China Studies Centre, the University of Sydney
5:30pm – 7:00pm AEDT, Tuesday 26 March 2019
Seminar Room 356, Carslaw Building, Camperdown/Darlington Campus, The University of Sydney, NSW 2006
Between the end of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, an opium economy emerged at the borderlands between the Qing and Russian Empires. The growth of poppy cultivation on Tsarist territory and of cross-border opium trade to China happened in the lands between Xinjiang and Turkestan, Manchuria and the Russian Far East. This cross-border activity was linked to the migrations of Chinese, Koreans, Hui, and Taranchis from the Qing to the Tsarist domains. Interactions of Cossacks and Russian peasants with poppy-growers from China shaped peculiar settler societies. After outlining how opium production and trade was embedded in the social and political landscape of the Sino-Russian borderlands, the presentation will focus on how the opium economy interacted with a cycle of wars, state collapse, and reconstruction. It will also analyses attempts by the political powers to prohibit or exploit the thriving opium trade, and how the successes and failures of these policies help to conceptualise cases of entangled imperialisms in modern Asia.
This event is co-presented with the Department of History at the University of Sydney.
About the Speaker
Niccolò Pianciola is Associate Professor of History at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. His research focuses on the social and environmental history of Tsarist and Soviet Asia.
5:30pm – 7:00pm AEDT, Tuesday 26 March 2019
Seminar Room 356, Carslaw Building, Camperdown/Darlington Campus, The University of Sydney, NSW 2006
Between the end of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, an opium economy emerged at the borderlands between the Qing and Russian Empires. The growth of poppy cultivation on Tsarist territory and of cross-border opium trade to China happened in the lands between Xinjiang and Turkestan, Manchuria and the Russian Far East. This cross-border activity was linked to the migrations of Chinese, Koreans, Hui, and Taranchis from the Qing to the Tsarist domains. Interactions of Cossacks and Russian peasants with poppy-growers from China shaped peculiar settler societies. After outlining how opium production and trade was embedded in the social and political landscape of the Sino-Russian borderlands, the presentation will focus on how the opium economy interacted with a cycle of wars, state collapse, and reconstruction. It will also analyses attempts by the political powers to prohibit or exploit the thriving opium trade, and how the successes and failures of these policies help to conceptualise cases of entangled imperialisms in modern Asia.
This event is co-presented with the Department of History at the University of Sydney.
About the Speaker
Niccolò Pianciola is Associate Professor of History at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. His research focuses on the social and environmental history of Tsarist and Soviet Asia.