Xinjiang’s location naturally makes it a focal point of the Silk Road (hereafter SR). But considering that for the first 60 years (circa 1920–1980) of Chinese archaeology—that is, over half of its development—the SR was rarely mentioned in scientific literature, the impact it has had on archaeological studies of Xinjiang remains unclear and poorly understood. With the eponymous Belt and Road Initiative (hereafter BRI) now a decade old and the field of Xinjiang archaeology approaching its centennial, this has become a critical subject of enquiry.

In this article, I recount the history of publication and discourse in Xinjiang, followed by a discussion of recent developments in archaeological practice instigated by the BRI. I contend that consistently using the SR to conceptualize the material record of Xinjiang, a prevalent approach in Eurasian scholarship, is based on flawed and unscientific presuppositions. Even in Chinese discourse today, the SR concept has become secondary to the state objective of building scientific and cultural infrastructure that is Chinese in method and approach, the goal of which is to amplify ‘discourse power’. Although the SR has served as a major banner for unifying studies on cross-cultural contact in Eurasian history, it is laden with complex layers of archaeological history intertwined with a century-old chauvinistic geopolitics that still reverberate globally today. As the scientific role of the SR becomes increasingly muddled, research referencing the SR must navigate the term’s biased presentist connotations to unveil the pertinent historical contexts, or consider alternative frameworks that resist totalizing narratives.

This article offers an explanation for gendered patterns of work in emerging Chinese cotton spinning mills during the early twentieth century from the perspective of household labour allocation. Female workers were rarely employed in mills in the north of the country, but the Yangtze Delta showed a much higher proportion of female factory labour. Whereas many authors have explained women’s participation from the viewpoint of patriarchal culture, or physiological differences, this article brings to the fore another, largely neglected but important, explanatory factor for differences in labour allocation in modern factories during early industrialization: the development of handicraft textile production in sending regions. In districts where household cotton textile production persisted, fewer women supplied their labour to the urban factories. Landholding size, real wages, and local agricultural-industrial structures contributed to variations in the living strategies of rural households, affecting the deployment of female family members. Our argument is supported by analyses of gender wage ratios and rural–urban income disparities in different parts of China in order to expose the opportunity structures under which households decided to supply their labour to modern textile factories.

This article examines the intertwined processes between China’s making of anti-slavery laws and the evolution of international legislation against slavery in the early twentieth century. By tracing international interventions into domestic servitude issues in Chinese communities both in China and Southeast Asia, the article analyses how the international legal regime was absorbed into the domestic laws of late Qing and Republican China. Drawing on two threads of scholarly discussion—namely, the histories of humanitarian internationalism and modern China’s legal reform—this article argues that late Qing and Republican jurists intentionally maintained an ambiguous definition of domestic servitude. This ambiguity served to affirm the humanitarian governance of the modern state while simultaneously preserving social customs, in defiance of international law.

This article examines how the British colonial administration and the local Chinese population interacted around the issue of obscene prints in 1900s–1930s Singapore, with a particular focus on the policing of the female nude. The notion of obscenity acquired different meanings as prints crossed geographical, cultural, and linguistic boundaries. What was deemed ‘obscene’ in Republican Shanghai or Edwardian London was not necessarily viewed the same way in colonial Singapore, and vice versa. By tracing the contradictory assumptions about the relationship between nudity and obscenity in a multiracial and multicultural colonial context, this article demonstrates that obscenity regulation in Singapore was intimately tied to what Partha Chatterjee has termed ‘the rule of colonial difference’,1 with race being the most obvious marker of difference. On an institutional level, the rule of colonial difference led to a division of regulatory labour that ultimately rendered Chinese salacious materials invisible to the British colonial government in the early twentieth century. In terms of definitions of nudity and obscenity, perceived racial–cultural differences—central to the rule of colonial difference—were used both to justify and to contest the public display of naked female bodies to non-Western audiences. This situates the Singapore case within the broader scholarship on obscenity regulation and colonialism, and offers fresh insights into the difference in imperial models of obscenity regulation. By exploring how obscenity regulation was premised on the process of racial ‘othering’, this article also highlights race as an underexplored factor in existing scholarship on obscenity regulation.

In 1934, the much-publicized engagement of Japanese noblewoman Kuroda Masako to Ethiopian nobleman Araya Abebe made headlines worldwide, epitomizing the transnational dream of a racially anti-hierarchical world. Starting from this unrealized wedding, this article showcases the voice of Kuroda Masako, a racially equal imperial feminist who tried to foster her vision of women participating in the empire-building process even in new settings like Ethiopia. By featuring her practices, we are able to understand why they resonated not only in the women’s press but also in a much larger intellectual scene that comprised Pan-Asian and Pan-African activists. Because of such significant resonance across various non-governmental actors worldwide, the Kuroda-Araya engagement became dangerous to state-endorsed agendas in many countries, which were unwilling to countenance an unprecedented alliance between Ethiopia, Japan, and the African American community at the expense of Western and white civilization discourse. As a result, the engagement created a rupture between popular sympathy and the state, eventually resulting in Japan’s official disengagement from Ethiopia well before the Second Italo-Ethiopian War.

This article analyses how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) created and spread new forms of subjectivity and social belonging in the formative years of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) (1949–present). Specifically, it examines how the CCP blended medical and emotional discourses to foster communal hatred of narcotics users and promote social cohesion. Building on scholarship that conceptualizes hatred as a way of producing and animating subjectivity, the article argues that the CCP saw it as a key tool of unification, bringing people together to commit acts of emotional and physical violence against drug users and traffickers. Propaganda officers and police forces worked hard to persuade people to hate drug users and traffickers, writing anti-narcotics songs, plays, and skits to make hating an entertaining and interesting activity for audiences. The article underscores how the CCP encouraged mass participation in the ostracizing and killing of narcotics producers, consumers, and traffickers to spawn a shared social hatred of them, and shows how people responded to state efforts to incite hate. To conclude, the article considers the unlikely agency of some accused drug criminals who resisted the tides of public and state pressure, and challenged their accusers.

The partition of India caused an unprecedented exodus of Hindus and Muslims to the new nations designated for each group. Amid the tempestuous Great Calcutta Killings and the corresponding riots in Noakhali in 1946, many Bengali Hindus living in Noakhali left for Calcutta, leaving their properties behind in what was soon to be the new state of Pakistan. Though many of them longed for home, I argue that displaced Bengali Hindus’ hopes of returning died in the mid-1950s. The article begins by examining the condition of the village of Lamchar in Noakhali at the time of the riots, partition, and afterwards. I then consider Noakhali within the larger historical context of laws relating to properties settlement in East Pakistan and the introduction of passports from 1948 to 1956. Finally, I examine a rare family archive of letters exchanged between Jogendra Roy, a Hindu landowner who fled Noakhali, and Oli Mian, his Muslim neighbour who remained behind. Twenty-six letters sent from Jogendra to Oli document his desire to return home to Noakhali and his later disappointment when this hope was never realized. This dying hope coincided with the East Pakistan government’s decision to take possession of the lands left by those displaced through the East Bengal State Acquisitions and Tenancy Act of 1950. This article concentrates on the complex relationship between Hindus and Muslims, exploring issues of nostalgia, identity, property, and hope, revealing the slow acceptance among displaced Bengali Hindus of the (im)possibility of return.

This article is an attempt to understand the vexed question of how the Boros of Assam have come to define and realize their ‘traditional’ religious identity amid contemporary assertions of Hindu nationalism in India. Since the early twentieth century, shaped by colonial anthropology and the consolidation of Hinduism, there have been attempts to categorize the Boros as either Hindus or animists. Subsequently, there have been efforts on the part of the Boros themselves to assert and consolidate their ‘traditional’ religious practices into a unified religion called Bathou.1 The process has continued in the complex arena of Boro identity assertion. As this article demonstrates, contemporary efforts at the consolidation of Hinduism by the Sangh Parivar and of Bathou by the Boros have often coincided and, at times, collided with each other, therein producing intricate transactions between traditional religionists and the votaries of Hindutva.

This article examines, for the first time, a significant aspect of Bangladesh’s Liberation War in 1971: the fate of ‘stranded Bengalis’ in West Pakistan during and after the war. The war ended with over 90,000 Pakistani prisoners of war (POWs) captured in East Pakistan-turned-Bangladesh, who were then transferred to Indian custody. The government of Pakistan responded by holding hostage roughly the same number of Bengali military personnel, civil servants, and their dependants in West Pakistan as leverage for the return of its captured POWs. Neither group would return home immediately in what arguably became one of the largest cases of mutual mass internment post-1945. Drawing on a wide range of untapped sources, both official and personal, this article traces the trajectory of this crisis of captivity in which the Bengali officials and officers—hitherto serving the Pakistani state—found themselves as rightless citizens with ‘enemy’ status after December 1971. Their wartime experiences, more than half a century after the war, warrant recognition in widening the understanding of 1971, not only in the history of regional and global politics but also at what was arguably the home front—a thousand miles away from the ‘war zone’ in East Pakistan.

Whilst the idea of infrastructure has animated scholarship for the past 20 years at least, there remains a need for more expansive understandings of what infrastructure is, and what it can be. The speed, scale, and material disruptiveness with which many of the infrastructural megaprojects that constitute China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) have been developed both underpin and validate this need. The effects of the BRI are both manifold and diffuse, and all of them expose situations of infrastructural complexity. We see the BRI as an infrastructural layer that comes into contact, competition, and collision with pre-existing infrastructural formations. It is an infrastructural vortex that causes once shared resources and public or common goods to become infrastructuralized in ways that bring about the (re)negotiation of meaning and value. These processes are acutely felt in South and Southeast Asia, where sedimented patterns of religion and belief shape the ways in which the BRI is engaged with and understood. Surprisingly, the sacred dimensions of these infrastructural commons remain unstudied, despite there being evidence to suggest that it is the transformative power of the sacred, rather than of secular modernity, that shapes and structures everyday lives. In this vein, the articles that constitute this special issue explore the sacred dimensions of the BRI’s infrastructural commons through a series of case studies from South and Southeast Asia.

How do ‘communist’ Chinese state companies handle sacredness and religions? What role do religions and sacredness play in infrastructural conflicts? Debates on Chinese investment and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) often highlight the failure of China’s largest-ever hydropower project overseas—the Myitsone Dam, located in war-torn Buddhist Burma (Myanmar) in an ethnic Kachin Christian area. Public outcry against this mega-development led the Burmese regime to halt construction in 2011, shocking Beijing and causing an international scandal. This article explores this infrastructural conflict’s religious, sacred, and more-than-human dimensions. Based on interviews, Chinese media analysis, and ethnographic fieldwork among Kachin people since 2010, the article focuses on the project site—the famous Myitsone confluence, birthplace of the Irrawaddy River. There, local village church leaders helped lead and shelter the very earliest anti-dam resistance, despite military state repression. There also, Chinese state-owned companies encountered Catholicism, Baptism, Theravada Buddhism, and indigenous animist worlds, and described these foreign, rural religious worlds for China’s domestic audiences. Kachin dragon-kin deities, anti-dam activists, and the more-than-human charms of the local natural landscape helped create a sacredness, which the Chinese dam developers could not easily disprove. Throughout, sacred politics shaped this international infrastructure conflict.

Development promises change. It is fundamental to the word both in English and in Lao: an improvement towards a pre-determined goal, but it is a process that is never entirely complete. In the Lao-speaking parts of Thailand, promises of development have formed the key commitments of particular regimes: military and monarchical, neoliberal and capitalist. Each presents a future that is nationally focused, guided by a paternalistic hand, be it that of a general, monarch, or tycoon. Spirits, too, play into such regimes, ensuring that development projects will fulfil their promises and that more such projects will come.

But what happens when these goals shift towards distant centres of power? Here, I examine the magico-religious aspect of these promises. As large-scale hydropower on the Mekong, part of Chinese infrastructure projects, throws the river into chaos, new regimes of development arise. In the realm of popular religion, the link between spirits and development, too, has altered, with old powers’ promises growing stale, and new ones yet to appear.

And between these two conflicting orders of power—orders that collapse state and religious dimensions—emerge different pathways towards navigating the uncertain world: an appeal towards other sources of monarchical authority, a search for survival in a newly shifting and globalized realm, and a waiting for a future as yet unrevealed.

In this article, we explore the material and discursive spaces around the Sinamale’ Bridge, which at the time of its construction was the sole infrastructure project financed by foreign investment in the Maldives archipelago—a distinction it held until recently with the start of the new Thilamale’ Bridge project funded by India. We look at the ways in which this Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) infrastructure project produces, both socially and symbolically, particular and often contradictory conceptions of religion and nation in this ‘100 per cent Muslim’ country. Under the presidency of Yameen Abdulla (2013–2018), mega development projects were envisioned primarily as symbols and sources of economic transformation. Simultaneously, there was a targeted government effort to revive sentiments of nationalism across the country through the circulation of songs, folk stories, and national heroes. Elaborations of the concept of Dhivehinge isthiqlaal (Maldivian national sovereignty) conflated religiosity and nationalism in popular discourse on development. The concept is also used to frame narratives of geopolitical relations and tensions, particularly with reference to the competing regional profiles of China and India, which are often framed in the Maldives along domestic political party lines and pitted against the other as presenting a lesser or greater threat to Maldivian identity. Examining the symbolic deployment of the Bridge through the analytic lens of political theology, we argue that it affords a prominent locus of political contestation around which understandings of religion and national sovereignty come together at both the local level and on the sprawling trans-regional scale of the BRI.

The ‘commons’ has acquired a renewed theoretical currency in recent years as a way of conceptualizing how different beings live together in shared places that are shaped and modified by human and non-human actions and structures. Through socioecological changes, warfare, movements of populations, sacralizations of land, political territorializations, and man-made infrastructures, the topography of any region, as a commons, is a process of perpetual transformation, invested by different flows and communities of humans. In this article, we will consider the positioning of the Lanten Yao (Mun) ethnic group within the Luang Namtha region in northern Laos. In the twentieth century, the Lanten Yao lived through the transformation of the commons into the territorialization and infrastructural building of colonial empires and nation-states, and negotiated the routes and boundaries between Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, and China. Today, the land is once again being transformed through the Belt and Road Initiative, with the construction of Special Economic Zones, two ‘smart cities’, a high-speed railway, and a new speedway only a short distance from the Lanten villages. These new infrastructures are once again leading the Lanten to transform their relationships to their land, other peoples close and far, and distant states and administrations. In this article, we will explore how these shifting relationships to the commons are expressed in the rituals, sacred memories, and changing religious configurations among the Lanten Yao.

In Singkawang, West Kalimantan, the local Chinese Indonesian community is currently engaged in a major Chinese religious revival centring around inter-ethnic spirit-medium practices. At the centre of this revival are processes of recreating Chinese Indonesian identities in relation to both highly localized gods, spirits, and territorially grounded senses of belonging and re-Sinicization processes that relate to transnational circulations of Chinese language education and media circulations within a greater Chinese cultural sphere. As China rises as a global superpower, it is manifesting political and economic hegemony through investments in ambitious infrastructural development projects along the territories within the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), including the Maritime Silk Road (MSR) which runs through Indonesia. Alongside this, members of this socially, culturally, and geographically peripheral diasporic community are realigning themselves symbolically and imaginatively with China as a social-historical force in the world. While the BRI is a multinational, regional infrastructural development programme that consists of both physical infrastructures and corresponding imaginaries of Global China, in this article I develop a case study from the vantage point of what I term the ‘shadow of the BRI’. Existing in this shadow are diasporic Chinese communities with their own networks, connections, and concerns that differ greatly from the state-driven BRI infrastructural development projects. Within this shadow of the BRI, I argue, there is a further shadow—the symbolic infrastructure of Chinese religion, which maintains a figurative connection with China, even when physical connections with China are weak or absent. In this article, I explain how, alongside the material infrastructures of the BRI, the figurative aspects of Chinese religion act as a shadow infrastructure that transports practitioners into a transnational realm of stories, myths, and politics in which divine bureaucrats demonstrate their power (Man. shen and ling) by interacting with and intervening in peoples’ daily lives. Building on existing scholarship that recognizes that the BRI is not merely a composite of infrastructure projects but also an act of the imagination, in which a specific civilizational imaginary of China’s place in the world is being articulated, this article further argues that for diasporic communities who are reorienting their Chinese identities in relation to these civilizational imaginaries, the figurative infrastructure of Chinese religion remains important, despite being in the shadows, as a hidden source of power and structure. In imperial times, political and religious infrastructures were representations of each other and deeply intertwined, forming a yin-yang complementarity. At present the infrastructures connected to the Chinese state and its policies and the figurative infrastructure of Chinese religion are unconnected with each other, comprising two completely distinct worlds that complicate the ambivalent connections to China of the Chinese Indonesian community in Singkawang.

The Tang dynasty is the only period of Chinese history to which the word ‘cosmopolitan’ is now routinely applied in Western-language historical writing. This article traces the origins of this glamorous image of the Tang to the 1950s and 1960s, but also links its current popularity to a more recent increase in the appeal of the concept of cosmopolitanism, as well as the idea of a ‘cosmopolitan empire’ among Western intellectuals since the end of the Cold War. The article then proposes a less presentist and more critical and holistic reading of Tang ‘cosmopolitanism’ as part of a larger, interconnected, multi-centred, and changing medieval world of numerous coexisting cosmopolitanisms, and argues for recognizing the existence of a different but equally important mode of ‘cosmopolitanism’ in the Song.

Qin imperial unification in 221 bce is often conceived of as the ‘unification of China’. Although from the long-term perspective of Chinese history this view is surely valid, it obscures some of the major trends of the Warring States period (453–221 bce). Back then, the Zhou (‘Chinese’) world was moving in the direction of the internal consolidation of large territorial states amid increasing political and cultural separation from their neighbours. This process unmistakably recalls similar developments in early modern Europe, where, as is well known, these resulted in the formation of nation-states. In China, by contrast, the development trajectory was markedly different. The potential transformation of the competing Warring States into fully fledged separate entities never materialized. The unified empire was eventually accepted as the sole legitimate solution to political turmoil, whereas individual states were denied the right to exist. Why, despite strong parallels, did the Chinese development trajectory ultimately diverge so conspicuously from what happened in modern Europe?

In search of an answer, this article focuses on the extraordinary role played by politically active intellectuals of the Warring States period. By prioritizing the common good of ‘All-under-Heaven’ over that of an individual polity, by denigrating local identities, and by rejecting the legitimacy of regional states, these intellectuals paved the way for the political unification of the Zhou world long before it occurred. This article addresses the idealistic and egoistic reasons for this choice and explores the cosmopolitan undertones of the universalist outlook of the Warring States-period intellectuals.

Since 1930s scholarship, the historiography of Kitan Liao has increasingly interpreted ethnicity as a factor in polity and policy, an interpretation that has depended upon retrospective constructions of Liao and Jin by, largely, the Qing imperial court of the eighteenth century. Archaeological evidence now demonstrates that the documentation itself was fragmentary and in all likelihood unrepresentative of the identity concepts that prevailed at various class strata of the Kitan Liao empire. On the ground, prominent aristocrats, including many from the lineage of Han Derang (or the Han of Jizhou), are shown to be derived from the status and wealth of each man in his own time. Identities drawn from ancestry, language, place of origin, or folk customs were characteristic of dependent populations, not of aristocrats. Stratified identities, by horizontal rank and not partitioned vertically by imputed ethnicity, appear to be evident in many histories of northeast Asian regimes from Northern Wei to the very early Qing. They were characterized by a continuous cultural tradition with complex elements, consistent among them reading and writing multiple languages and literatures, horse training and hunting pastimes, and shamanic religious and political practices. Because these elements are associated in modern discourse with distinct language and cultural traditions, this aristocratic culture tends to be seen as variegated and ‘cosmopolitan’ rather than as coherent and continuous.

With the establishment of the treaty ports in 1842, contact between China and the Western world intensified. In Shanghai, the most extensive exchange of knowledge and ideas took place between the missionaries of the London Missionary Society and their Chinese assistants. By working and translating for the missionaries, these traditionally educated men gained intimate insights into the West and Western learning and established close personal relationships with the missionaries. But in the process, they also became outcasts, as working for Westerners was viewed critically by their contemporaries. This article sets out to analyse the way in which Jiang Dunfu 蔣敦復 (1808–1867) and Wang Tao 王韜 (1828–1897) processed and accommodated these cosmopolitan experiences in Shanghai in their prose autobiographies.

Karakorum, in present-day Mongolia, was the first capital of Mongol empire and has often been portrayed as the cosmopolitan city par excellence of its era. This portrayal is primarily based on the description of the city as a multicultural community in a travelogue written by the Franciscan monk William of Rubruck, who spent some time there in 1254. This understanding of cosmopolitanism stems from a colloquial sense of the term and does not take into account its history and layered meanings. Based on a discussion of the term, this article presents an approach to cosmopolitanism suitable for archaeology, namely by examining the practices of ‘lived cosmopolitanism’. Taking the archaeological evidence from Karakorum as a case study, the author explores the cultural fields of city layout and architecture, cuisine, religion, and funerary rites to answer the question of whether and how the people of Karakorum were cosmopolitan. The discussion shows that it is of the utmost importance to distinguish between social groups and their status. While the Great Khans can be viewed as cosmopolitans of their time, the commoner population of Karakorum appears rather to have been segregated into different groups. The material evidence so far points to low degrees of engagement among different groups within the city. Yet, the discussion of cosmopolitanism reveals deeper insights into the social realities of the city’s inhabitants and unresolved questions in the study of this important city.