Reopening the Fujian coast, 1600--1800: Gender relations, family strategies, and ethnic identities in a maritime world

This study focuses on eighteenth-century southern Fujian as a migrant society on China's southeast coast. The interactions between overseas sojourners and their families in Fujian encompass some of the central themes of this dissertation. It is about Fujianese family strategies in a fluid and unsettled world along the coast as well as across the ocean. The dissertation is also about the tension between the central government and coastal localities that probes the reciprocal construction of state power by ambitious local elites interacting with the imperial bureaucracy. It shows how Fujianese took overseas sojourning as a survival strategy, and how they continued to dream of an open maritime world without boundaries through their negotiations with the imperial state and with authorities in Southeast Asia. Finally, the dissertation emphasizes gender relations in this migrant society, investigating women writers' imaginings of the larger polity beyond the Fujian borders, and the life in "female-headed households" the sojourners left behind.; Ethnicity is a growing key area of research in the New Qing history, not only because the ruling house was Manchu but also because Qing imperial policy attempted to "civilize" the borderland peoples in terms of a Manchu universalism (tianxia yi jia) that encompassed many different ethnic groups. The present project situates the reopening of the Fujian coast in the eighteenth century in the context of that Manchu universalism, to which Fujian elites consciously appealed.; In the dissertation, I juxtapose this fluid maritime community against the women who served as anchors lest their kinsmen float too far from home. I also bring this research into conversation with the characterization of women and overseas migration in the New History inaugurated by Liang Qichao and other intellectuals of the late Qing and early Republic.