When
Where
Come join us on various Wednesdays this Fall semester for the History Lunch Lecture Symposium. We will gather in Economics 406A to learn more about our colleagues' scholarship. Additional details will be posted here a week before the event.
Open to the University community!
For those of you who are unable to attend in person, please use the following Zoom link: TBD
Lecture Topic: The Politics of Light: Establishing Governance and Sovereignty in China’s Frontier.
Abstract: This study of the South Cape Lighthouse at the southern end of Taiwan tries to make conversations with and bring together Chinese "Customs history," history of empires, history of technology, labor history, and environmental history. Born as a subfield of the "Customs history" of modern China, the history of aids to navigation of China has inherited the divided historical evaluations of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, an agency within the Chinese government yet run by foreign personnel with great independence. Technologies of aids to navigation, which were built and managed by the Customs Service, were considered to be either a public welfare or a portal to the invasion of foreign informal empires. The South Cape Lighthouse demonstrates a case that is different from both. It showcases a more complex relationship among the Chinese empire, American empire, Japanese empire, and the Customs Service, within which competing empires found a common interest in using the lighthouse of the Customs to realize their differing agendas, often at the expense of the Indigenous peoples of southern Taiwan. The political meanings of the South Cape Lighthouse far exceeded what the technologies were created for. Yet, it was the workers of the lighthouse and supply steamers who made the lighthouse last as both an aid to navigation and a multifaceted political object. The advancement of empires depended on these unwitting workers and the transformation of materials into political agendas through their labor. All these processes at state, institutional, and individual levels took place within and because of a maritime and atmospheric environment that was problematic to maritime empires. This study explores how the material and the political shaped and became each other.
Biography: Zelin Pei is a PhD candidate at the Department of History. He is interested in environmental history, the history of technology, and modern Chinese history. His doctoral dissertation examines the technology and politics of aids to navigation in the maritime and estuarine environments of the China Seas and the Yangtze River from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. He is also interested in incorporating the Geographic Information Systems into environmental history.