Seizing Civilization uses the Shanghai Museum as a case study to examine an extraordinary process of art appropriation that persisted from 1949 to 1996 in the People's Republic of China (PRC). At the heart of this story is the museum's destruction of the preexisting art market, its wholesale seizure of privately-owned antiquities, and its sale of these objects on the international market. My findings show that museum employees used these events to create public art collections in the PRC. The Shanghai Museum pioneered the techniques that Chinese museums use to transform craft objects, as well as select ancient paintings, ceramics, and bronzes, into canonized cultural relics. I argue that the application of these techniques explains the erasure of provenance at Chinese Museums, and demonstrate how state cultural institutions render acquisition ledgers, private collecting records, and connoisseurship disputes invisible. I examine cultural relics' transformation into Chinese cultural heritage in five chapters. I first demonstrate how museum employees appropriated private collections during nation-building campaigns such as the nationalization of industries (1956). Second, I investigate changes to the Chinese art historical canon, placing them in the context of art market takeovers, the wholesale acquisition of ethnic minority artifacts, as well as municipal programs in salvage archaeology. Then, in two chapters, I reveal the Shanghai Museum's active participation in antiquities confiscation and divestment during the Cultural Revolution (1966 – 1976), which enriched public art collections on a previously unprecedented scale. I conclude with an examination of the mass restitution of expropriated property in the 1980s and 90s, which underpinned the museum’s dual function as both a preservationist institution, as well as a political and commercial enterprise. The antiquities and events I analyze not only explain the ascendency of a dominant narrative about Chinese civilization, but also reveal the limits, contradictions, and challenges of PRC national patrimony. / History

This dissertation explores the relationship between violence and betrayal in retribution against military and police collaborators who helped maintain Japan’s wartime occupations up until its defeat in 1945. Looking at the approaches taken in the colonies of British Asia, postwar treason trials in the Philippines, and Chinese Communist approaches in wartime and postwar Shandong province, this study argues that the laws and rhetoric of treason were deeply flawed tools for confronting the atrocities of war. At the very moment that war crimes trials were defining a set of acts that constituted crimes against all humanity, around the world thousands of individuals who helped perpetrate them were treated as primarily guilty of crimes against the nation. Each of the chapters in this work examines the costs and consequences of this for postwar societies on the eve of decolonization and civil war. Throughout the territories under Japanese occupation, locally recruited military and police forces comprised the largest category of individuals to face accusations of treason in the aftermath of war, but were also those most likely to be complicit in atrocities. Among the ranks of the disloyal, they were both the most useful as well as the most dangerous to postwar regimes and almost always separated out from other accused collaborators. Their treason was often treated as a disease of the heart which, once cured, allowed them to be deployed once more. Attempts to try them for their betrayal often faced destabilizing political opposition, especially in cases where their wartime actions were carried out in the name of independence from colonial rule, and were almost always reduced in scale to focus on those accused both of treason and atrocities. Marred by the politics of betrayal, the resulting hybrid proceedings failed to achieve a reckoning with wartime massacres and torture. / History

The subject of this dissertation is the life and career of \(Nakano Seig\bar{o}\), a Japanese journalist and politician born in Fukuoka-city on the southwestern island of \(Ky\bar{u}sh\bar{u}\) in 1886. Initially a liberal and a democrat, Nakano became enamored with European-style fascist movements in the 1930s and tried to start a similar political mass movement in Japan. Advocating a hard-line \(vis-\grave{a}-vis\) America and England, Nakano supported Japan’s entry into WW2. As early as mid-1942, however, he understood that Japan could not win the war and demanded that the government sue for peace – a position that put him into direct opposition with Japan’s military. After being imprisoned briefly for his attempt to bring down the \(T\bar{o}j\bar{o}\) cabinet in the summer of 1943, Nakano committed ritual suicide in October of the same year. The dissertation focuses on Nakano’s enchantment with European fascist movements – Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in particular - and his attempts to launch a similar movement in Japan. Nakano’s attraction to fascism was, in part, a reaction to the international economic and political trends following the Great Depression but also reflected his life-long admiration for charismatic political leaders. His fascist leanings were also the result of a complex political calculation that aimed to exploit the appearance of the masses on Japan’s political stage. The thesis argues that Nakano’s attempt to launch a popular mass movement modeled on the European fascist movements failed both because Nakano’s parties (first the \(Kokumin D\bar{o}mei\), 1931-6 and then the \(T\bar{o}h\bar{o}kai\), 1937 – 1943) lacked ideological cohesion as well as truly totalitarian scope and because Nakano refused to resort to political violence as a means to achieve his political ends. / East Asian Languages and Civilizations

Today’s Chinese ethno-nationalism exploits nativist ancestral claims back to antiquity to legitimize its geo-political occupation of the entire territory of modern China, which includes areas where many non-Han people live. It also insists on the inseparability of the non-Han nationalities as an integrated part of Zhonghua minzu. This dissertation traces the origin of this nationalism to the two major waves of scientific investigation in the fields of paleoanthropology and anthropology in the Chinese frontier during the first half of the twentieth century. Prevailing theories and discoveries in the two scientific disciplines inspired the ways in which the Chinese intellectuals constructed their national identity. The first wave concerns the international quest for human ancestors in North China and the northwestern frontier in the 1920s and 1930s. Foreign scientists, such as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Amadeus Grabau, Roy Chapman Andrews, and Davidson Black, came to China to search for the first human fossils. With the discovery of Peking Man, they made Beijing one of the most prestigious places for the study of human paleontology and popularized the evolutionary Asiacentric theory that designated Chinese Central Asia and Mongolia as the cradle of humans. Inspired by the theory and the study of the Peking Man fossils, Chinese intellectuals turned Peking Man into the first Chinese and a common ancestor of all humans. In the second wave, from the late 1930s to the early 1950s, Chinese anthropologists like Rui Yifu, Cen Jiawu, Fei Xiaotong, and Li Anzhai made enormous efforts to inscribe the non-Han people of the southwestern frontier into the genealogy of the Chinese nation (Zhonghua minzu). Their interpretations of the relationship between the Han and the non-Han and between the frontier and the center were influenced by various Western anthropological theories. However, their intensive studies of the southwestern non-Han societies advocated the ethnic integration and nationalization of China’s southwestern frontier. By linking the two waves of scientific endeavor, this dissertation asserts that the Chinese intellectual construction of modern Chinese ethnogenesis and nationalism was not a parochial and reactionary nationalist “invention” but a series of indigenizing attempts to appropriate and interpret scientific theories and discoveries. / History

This dissertation examines the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Japan’s ambitious attempt to create a new order in East Asia. Most studies on Japan’s new order focus on either the imperial center (Japan) or the periphery (individual East or Southeast Asian nations). This dissertation, however, brings together both. It discusses the Japanese effort to envision a postwar world, and at the same time shows how Japan’s new order was mobilized and co-opted by nationalist leaders in the Philippines and Burma. By focusing on dynamic imperial networks rather than simple models of unidirectional diffusion, this dissertation seeks to paint a more nuanced picture of World War II in the Asia-Pacific. Simple dichotomies fail to capture the complicated nature of the Co-Prosperity Sphere. The Co-Prosperity Sphere was neither a mere euphemism for Japanese imperialism and wartime actions, nor a sincere project aimed at the liberation of Asia. Instead, the Sphere is better understood as a process or contest of beliefs, one that could not be controlled by any single group or invading force. This process took shape as an effort to envision a postwar world while in the midst of war. Elites in Tokyo dreamed of a postwar Japan-led international order. Elites in Burma and the Philippines, on the other hand, remained focused on their domestic orders, and viewed independence as of paramount importance. This study highlights the evolution and contested nature of Japan’s new order, and shows how multiple parties—both in Japan and across Asia—impacted the shape the wartime empire would take. Moreover, my dissertation makes an important contribution to the history of empire and decolonization by unpacking the significance of the Japanese interregnum in Southeast Asia. It demonstrates that decolonization in Southeast Asia was more than an unintended consequence of World War II. Whether through extended participation in government, state building measures, or the creation of new governmental institutions, Southeast Asian leaders made conscious use of the Japanese empire to prepare for postwar independence. / History

This dissertation identifies a paradox at the heart of the visual culture of Song-dynasty (960-1279) Buddhism. On the one hand, as the celestial pantheon expanded, it was conceptualized in ever more bureaucratic ways, mirroring the growth of the terrestrial government itself. On the other hand, the boundary separating that supramundane realm from the human world became decidedly more permeable; ghosts and deities became an omnipresent part of daily life. How to treat these two contradictory phenomena--one pointing to rational orderliness, the other pointing to unpredictable unruliness--posed a distinct problem for Song visual artists, spurring the development of new strategies of pictorial representation and forcing reflection upon the nature of representation itself. Chinese Buddhist art was never to be the same again. I argue that the key to understanding these new forms of art lies in the Water-Land Retreat (Shuilu zhai), a massive, icon-filled ritual of decidedly cosmic pretensions. The patterns of practice and strategies of visual representation associated with this ritual constitute a system that radically broke with earlier Chinese tradition. Practitioners of the liturgy created an open ritual syntax that allowed it to take on myriad forms in accordance with its sponsors’ needs, while also allowing it to absorb deities and practices from non-Buddhist traditions. This dissertation examines these phenomena in three parts. Part 1 excavates the social place, methods of practice, and visual profile of the Water-Land Retreat in and around the Song. Relying extensively on paintings from the Jiangnan region, cliff carvings from Sichuan, and numerous liturgical manuscripts, I argue that image and practice are inextricably bound in this ritual. Part 2 focuses on the motif of the cloud in Water-Land-related images and texts. Through an examination of images of cloud-borne descending deities, I contend that this nebulous motif became the locus for reflection on the mediational nature of representation. Finally, Part 3 addresses the bureaucratization of ritual practice and pictorial production in Song Buddhism. I argue that practitioners of the Water-Land Retreat simultaneously embraced and transcended a bureaucratic idiom drawn from Daoism and contemporary government to create a new Buddhist vision of the cosmos. / History of Art and Architecture

Mixture between populations is an evolutionary process that shapes genetic variation. Intermixing between groups of distinct ancestries creates mosaics of chromosomal segments inherited from multiple ancestral populations. Studying populations of mixed ancestry (admixed populations) is of special interest in population genetics as it not only provides insights into the history of admixed groups but also affords an opportunity to reconstruct the history of the ancestral populations, some of whom may no longer exist in unmixed form. Furthermore, it improves our understanding of the impact of population migrations and helps us discover links between genetic and phenotypic variation in structured populations. The majority of research on admixed populations has focused on African Americans and Latinos where the mixture is recent, having occurred within the past 500 years. In this dissertation, I describe several studies that I have led that expand the scope of admixed studies to West Eurasians and South Asians where the mixture is older, and data from ancestral groups is mostly unavailable. First, I introduce a novel method that studies admixture linkage disequilibrium (LD) to infer the time of mixture. I analyze genomewide data from 40 West Eurasian populations and show that all Southern European, Levantine and Jewish groups have inherited sub-Saharan African ancestry in the past 100 generations, likely reflecting events during the Roman Empire and subsequent Arab migrations. Next, I apply a range of methods to study the history of Siddi groups that harbor African, Indian and Portuguese ancestry, and to infer the history of Roma gypsies from Europe. Finally, I develop a novel approach that combines the insights of frequency and LD-based statistics to infer the underlying model of mixture. I apply this method to 73 South Asian groups and infer that major mixture occurred ~2,000-4,000 years ago. In a subset of populations, all the mixture occurred during this period, a time of major change in India marked by the de- urbanization of the Indus valley civilization and recolonization of the Gangetic plateau. Inferences from our analyses provide novel insights into the history of these populations as well as about the broad impact of human migrations.

This dissertation is a study of early Islamicate commerce in natural luxuries of the tropical Indian Ocean and Western Pacific Rim, such as spices, ambergris and pearls, between the ninth and eleventh centuries C.E. I approach this topic by looking at a wide array of textual sources, from geographies, anecdotes, travel narratives, inscriptions, and the records of embassies, to materia medica and the oldest surviving Islamicate cookbook. I analyze these sources alongside material culture, archeological evidence from ports in Iran, Oman, and Southeast Asia, and newly-discovered shipwrecks from the Java Sea. Adapting the work of environmental scientists to the thesis, I locate this early Islamicate commerce within a bio-geographical space, the tropical "Indo-Pacific." I argue that desires for the tropical luxuries of the environmentally-distinct Indo-Pacific helped to define the cosmopolitan culture of early Islamicate societies, from Iran and Iraq to Egypt and Spain. These desires promoted an expanding Islamicate maritime commerce across the Indo-Pacific, which led to the flourishing of port-cities in southern Iran and Oman. This maritime trade expanded Islamicate geographical horizons, as reflected in the evolving "wonders" and geographical literature of the era. It also led to early contacts between the Islamic world and the peoples of the tropical Pacific Rim, a phenomenon that contributed, in time, to the formation of Islamicate societies in maritime Southeast Asia. / Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

This dissertation examines attempts at the revival of Buddhism in India from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century. Typically, Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar's conversion to Buddhism in 1956 is seen as the start of the neo-Buddhist movement in India. I see this important post-colonial moment as an endpoint in a larger trajectory of efforts at reviving Buddhism in India. The term "revival" itself arose as a result of a particular understanding of Indian history as having had a Buddhist phase in the distant past. Buddhism is also seen in the historiography as a British colonial discovery (or "recovery") for their Indian subjects viz. a range of archaeological and philological endeavors starting in the early decades of the nineteenth century. I argue that there was a quite prolific Indian discourse on Buddhism starting from the late nineteenth century that segued into secret histories of cosmopolitanism, modernity, nationalism and caste radicalism in India. In this context I examine a constellation of figures including the Sri Lankan Buddhist ideologue and activist Anagarika Dharmapala, Buddhist studies scholars like Beni Madhab Barua, the Hindi writer, socialist, and sometime Buddhist monk Rahula Sankrityayana, the first Prime Minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru and Ambedkar himself among others, to explicate how Buddhism was constructed and deployed in the service of these ideologies and pervaded both liberal and radical Indian thought formations. In the process, Buddhism came to be characterized as both a universal and national religion, as the first modern faith system long before the actual advent of the modern age, as a system of ethics that espoused liberal values, an ethos of gender and caste equality, and independent and rational thinking, as a veritable civil religion for a new nation, and as a liberation theology for Dalits in India and indeed for the entire nation. My dissertation is about the people, networks, ideas and things that made this possible. / History

This dissertation examines three contemporaneous religious philosophers active in early modern South Asia: Muhibb Allah Ilahabadi (d. 1648), Madhusudana Sarasvati (d. 1620-1647), and the Safavid philosopher, Mir Findiriski (d. 1640/1). These figures, two Muslim and one Hindu, were each prominent representatives of religious thought as it occurred in one of the three pan-imperial languages of the Mughal Empire: Arabic, Sanskrit, and Persian. In this study, I re-trace the trans-regional scholarly networks in which each of the figures participated, and then examine the various ways in which their respective networks overlapped. The Chishti Sufi Muhibb Allah, drawing from the Islamic intellectual tradition of wahdat al-wujud, engaged in "international" networks of Arabic debate on questions of ontology and metaphysics. Madhusudana Sarasvati, meanwhile, writing in the Hindu Advaita-Vedanta tradition, was busy adjudicating competing interpretations of the well-known Sanskrit text, the Yoga-Vasistha. Mir Findiriski also took considerable interest in a shorter version of this same Yoga-Vasistha, composing his own commentary upon a Persian translation of the treatise that had been undertaken at the Mughal imperial court. In this Persian translation of the Yoga-Vasistha alongside Findiriski's commentary, I argue, we encounter a creative synthesis of the intellectual contributions occurring within Muhibb Allah's Arabic milieu, on the one hand, and the competing exegeses of the Yoga-Vasistha circulating in Madhusudana's Sanskrit intellectual circles, on the other. The result is a novel Persian treatise that represents an emerging "sub-discipline" of Persian Indian religious thought, still in the process of formulating its basic disciplinary vocabulary as drawn from these broader Muslim and Hindu traditions.