HY4B7      One Unit
Asian Borderlands

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

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This seminar takes a borderland perspective to Modern Asian History, challenging the practice of treating national territories as the building blocks of academic enquiry. Through a wide range of readings, the participants examine the transformation of modern Asia by centring on the historically marginal societies and come to better understand a borderlands approach to the studies of history. The first part of the course follows a chronological scheme, tracing the changing political, social, and cultural landscapes of Asian borderlands in the eras of imperial encounters, decolonization, and the Cold War. The second part of the seminar focuses on a series of analytical lenses commonly applied in the study of borderlands history, such as state power, state resistance, identity, gender, ethnicity, and environment. Through the course of the seminar, students will critically analyse “space,” “frontiers,” “geo-body,” “Zomia,” and other important concepts that have informed the historiography of Asian borderlands. Through the assigned readings, discussion, and written assignments, students will also learn about how historians synthesize contributions originating from different regional historiographical literatures.

20 hours of seminars in the Winter Term.
20 hours of seminars in the Autumn Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn and Winter Term.

One essay (2000-2500 words) in the Autumn Term.

• Gavrilis, George. The Dynamics of Interstate Boundaries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
• Guyot-Réchard, Bérénice. Shadow States: India, China and the Himalayas, 1910-1962. Cambridge University Press, 2016.
• Ishikawa, Noboru. Between Frontiers: Nation and Identity in a Southeast Asian Borderland. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2010.
• Khan, Sulman Wasif. Muslim, Trader, Nomad, Spy: China’s Cold War and the People of the Tibetan Borderlands. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.
• Marsden, Magnus, and Benjamin Hopkins. Fragments of the Afghan Frontier. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
• Scott, James. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009.
• Song, Nianshen. Making Borders in Modern East Asia: The Tumen River Demarcation, 1881-1919. Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 2018.
• Sunderland, Willard. Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University press, 2004.
• Szonyi, Michael. Cold War Island: Quemoy on the Front Line. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
• Winichakul, Tongchai. Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation. Honululu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1994.

Course participation (25%)

Essay (75%, 4000 words)