Holy War of the Uprooted: Sufi Holymen and the Politics of Agrarian Development in Nineteenth-Century Eastern Turkestan

Holy War of the Uprooted: Sufi Holymen and the Politics of Agrarian Development in Nineteenth-Century Eastern Turkestan

Kwangmin Kim - CEAS Postdoctoral Associate & Lecturer

Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - 12:00pm to 1:30pm
Room 218, East Asia Library, SML See map
120 High Street
New Haven, CT 06511
Nineteenth-century Eastern Turkestan witnessed a series of Islamic resistances  against the Qing empire and its local allies - commercially-oriented members of oasis elites (Begs.) A prominent family of Sufi holymen from the area (Khwajas) led five wars against the Qing empire and Begs from 1826 until 1864. This talk offers a brief examination of the Khwaja wars in the broader context of politics of the state building and agrarian development in nineteenth-century Central Asia. This talk argues that the Beg-initiated agrarian development project under the Qing protection realigned the local and regional politics in an unprecedented way, polarizing the communities and regions into transnational coalition a of   developmentalist state builders and merchants on one hand, and equally transnational forces of uprooted oasis farmers and maroons, led by Islamic holy men, on the other. This talk shows how the itinerant Islamic holymen used their personal charisma, resources, and biography to organize the maroons and refugees into an alternative political community in the rugged mountains of Pamir and Tianshan, and successfully led them in fierce struggle against the Qing empire and Beg state builders.
 
Kwangmin Kim specializes in early modern Chinese history. After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2008, Kwangmin taught Chinese History at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His research focuses on the history of empire, borderlands, and transnational relations. As a Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University, he will be working on a book manuscript, which will examine trade and state formation in Chinese Turkestan in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He will be teaching “Frontiers and Environments in Asia” in the fall of 2013. 
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