Pat Giersch
Edith Stix Wasserman Professor in Asian Studies and Professor of History
Historian of China/Inner Asia; research on intersection of empire and ethnicity in the 1700s, and on the links between business, state-building, and inequality in the 20th century.
In earlier work, I sought to understand the early modern origins of China's ethnic diversity, a project culminating in Asian Borderlands, a book on conquest, migration, and cultural encounters in China's Southwest. More recently, I have investigated why modern China’s economic development has produced extraordinary geographical and ethnic inequality. Corporate Conquests, published in 2020, answers this question through three interrelated stories. The first is one of village entrepreneurs who struck it rich by building powerful companies that reached deep into Southwest China’s diverse communities. The second is one of Yunnan Province’s interwar technocrats who, influenced by global ideas and local prejudices, created China’s most innovative state-run enterprises, but also managed development as a civilizing mission designed to subjugate minority communities living in the borderlands. The third is one of Yunnan’s ethnic Tai elites who followed transnational anti-colonial movements and conceived an alternative future of inclusive development that empowered local communities. These stories unfolded from the 1870s to the 1950s, and provided China’s Communist Party with options. In the end, the Party chose the civilizing mission, merged the private companies into a powerful state-led network of control over resources and people, and ignored the possibilities for inclusivity and empowerment, especially in the many minority communities across China's vast western regions.
I teach a range of courses designed to help students investigate how historical developments have shaped China, East and Inner Asia, and the globe. These courses include a comparative survey of China, Japan, and Korea; an introduction to China’s business and economic history; and a specialized seminar on the Qing (China’s last dynasty), its empire of conquest, and the empire’s legacies for modern China. The courses emphasize acquisition of crucial skills: knowledge of methods used for reconstructing the past, an understanding of the contingent processes of change, and the ability to think critically about the relationship between past and present.
BOOKS
Corporate Conquests: Business, the State, and the Origins of Ethnic Inequality in Southwest China, Stanford University Press, April 2020.
Asian Borderlands: The Transformation of Qing China's Yunnan Frontier, Harvard University Press, June 2006.
COURSES
HIST205 The Making of the Modern World Order
HIST274 China, Japan, and Korea in Comparative and Global Perspectives
HIST277 China and America: Evolution of a Troubled Relationship
HIST278 Reform and Revolution in China, 1800 to the Present
HIST280 Topics in Chinese Commerce and Business
HIST 371 Legacies of Conquest: Empires in Chinese & World History
Education
- B.A., Dartmouth College
- Ph.D., Yale University
Current and upcoming courses
This course introduces in-depth study of powerful empires and their legacies. We focus on Qing-era China (1644-1912) asking how its leaders built China’s most expansive, durable, and ethnically diverse empire. We then consider the still incomplete efforts to reconfigure the empire as a Chinese nation, a process challenged by Tibetan, Uyghur, and Hong Kong citizens. Topics include institutions for segregating and representing diverse communities; the role of international commerce and technologies; the challenges of modern nationalism and European colonialism; methods for envisioning a new, multiethnic China led by a Han majority; and ways that Hong Kong, Islam, and Tibetan Buddhism are perceived as challenges. Readings in Ottoman, American, and South Asian history bring comparative perspectives and prepare students for research on world regions of their choice.
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This foundational course in international history explores the evolution of trade, competition, and cultural interaction among the world's diverse communities, from the Mongol conquests of the late thirteenth century through the end of the twentieth century. Themes include: the centrality of Asia to the earliest global networks of trade and interaction; the rise of European wealth and power in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; empires; imperialism and its impact; the evolution of the nation-state; scientific and industrial revolutions; and "modernization" and the new patterns of globalization during the late twentieth century. Attention to agents of global integration, including trade, technology, migration, dissemination of ideas, conquest, war, and disease.