Peasants Versus Empires: Transnational Civil Justice and Socialist Decolonization in Manchuria, 1881-1957
My first book project offers a transnational history of peasants’ “international law” in the Northeast Asian borderland of Manchuria. Histories of legal modernization in East Asia has often foregrounded the coastal metropolises, where central states spearheaded projects of legal transplantation from Berlin and Paris to Beijing and Tokyo. Drawing on new sources from 18 archives in multiple languages, I present an alternative narrative about the bottom-up emergence of transnational legal modernity by refocusing on frontier “badlands.” Situated strategically between Inner Asia and the Pacific, Manchuria was such a rural frontier in early 20th century Northeast Asia. Migrants traveled into the colonial borderland across the Great Wall of China, through the steppes of Russia, and over the Sea of Japan. Following their paper trail, I demonstrate how, in creative legal campaigns over property and personhood, peasants and migrants helped create a sedimented structure of law that constrained the actions of empires.
Antagonists of the Anthropocene: An Ecological History of Legal Cultures in Northeast Asia, 1.95 Ga – 1976 AD
My next project expands the boundaries of the critical humanistic inquiry by bringing together two unlikely fields: legal history and the environmental/earth sciences. Moving beyond agrarian spaces and farmlands, I ask how the grassroots experience with state property law would look different if we were to turn to the riparian, the oceanic, the pastoral, and the petrological. Drawing on a multilingual legal archives from Manchuria and Mongolia, I aim to offer an ecological history of legal cultures in Northeast Asia. The project also foregrounds the agency of the non-human in shaping state legal regimes in complex ecologies. Incorporating data and methods from the natural sciences, I will provide an experimental narrative which combines changes happening at vastly different time scales – social, legal, and geological – into one snapshot of the entanglement between human legal orders and vagaries of the earth.