Empire and Regional Order

• Author: Tao Zan
• Position: Tenured Associate Professor, Department of History of Peking University; Deputy Dean of the Institute of Area Studies of Peking University
• Pages: 54-68

54

Unit 4: Empire and Regional Order1

Moderator: Tao Zan (Tenured Associate Professor, Department of History of Peking

University; Deputy Dean of the Institute of Area Studies of Peking University)

Kankan Xie (Assistant Professor, School of Foreign Languages, Peking University)

Topic: Symptoms of Imperial Paranoia: Colonial Policing, Imprisonment and Exile

from a Southeast Asian Perspective

Ladies and gentlemen!

The topic I am presenting today seems relevant to law and jurisprudence. However,

what I want to discuss is more related to approaching historical issues from a regional

perspective and how research concerning the colonial period can help deepen our

understanding of regional orders in the contemporary era.

I have introduced two books to my graduate students this semester. The first is Alfred

McCoy’s Policing America’s Empire, which focuses on how the United States developed

its surveillance technology during its colonization of the Philippines. The United States

was less experienced in colonial governance than its European counterparts. Nevertheless,

the United States treated the Philippines as a crucial experimental field of colonization and

made many attempts to improve its surveillance capacities. Later, the United States adopted

such experiments, including surveillance technologies and the so-called “peacekeeping”

measures, in both the homeland and overseas after World War II. The second book is Along

the Archival Grain by American anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler. The book has received a

lot of attention in recent years. This book suggests that we should not treat archives as our

sources of information only. More importantly, it is essential to treat archives as our field

in an anthropological sense by critically reflecting on how these archives are generated.

Echoing the themes of these two books, I will discuss two related issues: 1. how to do

research on the history of regional politics? 2. how to make sense of the unwritten by

following the “archival grains”? Ann Laura Stoler has discussed the concept of “epistemic

anxiety” in her book. She suggests that colonial officials often “generate facts” through

subjective perception, speculation, and even imagination in the process of archive

production. Intelligence officers needed to reflect on “what they needed to know, what kind

of knowledge they needed, and what they knew they did not.” Both “epistemic uncertainties”

and “perceived facts” are significant throughout the process. I have pushed my students to

discuss several issues: the first is incarceration in colonial Southeast Asia, especially the

operation of colonial prisons; the second is the relationship between policing and the

maintenance of the colonial order; the third is banishment, also a critical means of colonial

rule. I will use an example from my research to demonstrate how epistemic anxieties

emerge and how such issues can help us understand the history of Southeast Asia before

World War II. My research primarily focuses on the leftwing movement of Southeast Asia

in the late colonial period, which is closely related to colonial officials’ practices of

1 This Unit is translated by Ziqi Sun (Hangzhou Minglang Film & TV Production Co., Ltd.) and Xiaofu Li

(Associate Editor of FLIA Review). Assistant Professor Mingchao Mao translated his own speech. The

translation has been modified and confirmed by the speakers.