persons are entitled to full membership in the political community, in circumstances where its position is likely an anti-majoritarian one. The CCJ is demonstrating its decolonizing capacity in a context where, it is argued, the Privy Council cannot. It is hoped that other Caribbean States will be encouraged to accede to the CCJ’s appellate jurisdiction.

Stratigraphic revision of the El Imperial Formation (Pennsylvanian-Cisuralian), in its type locality, San Rafael Basin(Mendoza), Argentina

The El Imperial Formation (San Rafael Basin) shows a complete record of the late Carboniferous - early Permian stratigraphy in western basins of Argentina. The sedimentological and stratigraphic analysis in the type locality allowed recognizing eight facies associations. Facies association A includes diamictites and conglomerates related to the Late Paleozoic glacial event, facies B composed of shales and fine-grained sandstones, was formed during the postglacial transgression while facies C represents sandy littoral bars, that pass upward to shales and mudstones of the facies association D. The conglomerates and sandstones of the facies association E entirely correspond to fluvial sedimentation, followed by a new transgressive event represented in fine-grained sandstones and shales of the facies F. The last transgression is recorded in shales, mudstones and very fine-grained sandstones belonging to the facies G, which are covered by sandstones and conglomerates corresponding to multi-channel fluvial systems.From these facies associations, 33 palynofloras divided into three palynological associations were obtained. The palynological assemblages that characterized the basal section contain abundant trilete spores and monosaccate pollen grains, with a progressive increase of taeniate pollen towards the top of the unit. The presence of scolecodonts characterizes palynofloras from transitional to marine environments. The composition of the palynofloras allows correlations with the current biostratigraphic scheme of the center-west of Argentina. The presence of the Biozone Raistrickia densa- Convolutispora muriornata in the lower and middle part of the El Imperial Formation, together with Pakhapites fusus-Vittatina subsaccata Biozone in the upper part, allows us to refer the palynofloras to the late Serpukhovian/early Cisuralian.

Thermal history of the Mackenzie Plain, Northwest Territories, Canada: Insights from low-temperature thermochronology of the Devonian Imperial Formation

Abstract Devonian strata from the Mackenzie Plain, Northern Canadian Cordillera, have undergone two major burial and unroofing events since deposition, providing an excellent natural laboratory to assess the effects of protracted cooling history on low-temperature thermochronometers in sedimentary basins. Apatite and zircon (U-Th)/He (AHe, ZHe) and apatite fission track (AFT) thermochronology data were collected from seven samples across the Mackenzie Plain. AFT single grain ages from six samples span the Cambrian to Miocene with few Neoproterozoic dates. Although there are no correlations between Dpar and AFT date or track length distribution, a relationship exists between grain chemistry and age. We calculate the parameter rmr0 from apatite chemistry and distinguish up to three discrete kinetic populations per sample, with consistent Cambrian–Carboniferous, Triassic–Jurassic, Cretaceous, and Cenozoic pooled ages. Fifteen ZHe dates range from 415 ± 33 Ma to 40 ± 3 Ma, and AHe dates from 53 analyses vary from 225 ± 14 Ma to 3 ± 0.2 Ma. Whereas several samples exhibit correlations between date and radiation damage (eU), all samples demonstrate varying degrees of intra-sample date dispersion. We use chemistry-dependent fission track annealing kinetics to explain dispersion in both our AFT and AHe data sets and detail the thermal history of strata that have experienced a protracted cooling history through the uppermost crust. Thermal history modeling of AFT and AHe samples reveals that the Devonian strata across the Mackenzie Plain reached maximum burial temperatures (∼90 °C–190 °C) prior to Paleozoic to Mesozoic unroofing. Strata were reheated to lower temperatures in the Cretaceous to Paleogene (∼65 °C–110 °C), and have a protracted Cenozoic cooling history, with Paleogene and Neogene cooling pulses. This thermal information is compared with borehole organic thermal maturity profiles to assess the regional burial history. Ultimately, these data reflect the complications, and possibilities, of low-temperature thermochronology in sedimentary rocks where detrital variance results in a broad range of diffusion and annealing kinetics.

Felder , Björn M. Weindling , Paul J. Baltic Eugenics: Bio-Politics, Race and Nation in Interwar Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania 1918–1940 Turda , Marius The History of East-Central European Eugenics, 1900–1945: Sources and Commentaries (review)

REVIEWS 571 unfolding of the Second World War, so often absent in Western publications. The complete English translation should be acquired by university libraries where the history of international relations and the Soviet Union are taught. These volumes will open up a Soviet point of view to non-Russian readers, something needed in these days of Western anti-Russian hysteria. Département d’histoire Michael Jabara Carley Université de Montréal Felder, Björn M. and Weindling, Paul J. (eds). Baltic Eugenics: Bio-Politics, Race and Nation in Interwar Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania 1918–1940. On the Boundary of Two Worlds: Identity, Freedom, and Moral Imagination in the Baltics, 35. Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York, 2013. 333 pp. Notes. Bibliographies. €93.00. Turda, Marius (ed). The History of East-Central European Eugenics, 1900–1945: Sources and Commentaries. Bloomsbury Academic, London and New York, 2015. xxii + 630 pp. Glossaries. Notes. Bibliographies. Appendices. Index. £95.00. The first half of the twentieth century saw the rise of eugenic thoughts and practices across the globe. In Central and Eastern Europe, this eugenic trend coincided with rising national aspirations in imperial formations and the nation-building efforts of newly independent states. Central and Eastern European eugenicists pushed for their agenda in a context distinctively different from their colleagues in Britain, Germany and the United States. While eugenic ideologies and legislations in these three countries are relatively well explored in scholarly pursuits, the two edited collections reviewed here turn our attention to a region with a rich past of eugenics prior to the Second World War, yet less represented in the study of eugenics. Baltic Eugenics, a collection of conference papers from 2009, emphasizes trans-national perspectives to examine the history of eugenics in the Baltic States and its relations to the wider Baltic Sea Region, including the Soviet Union, Germany and Sweden. In particular, half of the volume focuses on interwar Estonia and Latvia. This is justifiable, given that Estonia boasted of the most institutionalized eugenic movement of the three Baltic States, and that Estonia and Latvia legalized eugenic sterilization in late 1930s. The timing of such eugenic legislations — not under democratic order but after the coups that turned Estonia and Latvia into authoritarian states — raises the important question of the relationship between authoritarianism and eugenic practices. It also invites the obvious comparison with Nazi Germany. In his introduction, Björn M. Felder argues that the eugenic agenda of Baltic authoritarian regimes SEER, 97, 3, JULY 2019 572 reflected the wish to form a ‘racial state’ that defined its nation in biological terms (p. 6). This is a convincing claim supported by evidence drawn from subsequent papers, even though other contributors show more reservation than Felder. Two chapters investigate racial anthropology and its eugenic logics of differentiating racial value in Estonia and Latvia. Ken Kalling and Leiu Heapost examine Estonian responses to Baltic German and Swedish research on the Estonian racial constitution, especially focusing on the eugenic-minded anthropologist Juhan Aul in the interwar period. They argue that his interest in the Estonian racial question were motivated by a nationalist defensiveness towards German and European scholarship that characterized Estonians as racially inferior. However, they suggest that ‘there seems to have been no particular racial goal or ideal as an agenda of popular discussions’ in Estonia (p. 93). Meanwhile, Felder takes a similar approach, focusing on the research and politics of Latvian anatomist Jēkabs Prīmanis to analyse the links between racial anthropology and eugenics in Latvia. Felder convincingly demonstrates Prīmanis’s central role in forging a Nordic racial identity for the Latvians, as well as his involvement in the national eugenic projects. In contrast to Kalling and Heapost’s reservations about the racial aspect in Estonian eugenics, Felder sharply criticizes the lack of reflection on race and eugenics in Latvian historiography. Though diverging in conclusions, these two chapters elucidate many parallels in the career development of leading Estonian and Latvian racial scientists. Comparison with Nazi sterilization law constitutes the background of two studies on eugenic practices in Estonia and Latvia. Ken Kalling argues that, while authoritarianism indeed contributed to the eugenic regulation of human reproduction, it was mainly the small nation’s...

Untimely Developments: Genre Drag and Gish Jen’s Mona in the Promised Land

Abstract Through a reinterpretation of Gish Jen’s novel Mona in the Promised Land (1996), this essay makes the case for the queer possibilities immanent to the most conservative “family values” Asian American genre—the bildungsroman organized around intergenerational conflict. In a decade obsessed with the question of what shifting racial and ethnic demographics meant for the national future, Mona’s content tempted 1990s readers to interpret its vision of the 1960s as a timely meditation on the present. Read in such a way, the novel resolves anxieties about demographic change by reproducing the “timeless” values of family and nation. However, Mona’s form tells a different story. Rather than using the historical past as a mere backdrop to tell a timely story about national progress, Mona is reflexive in its preoccupation with its relationship to the past. Jen’s novel shows us what a coming-of-age story looks like when it does not assimilate its subject into national time. Instead, Mona draws “untimely comparisons” between past US imperial formations that are the present’s condition of possibility. I examine how the novel disrupts the bildungroman’s formal and ideological relationship to national futurity by evoking the past as a drag on progress and the novel as enacting a formal corollary to queer drag performance. I read Mona as a novel of untimely development that reinvents the coming-of-age narrative so that the Asian American subject becomes not a figure that exemplifies a certain future subject or nation but instead one that generatively obstructs national fantasies of progress.

Colonial Labour Internationalized: Portugal and the Decolonization Momentum (1945–1975)

The history of the convoluted devolution of power in late colonialism can only be fully apprehended if its international and transnational dimensions are brought into the picture. Diverse modalities of internationalism shaped the disparate trajectories of colonialism and decolonization in multiple societal domains, in diverse ways. We depart from the labour question in the Portuguese late colonial empire to highlight three main inter-related aspects in order to demonstrate this argument. First, that the history of Portuguese late colonialism and decolonization was significantly moulded by international and transnational actors, institutions and networks, despite the authoritarian and nationalist nature of the metropolitan regime. Second, that the social and economic dimensions of Portuguese colonialism were a permanent feature of administrative and diplomatic ruminations regarding possible strategies of imperial resilience in a context of mounting anti-colonial pressures. Therefore, they need to be properly studied in order to advance our understanding of the trajectories of imperial disengagement. Third, that despite the increasingly hostile global order to imperial and colonial powers, noticeable in many international fora, the latter were always conceived both as channels for the expression of anti-colonial dissidence and as potentially useful instruments for those interested in advocating the continuity of imperial formations.

Risk and Refuge: Contemplating Precarity in Irish Fiction

Financial speculation and capitalist accumulation leave spatial and temporal traces. When the waves of the global financial collapse reached Ireland and culminated in the extreme measure of the comprehensive state guarantee, the receding excesses of the Celtic Tiger revealed a landscape that was gentrified and alienating. The spectrality of the ghost estates of Ireland became a synecdochal signifier of Ireland's ignominious fall from the podium of neoliberal grace and the focus of both popular lament and critical intervention. This essay provides a deferred assessment of the uncanniness of dwelling in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland by concentrating on the socioecological fallout of ruins and the longterm casualties of land speculation: that is, transformations of landscape into real estate, and of place into property. Reading Ireland's ghost estates as ‘imperial formations’ that ‘register the ongoing quality of processes of decimation, displacement, and reclamation’ – to use Ann Laura Stoler's term – the essay brings to the fore questions of dwelling and homeliness that suggest more protracted imperial processes which ‘saturate the subsoil of people's lives and persist, sometimes subjacently, over a longer durée’. To demonstrate these arguments the essay will analyse works by Kevin Barry, Sara Baume, and Claire Keegan.

The coastal evacuation of Zhangpu County in early Qing: Borders, shifting zones, and social change as seen in forts and fortified villages

Qianhai, the early Qing order that forced people in southeast coast to evacuate the coast to a distance of ten to eighteen miles inland in order to eliminate anti-Qing activities, is an excellent topic through which to examine the formation of the border in Han local society. The development of regional studies during the past 20 years encourages us to both refine our local case studies and map the wider picture. The story of social transformation in Zhangpu County during the Ming-Qing transition provides a perfect case to discuss how the coastal evacuation policy was implemented in local society. It can also promote our understanding of multiple histories. First, the lineage story of the coastal evacuation can be described in greater detail. Even in a single county, there was no standard evacuation distance. Local officials relied on mountainous terrain and existing forts and fortified villages to form a line of defense that determined the scope of the evacuation. Second, the social landscape in the communities of the county demonstrates the rise and decline of local power structures. Many of the most influential and deep-rooted lineages were badly weakened by the time they returned home after the evacuation order was rescinded. On the basis of the ebb and flow of local elites, the Qing state began to regulate households more closely, and state power thus penetrated to the local level. The household registers of Zhangpu were established based on the specific historical context of the county, but the process shared with the rest of the southeastern coastal region a pattern whereby pacification and local Defense shaped state penetration. Even in a supposedly “traditional” Han region, the empire needed to handle the problems of the border and social complexity, just as it did in “non-Han” areas. This illustrates the process of late imperial state formation in practice.