This panel rethinks early modern and nineteenth-century empire-making in Asia by treating contestation as an administrative and ecological condition rather than an episodic crisis. Across the Qing Empire, the Dutch Empire, and the British Raj, the papers examine how imperial projects were assembled, and repeatedly unsettled, through the governance of knowledge, the mobilization of labor and officials, and the management of nonhuman life and environments. Moving between court ritual and county administration, littoral caves and offshore waters, and transport corridors and frontier campaigns, the panel tracks how sovereignty was asserted through periodic mobilizations and extractive regimes that depended on contested expertise.

Collectively, the papers shift attention from imperial ideology to infrastructures of coordination: calendrical and astronomical regimes, legal-jurisdictional orders at sea, subterranean property and lease systems, and logistical–biomedical apparatuses that underwrote frontier violence. They advance a shared methodological claim: empires were challenged not only by rival polities and local elites, but also by the unruly materialities of animals, commodities, and environments that crossed jurisdictions and confounded administrative routines. In doing so, the panel links Qing political theology and bureaucratic practice to Dutch maritime legal history and to British imperial science, medicine, and logistics, offering a comparative account of governance across disparate imperial formations.

Cao Yin reconstructs the British Raj’s shift from elephants (and camels) to mules in military transport in its frontier campaigns. Veterinary uncertainty enabled moralized delegitimations of Indian expertise and a technocratic pursuit of “certainty” and manageability, yet these policies repeatedly broke down when colonial governance ignored locally embedded human–animal–ecological relations sustaining pack-animal systems. Yuanchong Wang analyzes Qing eclipse “rescue” rituals as periodic technologies of imperial mobilization. By extending participation from the emperor and Beijing officials to provincial and county administrations, the Qing court used eclipses to discipline bureaucrats, regulate the production and circulation of astronomical knowledge, and reaffirm territorial-temporal sovereignty through coordinated action. Guanmian Xu follows trepang (sea cucumbers) to revisit Dutch legal imperialism in the Spice Islands. From the late seventeenth through the early nineteenth centuries, expanding trepang fisheries supplying the Chinese market undermined Dutch maritime jurisdiction and destabilized Grotian treaty claims to mare clausum, generating a southern, extra-jurisdictional world extending from Amoy through Makassar to northern Australia. Meng Zhang examines edible bird’s nest caves as sites where sovereignty was enacted through subterranean governance. Surveying Vietnam, Myanmar, and Java and centering on Gomantong in north Borneo, the paper traces how indigenous polities, colonial states, and chartered companies converted inaccessible caves into revenue regimes via coerced labor, taxation, state property claims, and auctioned leases, while natural history and biological investigation rationalized extraction. Together, these papers argue that contested empires were made in the attempt to coordinate heterogeneous agents across space and time, and in the recurrent frictions that exposed the limits of imperial rule.