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Bukharan Trade Networks in Eurasia  

Erika Monahan

Bukharan trade networks functioned as significant conduits to the movement of goods and people throughout Eurasia. Evidence of trade activities of Bukharans in the early modern period extends from the northern shores of Russia, east to China, and south to the Caspian, Iran, and the Indian subcontinent. In the Russian Empire Bukharan merchants became a privileged diaspora community that played a significant role in commercial life of Siberia. In Siberia theyoften maintained commercial and religious ties with their Central Asian communities; they seemed in some cases to established close ties with the Siberian Tatar community as well. Bukharan merchants were not necessarily from the city of Bukhara per se, but rather, probably due to the prestige of Bukhara, the Russian imperial state applied the moniker Bukharan (Bukharetin–singular; Bukhartsy–plural) to merchants that hailed from a variety of Central Asian cities and towns. In Siberia, some Bukharans served the Russian imperial state not only as merchants but also in the service of Russian imperial commercial and diplomatic administration. They served the Russian imperial state in various roles, includingin the customs administration and diplomacy. Commercial and spiritual reasons brought this diaspora community to Siberia. While the Russian state courted Bukharan immigration to Siberia for the economic benefits they could bring, Bukharan immigration to Siberia predated the Russian conquest. Bukharans came as proselytizers to Islam at the behest of Siberian Khan Kuchum, if not earlier. State policy toward them reflected a larger state economic strategy of building and maintaining an expanding empire and the army necessary to the project through activist commercial policies. Bukharans played integral roles in Siberian life yet maintained a distinct Bukharan identity. While their integrated economic life resembled that of Russians enough to elicit strong pressures to rescind their tax advantages, Bukharans defended their rights before the state and before their neighbors with savvy and enjoyed various tax privileges into the early 19th century. Although Bukharans lost market share to the Armenians in Astrakhan and the establishment of direct Russian involvement in theRusso–China trade undermined their role in that trade, Bukharan trade networks continued to be an important part of Eurasian commerce. Bukharans may have increased the share of European wares in their trade portfolios, for example. . Meanwhile, Siberian and transit Bukharans continued to cooperate generations after Siberian Bukharans had been settled in the Russian Empire. In short, Bukharans provided simultaneously adaptive to their new homeland and changing market conditions while, at the same time, maintaining the mercurial distinctness of a mercantile diasporic community. Despite their long-standing roots and presence in the Russian Empire, the imperial state counted them as a distinct population as late as the empire-wide census of 1897. That Bukharans were only subsumed into the category of Tatars by the Soviet state testifies to their enduring presence as a distinct group in the Russian Empire.

Article

The China-Russia Trade through Nerchinsk and Kiakhta  

Ilya Vinkovetsky

Direct bilateral trade between the Romanov and the Qing Empires began officially with the signing of the Nerchinsk treaty in 1689. State-sponsored caravans initiated in European Russia traveled the lengthy continental route from European Russia across Siberia and the Gobi, arriving in Beijing to conduct trade. But by the second quarter of the 18th century, caravan trade was disrupted by a new arrangement, initiated by the Qing, that in the long term proved more agreeable to both empires: the two sides agreed to demarcate their common border, enforce and patrol it more effectively, and establish a new trading post on the Mongol/Transbaikal frontier. Caravan trade was subsequently phased out, replaced by the more efficient trade at the border hub of Kiakhta, where virtually all of the China-Russia trade was conducted almost exclusively by barter. Strict barter regulations, which became a distinguishing characteristic of the “Kiakhta system,” remained in place into the 1850s. Trade at Kiakhta expanded in the 18th century, and in the 19th century, when growing volumes of tea replaced silk, rhubarb, tobacco, and luxury goods as the chief Chinese export, it boomed. In the early years of China-Russia trade, the Russians offered furs almost to the exclusion of any other exports. But as the populations of the fur-bearing animals plummeted, they diversified their offerings. Textiles and light manufacturing came to play an increasingly important role in the 19th century. The result was that Kiakhta trade stimulated manufacturing in Russia and tea-growing agricultural economy in China. Affecting fashions, tastes, and customs, the exchange of commodities (furs, tea, rhubarb, tobacco, cloth, etc.) led to important changes in Russian and Chinese societies and economies. Ongoing trade between the Qing and the Romanov empire-states, conducted on the Buryat/Mongol frontier, also supported colonization and development, stimulated imperial expansion, and had far-ranging ramifications for the indigenous peoples of the Transbaikal region, Mongolia, Siberia, and Central Asia. Geopolitical changes of the late 1850s, culminating in the 1860 treaties that overturned the rules of China-Russia trade, put an end to Kiakhta’s status as a funnel of transregional and global trade.

Article

The Classical Silk Road: Trade and Connectivity across Central Asia, 100 BCE–1200 CE  

Valerie Hansen

The Silk Road refers to all the overland routes connecting the major oasis kingdoms of Central Asia including Dunhuang, Turfan, Khotan, and Samarkand to their neighbors: the Chinese landmass, the Mongolian grasslands, the Iranian plateau, and the Indian subcontinent. The best-known routes ran east-west, but the north-south routes to the nomadic states of the Asian grasslands were also important. In the popular view of the Silk Road, extensive camel caravans carried goods over long distances, but this was rarely the case. Usually peddlers carried mostly local goods short distances. Government shipments to provision armies profoundly affected the region’s economy, because they involved much larger quantities than in the peddler trade. Rulers regularly exchanged envoys who carried gifts, exchanges that continued even when private trade fell off. Whatever the reason for an individual’s trip, almost everyone—whether envoy, missionary, artist, craftsman, or refugee—bought and sold goods to pay for travel along the Silk Road. Silk was not the primary commodity traded on these routes. Goods traveling east included ammonium chloride, paper, silver, gold, glassware, and aromatics such as spices, incense, and fragrant woods. Goods traveling west out of China included bronze mirrors, other metal goods, and paper, in addition to silk. Between 300 and 1000 ce, the most important function of silk was as a currency, not as a trade good, although it remained an important export throughout the period. A vibrant series of cultural exchanges occurred alongside these commercial exchanges. Technologies, medicine, plants, music, and fashion all moved in both directions across Central Asia. Multiple religions also entered China during this time. The term Silk Road may not be the most accurate term for these commercial and cultural exchanges, but, despite its flaws, the term has secured a firm place in both scholarly works and the popular mind.

Article

Commerce in Qing Central Asia, 1644–1864  

Kwangmin Kim

After a long decline beginning in the early 15th century, Sino-Central Asian trade witnessed an upward trend as of the late 17th century. The tea-horse trade between the Qing government and small Tibetan tribes in northwestern China was the first significant type of Sino-Central Asian trade during the Qing period. Despite the fact that the Qing largely discontinued this trade in the early 18th century, Central Asian and Chinese smugglers still carried on the tea trade. Meanwhile, the Zunghar Khanate forced the Qing to open tribute trade in the 1670s, expanding the venue for the Sino-Central Asian trade. The destruction of the khanate in the 1750s led to further expansion of the Sino-Central Asian trade, as the simultaneous expansion of the Qing and Russian Empires in Central Asia provided a stimulus. The Qing Empire’s initiatives to support its military in Xinjiang, including annual injections of silver into Xinjiang, provided a boost to the local agriculture and commerce there. The Russian expansion in Siberia along the Irtysh River and Russia’s decision to utilize Siberian towns as new bases for trade with China led to growth of trade between Xinjiang and Siberia. The long-standing pattern of Sino-Central Asian trade—the exchange of Central Asian horses and animals for Chinese tea and silk—remained dominant throughout the period. But Chinese rhubarb and Xinjiang jade emerged as new items of long-distance trade while the importance of staple goods in the overall trade increased steadily. The Chinese merchants emerged as the most dominant player in the trade, primarily due to their command of the supply of tea and rhubarb in the Central Asian market. Altishahri landlords and merchants made adjustments to advance their agricultural and commercial enterprises. Three groups of Central Asian merchants—Bukharans, Andijanis, and Kazakhs—thrived, as they facilitated the Sino-Russian trade.

Article

The Concept of the Silk Road in the 19th and 20th Centuries  

Justin M. Jacobs

The concept of the Silk Road first attained prominence in the latter half of the 19th century as part of European attempts to impose economic and political claims upon the lands and peoples of Xinjiang (also known as East Turkestan, Chinese Central Asia, or Chinese Turkestan). These claims were given cultural substance at the turn of the century by a series of expeditions undertaken by Western explorers and archaeologists, who ventured into the deserts of northwestern China in search of Greco-Indian art and antiquities. The study and display of such artifacts were motivated primarily by a desire to highlight the eastward migrations of Indo-European speakers into Central Asia. When these same expeditions began to reveal the presence of ancient Chinese ruins and antiquities as well, Chinese scholars and officials joined their Western counterparts in the field, using the material proceeds of their excavations to construct competing narratives of the westward influence of Chinese civilization. In the decades since the end of World War II, the concept of the Silk Road has come to dominate popular and scholarly associations with the region, monopolizing everything from the advertising of Central Asian and Middle Eastern cuisine to the names of academic monographs and international string ensembles. The elusive and malleable idea of “the Silk Road” has provided an attractive ideological platform over the past 200 years for major political, economic, and cultural actors throughout Eurasia to assert their imagined historical importance across both time and space, often with a highly romanticized gloss. In that sense, it is a purely modern intellectual construct, one that would have been utterly unfamiliar and likely incomprehensible to those historical agents it purports to describe.

Article

Environmental Approaches to Soviet Central Asia  

Sarah Cameron

The vast region known as “Soviet Central Asia” encompassed the territory of five Soviet republics, Kazakhstan, Kirgizia, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. Because of the region’s environmental features, particularly its aridity, historically there had been a close linkage between people and the environment in this region. But the Soviet regime set out to radically reshape this relationship, focusing on the fields of agriculture and animal husbandry, large-scale water engineering, nuclear and biological weapons testing, and medicine and public health. By focusing on the environmental impact of these policies, scholars can see how Moscow’s efforts brought many benefits to the region. Cotton production boomed, and Moscow declared the eradication of malaria. But they also left horrific scars. Josef Stalin’s program of agricultural collectivization devastated Kazakhstan, resulting in the death of more than 1.5 million people. The Aral Sea, once one of the world’s largest bodies of water, began to shrink dramatically during the Soviet era, a development due in large part to Moscow’s efforts to divert the waters that fed the sea to cotton production.

Article

Environmental Change and Chinese Empire  

David A. Bello

Agriculture—especially grain cultivation—informed the primary environmental ground of imperial China (221 to 1912 ce) and was ideally intended to produce human habitat from state-supervised environmental change. The consequent political and socioeconomic development of the empire and its constituent dynasties was conditioned within larger global ecological contexts that can be abbreviated as two major climate shifts, the Medieval Warm Period (MWP, c. 1000–1300 ce) and the Little Ice Age (LIA, c. 1400–1900 ce). Before 1000 ce, China likely experienced a number of less prolonged alternations of cold and warm climate, such as the Sui-Tang Warm Period (650–700 ce). Chinese empire’s adaptations in response were rooted in agriculture, augmented by agro-pastoral and pastoral measures mainly concentrated along and above north China’s steppe ecotone. Critical inputs for the sustainability of environmental relations were maintained throughout the imperial period and came from domestic and foreign sources—most critically including the fertile eroded silt of the north China Loess Plateau, the water resources of the Yellow and Yangzi river basins, a high-yield crop suite of both dryland and wet rice varieties, south China fast-growth tree species, and New World silver and highland crops. Ongoing development and exploitation of these resources across the succession of seven major—and over a dozen more localized—dynasties over two millennia allowed China’s population to expand at globally unprecedented rates, numbering from tens of millions around the year 0 ce to hundreds of millions during the 18th century. In the process, biodiversity—especially that of wild growth forest habitats—was steadily reduced from north to south, successively. The empire’s main resource base and population centers correspondingly relocated south of the Yangzi around the watershed Song (960–1279 ce) period, with the Grand Canal tapping both of China’s major rivers to deliver southern abundance as far north as Beijing by the Yuan (1279–1368 ce). Inner and Southeast Asian peripheries came under comparable agro-commercial developmental pressure only during the Ming–Qing period (1368–1912 ce). With the onset of the 19th century, however, destabilizing environmental pressures emerged across the empire, many of them paradoxically driven by once-effective adaptations.

Article

Environment, Demographics, and Economy in Qing China  

David A. Bello

The Manchu rulers of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912), China’s last, ruled an ethnic diversity of peoples throughout both Inner Asia and China proper. In the process, networks of environmental relationships were formed across Mongolian steppes, Tibetan and Southeast Asian highlands, Manchurian forests, and alluvial plains in the empire’s core, China proper. The dynasty’s main environmental efforts were devoted to the lowland agrarian concentration of water and grain. Yet the empire’s sheer extent also required management of agro-pastoral, pastoral, foraging, and swiddening relations—pursued under conditions of global cooling in the Northern Hemisphere, known as the Little Ice Age. Mineral inputs from foreign and domestic sources, as well as New World crops, were critical not only for the dynasty’s material development, but also entailed debilitating costs—most particularly deforestation and soil erosion. As it adapted to dynamic demographic and ecological conditions, the dynasty developed many structures for the maintenance and resiliency of its environmental relations, which included existential interactions with select animals and plants, to produce the world’s largest population of its time. The Qing achievement can be evaluated differently according to timescales and wide-ranging criteria that transcend crude Malthusian parameters. However, its political and demographic accomplishments must be qualified from an environmental perspective in light of the mid-19th-century breakdown of many of its environmental networks that directly contributed to its demise and that of the 2,000-year-old imperial system.

Article

Indigenous Religions in the Asian Uplands: Perspectives on Landscape in Northeast India  

Claire Scheid

Indigenous religions in the Asian uplands comprise a broad spectrum that includes a variety of unique site-specific practices, rituals, and beliefs. Just as the Asian uplands are a vast territory home to multiple cultures, they are also home to multiple indigenous religions. It is important not to conceptualize indigenous religions as homogeneous or static; rather, they are specific, organic systems particular to a given community that may vary even from household to household in design, praxis, and content. Similarly, it is tempting to presume that all indigenous religions in the Asian uplands must integrate the hilly or mountainous terrain around them into their cosmologies, ontologies, or eschatologies; this is also a fallacy. While some indigenous religions do worship or deify the topography that surrounds them—such as the Lepcha and Lhopo (Bhutia) of Sikkim, India, whose veneration of Mount Khangchendzonga is central to their understandings of the cosmos—others—such as the Adi of Arunachal Pradesh, India, and the Khasi of Meghalaya, India—consider certain upland sites in nature as sacred but do not incorporate them into the framework of their religious conceptualizations or practices in a primary way. To illustrate the variety of indigenous religions found in the Asian uplands, and their independent relationships with, and conceptions of, nature and landscape—and to highlight the diversity extant even between those in close proximity to each other—examples can be found in four ethnic communities (the Adi, the Khasi, the Lepcha, and the Lhopo [Bhutia]), all classified as “scheduled tribes” under the Constitution of the Indian Republic and located in Northeast India. Through a survey of these four groups, it becomes apparent that “indigenous religions” vary greatly in upland (and other) areas—and practically, and ethically, cannot be effectively generalized. It is easiest to glean a working comprehension of the characteristics of indigenous religions in the Asian uplands through recognizing the distinctive qualities of a sampling of individual ethnic communities that reveal great differences despite their geographical similarity. Indigenous religions do not exist in sterile isolation from other “mainstream” religions; boundaries between indigenous religions can be permeable, even if the religions themselves are very different; globalization is changing how indigenous religions are articulated, as they take on new structures for the sake of preservation; and while a mountain may be the center of an upland Northeast Indian religion, equally, it may not be.

Article

The Indus River  

David Gilmartin

The Indus is the westernmost of the great arc of rivers across southern and eastern Asia flowing from the Tibetan plateau, and its watershed today includes parts of China, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. Flowing through a predominantly arid region, it was the site of South Asia’s earliest urban civilization in the 3rd millennium bce. Today, it features some of the most highly developed irrigation works in the world, supporting large agricultural populations on the plains of Pakistan and in northwestern India. Its history has been defined not only by the dynamics of the Indus river system, with its highly seasonal, monsoon-fed flows descending from the mountains, but also by its critical role in defining a transitional zone of migration and mobility situated between central Asia and the Iranian plateau, on the one hand, and the wetter parts of the Indian subcontinent, on the other. Within this context, it played a critical role in the coming of Islam to the subcontinent from the west. Since the late 19th century it has been the site of one of the modern world’s most dramatic irrigation-based transformations, rooted in British colonial canal-building and the opening of large canal colonies for agricultural settlement. What was already the world’s largest, integrated irrigation system was divided between India and Pakistan in 1947 (with the larger part going to Pakistan). The subsequent Indus Waters Treaty of 1960, which was intended to facilitate the continuing management of the river basin, accomplished this only through the intensification of irrigation investment and the maximization of the available water’s “use,” with all the difficult environmental and political challenges that has brought.

Article

Japan and the Ainu in the Early Modern Period  

Noémi Godefroy

The Ainu are an indigenous people of northeast Asia, and their lands encompassed what are now known as the north of Honshu, Hokkaido, the Kuril archipelago, southern Sakhalin, the southernmost tip of Kamchatka, and the Amur River estuary region. As such, Ainu space was a maritime one, linking the Pacific, the Sea of Okhotsk, and the Sea of Japan, and the Ainu settlements were dynamic actors in various maritime trade networks. Hence, they actively traded with other peoples, including the Japanese, from an early stage. Spreading over thousands of years, relations between Japan and the Ainu evolved in an ever-tightening way. These relations can be read in diplomatic or political terms, but also, and maybe even more so, in economic, spatial, and environmental terms, as Japan’s relationship with the Ainu people is deeply rooted in its relationship to Ainu goods, lands, and resources. Furthermore, Ainu songs reveal the importance of the charismatic trade with Japan in the shaping of Ainu society and worldview. From the 17th century, the initial, relative reciprocity of Ainu-Japanese relations became increasingly unbalanced, as the Tokugawa shoguns’ domestic productivity and foreign trade came to hinge upon Ainu labor, central to the transformation of northern marine products. During the 18th century, overlapping authorities and conflicting interests on both sides of the ethnic divide led to the advent of an inextricable web of mutual interdependencies, which all but snapped as the northeastern region of the Ainu lands became the convergence point of Japanese, Russian, and European interests. The need to establish clear regional sovereignty, to directly reap regional economic benefits and prevent Ainu unrest, led the shogunate to progressively establish direct control on the Ainu lands from the dawn of the 19th century. Although shogunate control did not lead to a full-fledged colonial enterprise per se, from the advent of the Meiji era, Ainu lands were annexed and their inhabitants subjected to colonial measures of assimilation, cultural suppression, and forced agricultural redeployment on the one hand, and dichotomization and exhibition on the other hand, before they all but disappeared from public discourse from the end of the 1930s. From the 1990s, within a global context of emerging indigenous and minority voices, Ainu individuals, groups, and movements have strived to achieve discursive reappropriation and political representation, and the past years have seen them be recognized as a minority group in Japan. Given past and ongoing tensions between Russia and Japan over sovereignty in the southern Kuril, and the future opening of the Arctic route between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the Ainu could play an international role in both diplomatic and environmental terms.

Article

The Japanese Empire and Russia, 1868–1945  

David Wolff

As Russia expanded eastward in the early and mid-19th century, it came into increasing contact with the Japanese Empire. In turn, after the modernizing Meiji revolution premised, in large part, on fears of Western countries, such as Russia, the Japanese began to expand westward, leading to further collisions. War was avoided for the first thirty six years, but the next forty years were bloody, with Russia and Japan fighting three times. Although the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 (called the “Japanese-Russian War” in Japanese) has been depicted in Japan as a victory and the apogee of empire, it also put the Island Empire on the road to future wars it could not ultimately win. The USSR was one of the victor nations taking the Japanese surrender on the deck of the USS Missouri anchored in Tokyo Bay in September 1945. Thus, Russia played an active role in both the glorious heights and shattering conclusion of the Japanese Empire. The clashes with Japan also influenced Russian history. Russia’s defeat in every land battle and the loss of two-thirds of its naval forces defied expectations and set off a sequence of events that, among other causes, fatally weakened the Russian Empire, both internally and externally. Revenge would come forty years later. Although Stalin failed to garner many of the fruits of victory he had hoped for, especially in regard to Japan, the very presence of vast Soviet armies in the Chinese northeast at the end of World War II put them in a position to midwife the Chinese communist revolution, mainly by handing over the captured Japanese weapons to Mao Zedong’s army. The meeting of Russia and Japan in the period from 1868 to 1945 gave birth to modern northeast Asia, a region whose rapid and recent rise to prosperity has been riddled with conflicts and controversies.

Article

Japanese Pirates and the East Asian Maritime World, 1200–1600  

Peter D. Shapinsky

Historians translate a variety of terms from 13th- through 17th-century Japan, China, Korea, and Europe as “Japanese pirates” (e.g., Jp. kaizoku, Kr. waegu, Ch. wokou). These constructs reflected the needs of regimes and travelers dealing with a maritime world over which they had little direct control, and often denoted bands of seafarers who based themselves in maritime regions beyond and between the reach of land-based political centers. Seafarers rarely used the terms to refer to themselves. Japanese pirates opportunistically traded, raided, and transmitted culture in periods when and places where the influence of central governments attenuated. However, some innovated forms of maritime lordship that enabled them to establish dominance over sea-lanes and territories at the heart of the Japanese archipelago. Pirates developed expertise in navigation and naval warfare that helped them acquire patrons, who provided access to networks of diplomacy and trade. In the 16th century, some Japanese pirates forged multiethnic crews that seized control of the maritime networks linking East and Southeast Asia. Labels for Japanese pirates also operated as ethnographical, geographical, and historical symbols. Traumatic assaults by waves of Japanese pirates who massacred and enslaved local populations were indelibly etched into the collective memories of Koryŏ–Chosŏn Korea and Ming–Qing China. By contrast, in early modern Japan the eradication of piracy enabled the state to extend its maritime sovereignty as well as to then commemorate pirates as ethnocentric symbols of Japanese warrior prowess.

Article

Kachin Communities in Myanmar  

Mandy Sadan

The term “Kachin” is an exonym that references several subcommunities, all of which have traditionally resided in the northernmost region of Burma (modern Myanmar). The name “Kachin State” for this region evidences this historical connection. Kachin communities are identified as comprising six main subgroups, but the boundaries of these are often contested. Identity politics in Myanmar is complex and highly sensitive, given the ongoing conflicts in which many communities, including those identified as Kachin, have been involved for many decades; it is also ongoing. Kachin communities also have strong cross-border relations with cognate groups of people residing in northeast India, Yunnan, and Thailand, as well as a globally dispersed diaspora, which is particularly large in the United States, Japan, and Thailand. Kachin communities were impacted directly by the experience of British colonial rule from its beginnings in Burma in 1824, even though they were not brought under any administrative system until after full British control over the Burmese kingdom was established after 1885. However, neither British nor Burmese (later, Myanmar) administrations have been able to bring the Kachin region fully under their control. At independence from British rule in 1948, many Kachin elites hoped that there would be a federal system, but as hopes for this diminished with the emergence of a military dictatorship, the movement for resistance gained ground. As many other parts of the country fell into civil war, so too did the new Kachin State. The Kachin Independence Army was founded in the early 1960s and by 1963 had declared open conflict with the Burmese military regime. A ceasefire was signed in 1994 and provided some respite, but as the situation again deteriorated through exploitative resource extraction, environmental degradation, and the social harms caused by the widespread availability of narcotics and opiates, considerable popular support for a return to war was felt. The ceasefire collapsed in 2011 leading to more active conflict. This social and political upheaval over many decades has resulted in dramatic changes to Kachin communities and has impacted their tangible and intangible heritage irreparably. There is a great deal still to learn about the histories of Kachin communities in Myanmar, but to do so will require creativity and long-term support for and engagement with local scholars and researchers.

Article

The Line of Control in Kashmir  

Mato Bouzas

The ceasefire line that has divided the disputed formerly princely state of Jammu and Kashmir (1846–1947) since 1949, following the involvement of the United Nations (UN) to end the first India–Pakistan war for the control of that state, was renamed in 1972 the Line of Control (LoC). The LoC is the result of the Simla Agreement that ended the 1971 war between India and Pakistan and marked the diminishing role of the UN in the conflict. Although the LoC is formally referred to as a border, it is very much contested, not only by the states of India, Pakistan, and the wide spectrum of Kashmiri nationalism but also, more broadly, by those living in the nearby areas on both sides who have been affected by this construct in multiple ways. As an ambivalent border, the LoC not only divides people, land, and resources—separates several political-administrative spatial units—but is also on its own a producer of a space, the symbolic and material meaning of which varies over time. From an initial (thin) line formed to delineate an end of hostilities as part of the Karachi Agreement of 1949, and, presumably, invite further negotiation, the LoC has turned in the two first decades of the 21st century into a (thick) fortress due to technological and military advances that allow a more effective control of territory. India’s fencing of the side it controls after the 2000s, initially to stop cross-border terrorism, re-creates an illusion of state spatiality that also justifies further compartmentalization and incorporation of the space under its control, as has been exemplified in the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act, 2019. The limited cross-LoC mobility for people and goods established after 2005, following the India–Pakistan dialogue, is a highly bureaucratized process. As a result of this monitoring of mobility, the LoC is becoming more border-like.

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Mapping of the Maritime Boundaries at Japan’s Northern Edge in the 19th Century  

Edward Boyle

Japan defined its northern edge against Russia over the course of the 19th century. In earlier periods, an area and people known as Ezo marked the northern edge of Japanese state and society, but expansion of both the Russian and Japanese polities brought them into direct contact with one another around the Sea of Okhotsk. Perceptions of foreign threat accelerated Japan’s efforts to map and know Ezo, and shifted understandings of Japan’s northern edge outwards. Maritime routes defined this new northern edge of Japan, and their traces on the map tied distant locales to the national body. Maritime space was therefore crucial to this expansion in conceptions of the nation, through which the maritime boundary of Japan came to incorporate much of the Ezo region. The mid-century opening of Japan transformed this maritime boundary, which was shaped in the latter half of the 19th century by Japan’s particular situation, even as global and universal concepts were drawn upon to justify its operation. Japan’s participation within international and inter-imperial society conferred upon it the ability to appeal to such concepts for legitimacy, a participation made possible by the state’s efforts to satisfactorily map and administer the boundaries of Japan’s northern edge.

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Rajput Kingship  

Arik Moran

The term Rajput kingship designates the sociocultural ideals and practices that inform sovereignty among the erstwhile kingdoms of northern India. Originating from the mixture of South Asian peasant societies and Central Asian invaders in the second half of the 1st millennium ce, the Rajputs (literally, “sons of kings”) propagated a composite image of sovereignty that conjoined the autochthonous beliefs of agro-pastoralists with Brahmanical (Sanskritic) mores. By the early modern era, Rajput kingship came to be embodied in the image of the heroic warrior-king. This ideal manifested in martial valor, attachment to territory, fidelity to kin and allies, and was epitomized through the notion of self-sacrifice. Having played an integral part in the administration of the Mughal Empire, Rajput rulers adopted additional tastes and customs from the Persian cosmopolis. The consolidation of Rajput kingship in the modern era saw the assimilation of local rulers into the framework of the British Indian Empire as autonomous subjects, becoming the emblematic icons of Indian kingship familiar today.

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Religion and Migration in Rakhine  

Michael W. Charney

The historical migration and religious development in Rakhine (Arakan) up to the end of the second decade of the 21st century is complicated. This region was a crossroads for South and Southeast Asian civilizations and existed at the overlap of the frontiers of Islam and Theravada Buddhism. Existing in an ecological niche with a difficult topography and climate and a low population base, Rakhine social and state formation was built around inclusivity and tolerance. Although for much of its history the dominant religions of the population of the region were animism and then Brahmanism, successive waves of immigrants from both Bengal and Myanmar meant that Islamic and Theravada Buddhist influence was very strong. The early modern kingdom that emerged at Mrauk-U, its main political center, was built on maritime connectivity with the Indian Ocean world and developed a court culture that was both Muslim and Buddhist and ruled over a population that was religiously heterogeneous. Toleration was challenged, however, by the conquest of Rakhine by Myanmar in 1785 and efforts to eradicate local religious autonomy. Things did not improve under British rule after the British annexation of 1826. The Myanmar and British rulers of Rakhine politicized the region’s history and tried to retell the history of the region in ways that excluded some populations and included others, leading to efforts to force the Rohingya out of Rakhine from August 2017.

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Sakhalin/Karafuto  

Naoki Amano

The modern history of Sakhalin Island, a border island between Russia and Japan, has been one of demarcation, colonization, re-demarcation, and refugee resettlement, with a total of four demarcations and re-demarcations since the late 19th century, the first through diplomatic negotiations and the remaining three through war. One of the most significant features of the modern history of the border island is that each time the sovereignty of the islands changed, the population was completely replaced. Four major events shaped the history of Sakhalin Island: the Treaty of St Petersburg of 1875, which de-bordered the island from the traditional international system of East Asia and incorporated it into the modern international system of the West; the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, which resulted in the Japanese acquisition of the southern half of the island; the end of the five-year military occupation of northern Sakhalin by the Japanese in 1925; and the Soviet occupation of southern Sakhalin in 1945. Through each of these occasions, a holistic picture of the modern history of the Russo-Japanese border island can be discerned by focusing on the mobility of its inhabitants, how the inhabitants became displaced and were forced to leave their homes, and how the island was settled by the new sovereigns who replaced them.

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The Sino-Tibetan Borderlands  

Stéphane Gros

The Sino-Tibetan borderlands cover a vast mountainous expanse inhabited by agricultural and pastoral communities of various ethnicities, predominantly Tibetan-speaking groups. An area of mutual interest, rivalry, and conflict, it has been the scene of lively religious and commercial exchanges, remarkable cultural flows, and circulations, which have involved many diverse peoples who were part of varying motley sociopolitical entities (kingdoms, estates, tribal federations, etc.) on various scales. Central Tibet, Mongolia, and China have historically exerted a strong political influence that has greatly contributed to shaping local political formations, religious landscapes, and cultural identities. For a proper understanding of this diversity, an anthropological history of this area cannot be limited to Sino- or Tibeto-centric narratives but needs to take into account multipolar perspectives. However, very few sources provide a borderland-centered history and, where written sources do exist, they generally portray the view held by the centers of power. A more kaleidoscopic view of this mountainous area can complement a social history of Sino-Tibetan relations and of the associated processes that have contributed to shaping the region into a borderland by restoring the multiplicity of historical experiences of the communities in between.