Between winds and clouds: The making of Yunnan (second century BCE--twentieth century CE) (China).

摘要

The dissertation distinguishes itself by a global and long-term perspective on a local past. Based on an exhaustive study of imperial records, local gazetteers, archeological studies, travel literature, and works by scholars of America, Europe, Southeast Asia, Japan, China, and Tibet that utilize diverse sources including English, Tibetan, French, Japanese, and Arabic, it explores the process over two thousand years by which Yunnan was transformed from a non-Chinese culture into part of China.; The dissertation is inter-disciplinary, as it incorporates ethnography, commercial history, military history, frontier history, and Chinese colonialism. It firstly demonstrates the significance of Yunnan in the Eurasian communications by conceptualizing the Southwest Silk Road. Secondly, it illustrates how power struggles in eastern Eurasia shaped the fate of Yunnan. Then it examines the transformation of Yunnan in terms of demography, administration, new local identity, and economic-reorientation. The institutionalization of the native chieftain system (tusi zhidu) symbolize the success of Chinese administration; indigenization of Chinese immigrants and sinicization of the indigenous peoples resulted in the formation of the Yunnanese (Yunnan ren), a provincial identity in late imperial China; silver mining, the collapse of the cowry money system, and the copper procurement in the Ming-Qing period show the economic re-orientation. Finally, ethnic identification shows how imperial legacy shaped modern state-building. The above issues tie directly to present inter-disciplinary concerns over the formation and nature of Chineseness, ancient Eurasian communications, Chinese colonialism, frontiers in a comparative context, world-system debates, late imperial China, and ethnic relations and politics in twentieth century China.; This dissertation may serve to demonstrate the feasibility of world history as an alternative to regional and national studies. Firstly, it shows that a large analytic framework is feasible for a doctoral research. Secondly, it argues that a world history approach is necessary to reveal the dynamics of local past that usually is confined within the categories of national boundaries.