The Centre for Comparative Modernities is delighted to announce the first session in its 2024/25 Autumn term workshop series on 15 October 2024. Please note all sessions will be online on Zoom at 14:00 UK time:
https://durhamuniversity.zoom.us/j/8603919782?pwd=OGxydGs1QVNKZTJrbTJuZkF3ZEZIZz09
Meeting ID: 860 391 9782
Passcode: 444615
Session 1: Technological and Ideological Modernities
Counting In, Counting Out: Practical and Ideological Considerations in the 1865 Census of Shanghai Foreign Settlements
Qingrou Zhao, University of Edinburgh
Abstract: Two foreign extraterritorial jurisdictional enclaves (租界 zujie, “settlements”) occupied the north of Shanghai since the 1840s: the Britain-USA-dominated, semi-autonomous International Settlement and the French Concession governed by the French Consul. In 1865, Western civic leaders and administrators in the International Settlement initiated what they considered the first modern census of Shanghai, surveying both settlements and counting both foreign and Chinese residents. From then on, Shanghai settlements conducted censuses in roughly five-year intervals until they ceased to exist in the 1940s.
This paper studies the first settlement census in 1865 from an administrative perspective. It begins by exploring the prehistory of settlement census-making, explaining both census traditions in Imperial China and Europe, and population enumeration attempts by foreigners in Shanghai before 1865. Then, it analyses on the motivation and process of the 1865 census by examining council meeting minutes, comparing different versions of census forms, and looking at announcements in contemporary newspapers. The paper argues that although Western elites were keen to portray the “modern” aspects of the census, its modernity was not universally applied. When surveying the foreign community, census makers performatively highlighted all key elements of a modern census: inclusivity, individuality, regularity, publicity, and independence. However, the enumeration of the settlements’ Chinese community was still driven by financial and security concerns underpinning traditional population statistics, while foreigners in Shanghai believed that Chinese people lacked the necessary “characteristics” to answer to a modern census.
The paper comes from a PhD project investigating census-making processes by French, British-USA, Chinese, and Japanese authorities in Shanghai from the 1860s to 1949. It studies why and how censuses were conducted in different jurisdictions, how the “modern” census found its way into China, as well as the cooperation, emulation, and friction across empires in a trans-imperial laboratory.
Biography: Qingrou Zhao is a second-year history PhD student at the University of Edinburgh. Her research, fully funded by the ESRC studentship at the Scottish Graduate School of Social Science, studies census-making in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Shanghai foreign settlements. Before her PhD, Qingrou completed an MPhil in Economic and Social History at the University of Oxford with Distinction. Her Master’s thesis studied the 1882-1883 financial crisis in Shanghai in relation to the Self-Strengthening Movement. Her undergraduate studies were completed at Peking University, China.
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Technical Modernity and Future Figurations in Nineteenth-Century Colombia
Daniel Hernández Quiñones, Catholic University of Eichstätt (Germany)
Abstract: In the last quarter of the 19th century, Colombia experienced two processes that seemed to move in opposite directions. The first was a modest but significant material modernization, evidenced by the construction of railways, small-scale steel plants, the promotion of steam navigation routes, and various infrastructure projects. The second was the shift from a radical liberal regime established in 1863 to a conservative, Catholic, and Hispanist regime known as La Regeneración in 1886, often labeled “anti-modern” by political historiography. Inspired by the contributions of historical semantics and the analysis of the conceptual repertoires employed by the involved actors, this presentation focuses on the meanings attributed to material modernity within the context of a political transition viewed by its supporters as a sign of spiritual maturity and by its critics as regressive in terms of liberties. Despite the ideological divides of the time, it is argued that this modernizing atmosphere was interpreted by both liberal and conservative voices as the prelude to a grand social contract intended to resolve 60 years of public disorder. On a deeper level, indicators of material modernity were integrated by various period observers into a Christian philosophy of history, portraying these technical advancements as a path to redemption within historical time, enabling the nation to achieve emancipation from economic servitude and destructive passions that perpetually led to war. The findings of this research, completed in 2023, are based on a diverse corpus of primary sources, including illustrated press, memoirs, travel accounts, and technical documentation related to infrastructure.
Biography: PhD Candidate in Latin American History at the Catholic University of Eichstätt. Historian and Master in Social Studies from the University of Rosario (Bogotá). His areas of interest include Visual Culture, Temporalities, and representations of technical modernity in Colombia and Latin America. Among his most recent publications is the book “The Prodigious Machine They Still Fail to Understand”: Technology, Early Industry, and Experiences of Time. Colombia 1880-1904.
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