The concept of "space as process" 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. What different connections and transformations can we document as arising through the actions of the people in this case? How do the people that appear in these materials interact with and transform larger structures around them?

Emerging spatialities of profit and information

One clear example, to build on the discussion of time and space in a preceding page, emerges out of the changing significance of the Jardine-Matheson company's network of ports and sailboats between India and China. The island of Lintin did not move locations, and neither did the ground upon which people built the cities of Singapore and Calcutta. While the urban histories of those places are full of physical transformations over time, the distance between Lintin, Singapore, and Calcutta has not changed appreciably over the centuries. But in the 1830s, due to the actions of people like William Jardine, James Matheson, and their partners and employees, new spatialities of profit and information management emerged. This was the work of people, it was contingent, and it changed over time. Clipper ships like the Red Rover fundamentally changed the nature of the spatialities of profit and information management for Jardine-Matheson, and the advent of steam navigation would change things further.

The Treaty of Nanjing (1843) that concluded the Opium War is another example of an event that would precipitate a breakdown of existing spatialities and a reconstitution of new ones. Lintin would lose its significance, replaced (in part) with the new British colony of Hong Kong. Meanwhile, the opening of two treaty ports in Fujian (Xiamen and Fuzhou) meant that people living in the coastal hinterland in places like Shenhu Bay would have to alter their patterns of trade, investment, and profit.

Treason and the transforming spatiality of the Chinese maritime frontier

Another fruitful place to explore the concept of space as process is in thinking about the relationship of people like the Yakou Shi lineage to the Qing administration and the rising tide of modern nationalism in China. As I argue in a journal article about the materials that make up this module, coastal Fujianese opium traders like Shi Hou came to personify treason during the rise of modern Chinese nationalism. The accusations of treason that officials levied against these opium traders, I argue, came out of a much longer history of the uneasy relationship between southeast coastal maritime lineages and the Qing state, extending back to the violent conquest of the region in the seventeenth century.

The significance here in a discussion about the concept of "space as process" is that the evolving commercial network between people like Shi Hou and John Rees precipitated the emergence of shadow or echo spatialities within the politics and worldviews of Qing administrators and patriotic Han Chinese onlookers from outside of the region. Coastal Fujian had long possessed the reputation of a place with outsized (and dangerous) lineages, along with illegal (and dangerous) commercial and migratory connections to various parts of Southeast Asia. But beginning in the 1830s, the connotations of coastal Fujian's connections and interactions with the outside world began to change. The actions of these people and the networks they operated came to represent the core essence of treason as China entered the modern era.