The Black Flags raided their way from southern China into northern Vietnam, competing during the second half of the nineteenth century against other armed migrants and uplands communities for the control of commerce, specifically opium, and natural resources, such as copper. At the edges of three empires (the Qing empire in China, the Vietnamese empire governed by the Nguyen dynasty, and, eventually, French Colonial Vietnam), the Black Flags and their rivals sustained networks of power and dominance through the framework of political regimes. This lively history demonstrates the plasticity of borderlines, the limits of imposed boundaries, and the flexible division between apolitical banditry and political rebellion in the borderlands of China and Vietnam.
Imperial Bandits contributes to the ongoing reassessment of borderland areas as frontiers for state expansion, showing that, as a setting for many forms of human activity, borderlands continue to exist well after the establishment of formal boundaries.
Table of Content
Introduction: Imperial Bandits, Cultures of Violence, and Oral Traditions
1. Opium and Rebellion at High Altitudes
2. Commerce, Rebellion, and Consular Optics
3. Imperial Bandits and the Sino-French War
4. Borderline, Resistance, and Technology
Conclusion: Flags in the Dust
About the author
Vincente L. Rafael is the Giovanni and Anne Costigan Endowed Professor of History at the University of Washington. He is the author of Motherless Tongues: The Insurgency of Language Amid Wars of Translation (Duke University Press, 2016), The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines (Duke University Press, 2005), and several other books.
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