Geographies of Inclusion and Exclusion: The Impact of Late 19th-Century Global Trade on Southwest China’s Borderlands Communities

China’s southwestern borderlands were transformed during Qing rule (1644-1912) as the state and merchants extended institutions of governance and commerce into highland and transfrontier regions.  By 1900, therefore, we cannot imagine China’s Southeast Asian and Tibetan borderlands as regions of autonomous self-government in the way that James Scott suggests in The Art of Not Being Governed.  Rather than conceiving of these borderlands as autonomous regions that only experienced transformative and traumatic subordination to centralizing states in the later twentieth century, as Scott suggests, this paper argues that the most significant changes were already underway by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  To do this, the paper relies on archival and published material to chart how the emergence of modern global trade impacted southern Yunnan’s mining regions and western Sichuan’s Tibetan (Kham) region.  By focusing on the roles that indigenes played in both mining enterprises and the gathering of gold dust and medicinal materials for export, the paper asks who benefited from this first era of modern globalized trade.  The answer turns out to vary depending on the specific political and economic institutions in local areas, demonstrating that, in order to understand the contours of China’s modern history, we must first comprehend its early modern developments.