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Assessing Colonization: Xinjiang and Egypt as Imperial Projects
Abstract by Kexin Cheng On Session II-16  (Asian Connections)

On Monday, November 11 at 2:30 pm

2024 Annual Meeting

Abstract
Xinjiang (lit. the New Dominion) only became Xinjiang in 1759 under the Qianlong Emperor of the Manchu Qing court following Qing’s conquer of the Mongol-ruled Zunghar Khanate, and Qing control of Xinjiang officially ended with its collapse in 1911. Egypt came under the impact of European imperialism in 1798 launched by Napoleon’s expedition whose brief control was superseded by Muhammad Ali Pasha in 1805, followed by British dominion from 1882 to 1956. Both spanned around one and a half centuries and their timeframes overlap for more than one century, thus temporally the imperial and colonial projects of Xinjiang and Egypt are quite comparable. But coevality isn’t the only ground nor merit of the seemingly random juxtaposition of Xinjiang and Egypt. By utilizing Qing sources including imperial edicts, gazetteers, and travelogues, as well as history writings by James Millward, Peter Purdue, Sean Roberts, Rian Thum, Eric Schluessel, Kwangmin Kim, and Joanna Waley-Cohen among others, I will discern comparable counterparts of imperial workings in Xinjiang and Egypt in three domains: knowledge production and representation, economism and capitalism, and discipline and civilization (as a verbal noun). This paper further investigates the staggered foci of writings on Qing imperial power and that of European imperial powers: as the former accents “imperial”, and the latter “powers”. Indeed, to faithfully reflect the recurrence in writings on Qing Xinjiang to open with qualifying Qing as an imperial power and, to a lesser degree, Xinjiang as a colonizing project, I will complicate the designation of Qing as an empire and justify deploying the framework of imperialism to the Qing dynasty. Despite the numerous comparable imperial tactics and instruments shared (or rather devised by each independently) between Qing and European imperialism, scholars on Qing Xinjiang seemed to have been content with citing the edicts and recording enforcements and aftermaths thereof in a somewhat discrete and discreet manner. By contrast, Egypt under the European powers is routinely treated as an archetype of imperialist and Orientalist colonization projects. Elaboration and extensive theorization of the meticulous and pervasive imperial workings in Egypt are seen in Timothy Mitchell and Aaron Jakes among others. Even Said took the 1798 Napoleon expedition as the inaugural point of systematic Orientalist knowledge production. Hence, this paper lastly attempts to identify potential causes and implications of such disparate treatments and representations of imperial powers and colonization.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Central Asia
China
Egypt
Sub Area
None