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Podcast: New Books in East Asian Studies
Episode: Steven B. Miles, "Opportunity in Crisis: Cantonese Migrants and the State in Late Qing China" (Harvard UP, 2021)
Description: Opportunity in Crisis: Cantonese Migrants and the State in Late Qing China (Harvard UP, 2021) explores the history of late Qing Cantonese migration along the West River basin during war and reconstruction and the impact of those developments on the relationship between state and local elites on the Guangxi frontier. By situating Cantonese upriver and overseas migration within the same framework, Steven Miles re-conceives the late Qing as an age of Cantonese diasporic expansion rather than one of state decline.The book opens with crisis: rising levels of violence targeting Cantonese riverine commerce, much of it fomented by a...