The Cartographic Steppe: Mapping Environment and Ethnicity in Japan's Imperial Borderlands (2016)
Christmas, Sakura Marcelle (Author)
Miller, Ian (Advisor)
Harvard University
Miller, Ian
Physical Details: 329 pp.
Language: English
This dissertation traces one of the origins of the autonomous region system in the People’s Republic of China to the Japanese imperial project by focusing on Inner Mongolia in the 1930s. Here, Japanese technocrats demarcated the borderlands through categories of ethnicity and livelihood. At the center of this endeavor was the perceived problem of nomadic decline: the loss of the region’s deep history of transhumance to Chinese agricultural expansion and capitalist extraction. As Japanese occupiers and their collaborators witnessed the social costs of state-led modernization, they began to pursue radical solutions in ethnic cleansing and environmental engineering on the steppe. These chapters show how Japanese administrators strove to reconstitute the relationship between land and nomad through theories of Social Darwinism, Marxian materialism, and cooperative evolution—theories they translated into technologies of rule on the periphery. Nomadism, often cast as incompatible to modernity, actually became integral to its conceit for the empire. Maps acted as the primary idiom through which Japanese planners sought to visualize the borderlands. Using Japanese, Chinese, and Mongolian sources, the dissertation challenges the nation-based paradigms that have come to dominate the environmental history of East Asia. To view the colonies from afar as an extractive frontier removes us from environmental consequences of imperialism as much as it did for those living on the archipelago at the time. Rather, the social scientific theories and land surveying technologies, as discussed in these chapters, combined to disrupt the lives of hunters, herders, and farmers with environmental consequences that persisted into the postwar. As such, the dissertation brings together the seemingly irreconcilable histories of the Japanese empire and the People’s Republic. The narrative here addresses the problematic practice in the literature on Japanese imperialism of overlooking the Mongolian territories as empty space. It also serves as an alternate understanding to the beginnings of the multiethnic framework of the People’s Republic. Instead of only seeing the beginnings of Communist rule as forged in the fires of war against the Japanese, the dissertation also points to the significance of the occupation in shaping the ethnic and ecological bounds of modern China.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Book
David A. Bello;
(2016)
Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain: Environment, Identity, and Empire in Qing China's Borderlands
(/isis/citation/CBB566174997/)
Article
Xiaoxing Jin;
(2022)
The Evolution of Social Darwinism in China, 1895–1930
(/isis/citation/CBB079283075/)
Article
Park, Sub;
(2003)
Transfer of Agricultural Technology from Imperialist Countries to Colonies: With the Focus on the Case of Korea and India
(/isis/citation/CBB000470930/)
Article
Kang, Jin-Yeon;
(2015)
Forging the Colonial State as an Arbiter of Internal Boundaries: Japanese Colonial Rule and the Agrarian Relational Shift in Korea
(/isis/citation/CBB001422237/)
Article
Tsukahara, Togo;
(2007)
Introduction to Feature Issue: Colonial Science in Former Japanese Imperial Universities
(/isis/citation/CBB000760592/)
Book
Kobayashi, Shigeru;
(2011)
Pictures of Foreign Countries: Japanese Empire's Maps on Asia
(/isis/citation/CBB001550705/)
Article
Petronis, Vytautas;
(2011)
Mapping Lithuanians: The Development of Russian Imperial Ethnic Cartography, 1840s--1870s
(/isis/citation/CBB001221478/)
Book
Daniel Foliard;
(2017)
Dislocating the Orient: British Maps and the Making of the Middle East, 1854-1921
(/isis/citation/CBB192403503/)
Book
Eagle Glassheim;
(2016)
Cleansing the Czechoslovak Borderlands: Migration, Environment, and Health in the Former Sudetenland
(/isis/citation/CBB728021043/)
Article
Reut Harari;
(2020)
Between trust and violence: Medical encounters under Japanese military occupation during the War in China (1937–1945)
(/isis/citation/CBB562919694/)
Book
Seok-Won Lee;
(2020)
Japan’s Pan-Asian Empire: Wartime Intellectuals and the Korea Question, 1931–1945
(/isis/citation/CBB330563116/)
Book
Joseph A. Seeley;
Albert L. Park;
(2024)
Border of Water and Ice: The Yalu River and Japan's Empire in Korea and Manchuria
(/isis/citation/CBB726189190/)
Article
Cheang, Sarah;
(2006)
Women, Pets, and Imperialism: The British Pekingese Dog and Nostalgia for Old China
(/isis/citation/CBB000660019/)
Article
Mario Cams;
(2018)
Blurring the Boundaries: Integrating Techniques of Land Surveying on the Qing’s Mongolian Frontier
(/isis/citation/CBB111379837/)
Article
Caroline Humphrey;
(2021)
Mongolian map-making as practice
(/isis/citation/CBB341491599/)
Book
Julie MacArthur;
(2016)
Cartography and the Political Imagination: Mapping Community in Colonial Kenya
(/isis/citation/CBB832005879/)
Article
Manias, Chris;
(2015)
Building Baluchitherium and Indricotherium: Imperial and International Networks in Early-Twentieth Century Paleontology
(/isis/citation/CBB001551823/)
Book
Schlitz, Michael;
(2012)
The Money Doctors from Japan: Finance, Imperialism, and the Building of the Yen Bloc, 1895--1937
(/isis/citation/CBB001320919/)
Article
Lynteris, Christos;
(2011)
From Prussia to China: Japanese Colonial Medicine and Goto Shinpei's Combination of Medical Police and Local Self-Administration
(/isis/citation/CBB001230168/)
Article
Baichun Zhang;
(2018)
The Early Modernisation of Technology in China (1860s–1930s)
(/isis/citation/CBB912588366/)
Be the first to comment!