I take the New Policies period (1068-1085) to be a critical juncture in Chinese history during which, for the first time, the Chinese state initiated systematic intervention into the market. This period witnessed the failure of plans to shape the collective action of bureaucrats and coordinate market actors through a host of organizing mechanisms. I explain why the policy makers in this historical process failed to incorporate and organize the ideas and interests of social actors, political elites and relevant bureaucracies into the state’s authoritative action. I argue that this failure was an outcome of the interaction between the political philosophy of the drafters of the New Policies and their historical context. In particular, it was a result of the incapacity of the drafters’ worldview to correctly explain and resolve unexpected problems in the policy environment, including the influence of political philosophies that were in fundamental conflict with the ideas of Wang Anshi, as well as the reaction of political elites to the New Policies, the rationales and behavioral modes of bureaucrats in financial markets and state monopolies, and unpredictable changes in the marketplace that bedeviled bureaucrats.

The dissertation examines the history of modern design in early 20th-century China. The emergent field of design looked to replace the specific cultural and historical references of visual art with an international language of geometry and abstraction. However, design practices also, encouraged extracting culturally unique visual forms by looking inward at a nation’s constructed past. The challenge of uniting these dual, and seemingly contradictory, goals was met in a collaborative book cover design project between Lu Xun (1881-1936), China’s most influential modern writer, and Tao Yuanqing (1893-1929), a painter who transformed ancient motifs into a transnational vocabulary of modern design. As the title suggests, the dissertation provides a history of modern Chinese design in four chapters, with the Lu Xun-Tao Yuanqing collaboration at its core. The investigation begins with the moment of culmination, wherein Lu Xun and Tao Yuanqing’s intersubjective dynamic allowed for evocative yet inscrutable book cover designs to be created. In the new medium of design, the writer’s anxiety regarding the inadequacy of language converged with the artist’s desire for ambiguity in art. The critical analysis then moves back to earlier instances of design and examines how the history of design in China was inflected by the World Exposition, Japan, art education, and commercial art. The inquiry finally moves forward to the discussion of Tao Yuanqing’s art and design’s relationship with a range of discursive fields in aesthetics and literary criticism, including modern notions of beauty, childlikeness, empathy, the native soil movement, cosmopolitanism, symbolism, and ambiguity in art. This part reveals how Tao Yuanqing’s innovations ironically endorsed while simultaneously subverting contemporary interpretive efforts. / History of Art and Architecture

Imperial Japanese soldiers were notorious for following their superiors to certain death. Their enemies in the Pacific War perceived their obedience as blind, and derided them as “cattle”. Yet the Japanese Army was arguably one of the most disobedient armies in the world. Officers repeatedly staged coups d’états, violent insurrections and political assassinations, while their associates defied orders given by both the government and high command, launched independent military operations against other countries, and in two notorious cases conspired to assassinate foreign leaders. The purpose of this dissertation is to explain the culture of disobedience in the Japanese armed forces. It was a culture created by a series of seemingly innocent decisions, each reasonable in its own right, which led to a gradual weakening of the Japanese government’s control over its army and navy. The consequences were dire, as the armed forces dragged the government into more and more of China in the 1930s, and finally into the Pacific War. This dissertation sheds light on the underground culture of disobedience that became increasingly dominant in the Japanese armed forces, until it made the Pacific War possible. Using primary sources in five languages, it follows the Army’s culture of disobedience from its inception. By analyzing more than ten important incidents from 1860 to 1931, it shows how some basic “bugs” programmed into the Japanese system in the 1870s, born out of genuine attempts to cope with a chaotic and shifting reality, contributed to the development of military disobedience. The culture of disobedience became increasingly entrenched, making it difficult for the Japanese civilian and military leadership to cope with disobedient officers without paying a significant political price. However, every time the government failed to address the problem, it became more acute. Finally, disobedient military officers were able to significantly influence foreign policy, pushing Japan further towards international aggression, limitless expansion, and conflict with China, Britain and the United States. / History

This dissertation explores the medicinal use of poisons in China from the third to the tenth century, which is when the major outlines of Chinese toxicological thought took shape. Challenging a widespread view that contrasts the benign naturalness of Chinese herbal remedies with the dangerous side effects of Western synthetic drugs, my research highlights the centrality of poisons to the practice and theory of medicine in China. Chinese doctors regularly relied on a large number of substances that they recognized as toxic to combat sickness, and identified toxicity as the central pillar for the classification of drugs. I argue that the boundary between poisons and medicines was always hazy in medieval China; it was not the substance itself, but how it was used and experienced that mattered. To examine this crucial yet ignored feature of Chinese medicine, my dissertation develops the following themes. The first is that drugs in medieval China were not fixed entities with unique effects. The effect of a given substance—whether it healed as a medicine, or sickened or killed as a poison, or altered a person in myriad other ways—varied both with usage and with processing. Subsequently, Chinese doctors developed a variety of techniques (the dosage, the drug combination, and the drug preparation) to mitigate the toxicity of a poison while preserving its therapeutic potency. Secondly, I highlight the intimate relation between bodily experience and the understanding of poisons. By studying the alchemical practice of ingesting toxic minerals, I show that the violent bodily effects induced by these substances were often perceived as confirmations of efficacy rather than worrying signs of pathology. My third theme is the circulation of toxicological knowledge across geographical and social domains. I argue that standardized textual knowledge propagated by the state was fluidly transformed in practice, contingent upon the availability of pharmacological ingredients and the needs of local people. Finally, I turn to non-poisons, especially foods, in Chinese pharmacy, and identify a distinctive character of Chinese medicine—the ingestion of mild substances to nourish the body and prolong life. Chinese medicine thus developed through the interaction of two related, but distinct enterprises—the fight against sickness, and the quest for ever-enhanced vitality. / History of Science

This dissertation examines the life, work, and contexts of noted Urdu writer and Indian cultural critic Ismat Chughtai (1911-1991). By engaging in readings of Chughtai’s texts and contexts, this dissertation presents the first study of its kind, examining Indian secular thought through the lens of an Urdu literary figure. As such, this dissertation offers new perspectives on intersections between popular culture and political and religious thought in modern India through the lens of a celebrated literary figure whose legacy continues to be invoked. I argue that, at its core, Chughtai’s critique of society hinged upon the equality (barābarī) of all Indians. The primacy of “humanity” (insāniyat) over other identities was the keystone of her formation of the secular, and has roots in a tradition that can be termed Islamicate humanism. In the first chapter, “Sacred Duty: Ismat Chughtai’s Cosmopolitan Justice between Islam and the Secular,” I argue that, by rejecting the inferior status of women within Muslim legal codes, Chughtai pursued what she saw as moral equality to a more radical degree than the postcolonial Indian state, which enshrined separate codes of personal law based on religious community. Ultimately, the secular ideals of equality, autonomy and human dignity were the mainstays of her thought, without regard to whether these were pursued through “Islamic” means. In the next chapter, “The Personal is Political: Economic and Sexual Progress in Modern India,” I argue that Chughtai, unlike other members of the Progressive Writers’ Movement, emphasized the link between hierarchical economic injustice and limitations on autonomous sexual choice. In the third chapter, “Reform, Education, and Woman as Subject,” I argue that in her writing, particularly the novel Ṭeṛhī Lakīr, Chughtai deployed narratives of education as foundational to the formation of an emancipated girl, one who liberates herself by rejecting the “old rules” (purānī qānūn). The fourth chapter, “The Many Lives of Urdu: Language, Progressive Literature and Nostalgia,” explores the fate of the Urdu language and Chughtai’s legacy in independent India. Ultimately, this project calls into question assumptions regarding what types of textual and human subjects are considered representatives of “Indo-Muslim Culture” in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. / Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

My dissertation examines the post-1949 transformation of religious and organizational culture in rural Ruian County of the Wenzhou region, Zhejiang. It explores the diversified adaptation patterns adopted by rural religious organizations in order to preserve, reinvent and even expand themselves in the volatile sociopolitical environment of post-1949 China. Based on hitherto unexploited government documents collected from local state archives, memoirs, historical accounts of religious organizations, as well as extensive oral interviews with Ruian residents, I demonstrate that, rather than following a linear and uniform decline that conventional wisdom suggests, religious organizations took divergent paths in Ruian during the Maoist era. The level of religious activities in Ruian and many regions of Zhejiang exhibited fluctuations over time rather than a linear downward movement. The Maoist period, I argue, was both destructive and constructive for religion. By stripping religious organizations of their traditional leadership and economic foundation, Maoist campaigns inadvertently accelerated the organizational reinvention of Chinese religions. Even more far-reaching, the Cultural Revolution dramatically stimulated a quick rise of Protestantism vis-à-vis other religions and fundamentally reshaped the religious landscape in parts of China, making China no exception to the global trend of religious resurgence, despite its isolation at the time. Religion in today’s China and related phenomena, in particular the uneven distribution of religious revival, the development patterns of rural organizations, and state-religion relations, cannot be fully explained without reference to the Maoist legacy. / East Asian Languages and Civilizations

Based on empirical study of newly declassified sources from South Korea, the dissertation examines the Park Chung Hee regime’s (1961-1979) policies related to chaju kukpang, or “self-reliant national defense,” from the late-1960s through the 1970s. In response to North Korea’s provocations in 1968 and the US reduction of troops stationed in South Korea in 1971, the Park regime masterminded an independent military modernization program in which citizens and civilian industries, functioning as the de facto engine of domestic arms production, propelled the emergence of a military-industrial complex. The study examines how regime policies mobilized Korean citizens for the effort and how civilian actors eventually responded by personally investing to fulfill this national project. The author observes that the state transformed civilians through both super-structural and infrastructural processes, as Park’s policies steered both the industrial capacities and the consciousness of the Korean populace along a path toward security independence. The total mobilization effort proceeded through complex mergers, tensions, and negotiations of state goals with civilian ideological and material interests, ultimately forging chaju kukpang as a bona fide national movement. The story of ROK defense industry development offers a prism through which the interplay of polity and society in the course of Korea’s modernization can be reexamined, with an eye to refining prevalent theories and suggesting implications for future research on the Park era. / East Asian Languages and Civilizations

This dissertation investigates Chinese Muslim (Hui) intellectual currents from the late Qing dynasty to the early years of the Communist Republic, 1908–1957. By analyzing a vast number of Muslim reformist journals, Chinese translations of Islamic sources, and diaries/memoirs of intellectuals who were connected to other zones of the Islamic world, I examine the process by which reformists sought to redefine Chinese Muslim identity and revive “true principles of Islam”—both in negotiation with the Chinese state and in conversation with local and transnational intellectual currents. In particular, this dissertation considers the ways in which intellectuals struggled to “awaken” Chinese Muslims so as to transform their past identity as Muslim subjects of the Qing Empire into “politically conscious and active” citizens of the Chinese Republic. Chinese Muslims were defined either as a religious community or an ethnic group (minzu), and this debate occupied the minds of reformist intellectuals in this period, the topic of the first two chapters. How it was settled would determine the political, social, and religious status of the Muslim community in China, where definitions of nation and ethnicity/race were constantly reassigned. Debates concerning Muslim integration into China hinged on their connection to the global Muslim community (umma). Newly introduced technologies of travel and communication, such as the steamship and print, facilitated Chinese Muslims’ participation within transnational and cross-confessional networks. I argue that it was through the selection, appropriation, and adaptation of ideas from the prominent centers of the Islamic world that these intellectuals navigated a path of integration in the Chinese context that did not put their distinct Muslim identity at risk. From these diverse sources, they were determined to find solutions to the challenges they faced in China—whether posed by the hegemonic discourse of the Nationalist Party or the iconoclastic New Culture Movement. In successive chapters, I focus on the intellectual connection of Chinese Muslims to the Kemalist secularism of Turkey, the Ahmadi movement of India, and Egyptian reformist currents. Thus, I demonstrate how a seemingly “peripheral” Muslim community in the Far East participated in complex transnational networks at a critical moment of transformation. / Inner Asian and Altaic Studies

This dissertation is the first major study of a slave trade that captured up to one million slaves along the Russian and Iranian frontiers over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries alone. Slaves served as farm-workers, herdsmen, craftsmen, soldiers, concubines, and even, in rare cases, as high-ranking officials in the region between the Caspian Sea and westernmost China. Most of these slaves were Shīʿites who were captured by Sunni Turkmens and sold in Central Asian cities and towns. Despite the Central Asian slave trade’s impressive dimensions, and the prominent role of slaves in the region’s history, the topic remains largely unstudied by historians of the region and of the broader Islamic world. Drawing on unpublished autobiographical sources and eyewitness accounts, I argue that slaves’ resistance and resourcefulness helped to define the contours of the slave labor system and played a key, unacknowledged role in their emancipation. While previous studies of slavery in the Muslim world have emphasized the role of colonial governments in fostering abolition, I argue that slaves in Central Asia, by fomenting the largest slave uprising in the region’s history, triggered the abolition of slavery in the region as a whole. / Inner Asian and Altaic Studies

This dissertation argues for the importance of knowledge production for understanding the relationship between the Russian Empire, the Qing Dynasty, and European actors, from the mid-seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. It focuses specifically on intelligence-gathering, including espionage, as a genre of intellectual work situated in state institutions, oriented toward pragmatic goals, and produced by and for an audience of largely anonymous bureaucrats. It relies on archival sources from Moscow, St. Petersburg, Paris, London, and Rome, as well as published materials. The dissertation begins by investigating how seventeenth-century Siberians compiled information about China, and how maps and documents were transmitted first to Moscow and then to Western Europe to be republished for wider audiences. It then examines the post-Petrine shift to more specialized forms of intelligence-gathering, focusing on industrial espionage in the Moscow-Beijing trade caravan. As the dissertation shows, the changing priorities of the Russian intelligence gathering apparatus shaped and often crippled the ability of Russian Qing experts to address wider audiences. On the mid-eighteenth-century Russo-Qing border, the dissertation follows the building of a robust Russian intelligence network in Qing Mongolia amid unprecedented inter-imperial tension, and its ultimate failure to achieve desired geopolitical ends. These intelligence failures are then shown to provide a compelling new explanation for the collapse of European imperial attempts at diplomacy in East Asia in the last third of the eighteenth century. Finally, the dissertation concludes by showing how, by means of strategic forgetting, intelligence was reconstructed into academic sinology during the reign of Alexander I. / History