| This dissertation examines the Chinese migration to Inner Mongolia, especially the Hetao/Ordos region, from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century, and explores how the Mongol periphery was transformed by processes of market penetration and state expansion, and how domestic factors such as demographical pressures and ecological crises in China came into play with global forces of trade, capitalism, imperialism, and religion in these processes. The goal is to analyze the social dynamics embedded in the migration process, within the larger context of China's incorporation into the global capitalist and nation-state framework. Building on the recent trends that criticize Frederick Turner's "frontier" model in favor of the "middle ground" and "contact zones," this study seeks to reconceptualize the frontier as a multiplicity of overlapping and crisscrossing borders shaped by a complex set of actors who accommodated, collaborated, clashed, and negotiated with one another. Together they created a set of new property regimes and socio-technical arrangements that paved the way for the administrative integration and cultural homogenization of the Mongol periphery into the Chinese nation-state.;This research is based on an array of source materials in Chinese, Japanese, Mongolian, and European languages, including official archives, local gazetteers, survey reports, travelogues, stele inscriptions, folk songs, and oral accounts. It attempts to recreate the socio-economic tapestry of Inner Mongolia by weaving together a multitude of actors (Han merchants and farmers, Mongol nobles and nomads, Catholic missionaries and converts, and Manchu and Han officials) who became involved in the processes of long-distance trade, land reclamation, community building, and state making. Many of these threads remain underexplored in earlier historiographies that largely focus on the Qing empire-building or relations between Manchu and Mongols, nomadic and settled. By restoring agency to this spectrum of actors, while at the same time addressing issues central to our understanding of late imperial and modern China, this study contributes to the current scholarship that studies the frontiers not only as regions in their own right, but also emphasizes their formative impact on the main course of Chinese history. |
