History Job Candidate Seminar

Abstract: This talk reexamines the history of China's interactions with the West in the years surrounding the First Opium War (1839-1842). Most scholars have painted a bleak portrait of this era's encounters between China's Qing empire and the Western world, with stories of cross-cultural misunderstanding, legal disputes, and opium smuggling taking center stage in a conflict-centered narrative of Chinese-foreign relations. My research, however, argues that conflict and misunderstanding were misrepresentative. Through a bottom-up reexamination of the daily lives and incentives of Chinese, Europeans, and Americans in South China's coastal borderlands in the years before and after the Opium War — merchants, sailors, laundrywomen, coolies, cooks, sex workers, interpreters — I show that mutually incentivized problem solving, rather than conflict, better characterized transnational relations on the ground level. Greater attentiveness to grassroots processes of negotiation and relationship building can not only reframe how scholars understand the global history of China but also offer a more sensitive understanding of how people from different parts of the world, holding different worldviews, could make sense of and engage with one another in their daily lives.