This page was created by Peter Thilly.
Archival Reasoning and Spatial History
Archival Reasoning
The two central paths of this module are both created out of primary sources. The first is a legal case from the Qing archives, and the second is a diverse collection of materials taken from British archives. This format is specifically designed to enable visitors to actively participate in the sort of archival reasoning that historians use when they triangulate between sources.
In the final two pages of this introductory path, I lay out my own interpretation of the two archives that make up this module. I approached these sources with an explicit desire to understand how the opium trade worked: I wanted to know who was doing what, and to understand what people did to make this illegal offshore trade so enormous. My hope is that visitors to this module might have other questions to ask of these sources, and might discover other connections, and craft different narratives.
Spatial History
This module also seeks to contribute to the methodological aims of the larger Bodies and Structures project, which called upon module authors "to identify, explore, and analyze the shared and distinctive dynamics of place-making within a particular historical space." The conclusion to the module offers a fuller explanation of these themes, but it is worth previewing my arguments for visitors interested in exploring this module's contributions to spatial history.
The organizing principle of my approach is a spatial history of profit. I wanted to understand how the people who bought and sold opium made their money, and I have approached this question by working through the roles of distance, space, travel, and time in the story of opium profits.
The intersection of space and time. Time was an essential component of how actors calculated their actions in the pursuit of opium profits. In the conclusion, I discuss how the greater Indian Ocean monsoon season structured the opium trade during the age of sail, and how both Chinese and British opium traders operated in a complex race against time when it came to pricing, each side seeking to use timely information to maximize profits.
A collection of discrete physical spaces were also important to this history. Here I consider the boats, buildings, beaches, bays, and villages that the people in the module occupied, and consider how these spaces were constructed and used, and what role these spaces had in the history of opium profits.
I also consider the spatiality of law enforcement and corruption on the Fujian coast. After all, an important part of the project of opium profiteering involved not getting arrested and punished by the state. The geography of Qing rule helps to explain why some people were arrested and others not, and space played an essential role in structuring how states and state actors selectively enforced or ignored laws.
Finally, this module also engages with the concept of "space as process". The concept refers to an approach to spatial history that moves beyond the significance of discrete physical spaces to consider how different spatialities are constituted, transformed, broken down, and reconstituted through the movements, actions, and decisions of people. In the conclusion, I consider how different spatialities of commodity and information circulation emerged out of technological and diplomatic breakthroughs like the advent of clipper ships and the conclusion of the Opium War in 1842. I also discuss how cases like the Shi Hou one that makes up the first path of this module indicate a spatiality of treason that structured interactions between the Qing state and Fujian's coastal residents.
