Overview
My dissertation project, tentatively titled State, Nature, and the Making of a Maritime Borderland in the Gulf of Tonkin, 1880-1950, investigates how the extraction of natural resources, such as fish, salt, and minerals, intersected with entangled state-building projects in both China and Indochina. The Gulf of Tonkin, bordered by southern China and northern Vietnam, provides an ideal geographical unit for studying the relationship between resource extraction and border management. The 1887 Sino-French delimitation project left much of the offshore waters unterritorialized. This uncertainty transformed the gulf into both a shared resource pool as well as a contested site to be integrated into the development agenda of colonial regimes and the emerging modern nation-state. By adopting a transnational perspective, this study aims to deepen our understanding of how layered state-building processes shaped the formation of geo-modernity in maritime borderlands. This research is supported by Luce/ACLS Program in China Studies, Esherick-Ye Foundation, Association for Asian Studies, and fellowships and grants from the Einaudi Center.
Dissertation Committee:
Mara Yue Du (Chair), Eric Tagliacozzo, Nicholas Mulder, Hieu Phung (Rutgers-New Brunswick), Tansen Sen (NYU-Shanghai/NYU)
Publications
Peer-reviewed Publication:
Wang, Anke. “Abolitionist Parallels: International Law and Domestic Servitude in South China (1900–1940).” Modern Asian Studies 59, no. 1 (2025): 122–42. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X24000386.