Faculty Bibliography

This paper explores the converging roots of mobilization for World War I in China and French West Africa. It traces mobilization in both regions to growing state and elite support for labor emigration starting in the late 1870s. For more than a century, southern China and the Senegal River Basin had provided contract laborers for Western enterprises. As Western powers sought to exploit resources across the Americas, Asia, Africa and the Pacific in the late nineteenth century, they turned once again to Chinese and West African migrant labor. Although state officials and elites in both regions had opposed foreign labor recruitment due to reports of abuses, starting in the late 1870s and 1880s, they increasingly supported foreign recruitment and labor colonization schemes. Both Chinese and West African elites began touting the achievements of Chinese and West African laborers who built infrastructure and cultivated reclaimed land overseas as contributing to a global “civilizing mission.” These elites—including merchants, intellectuals, officials and leaders of migrant communities—claimed the achievements of migrant laborers as those of Chinese and French West African society, thereby defending the status of their home regions in a global “civilizational” hierarchy. The Qing and French imperial states thus assumed growing responsibility for laborers, treating them as instruments of state policy. This shift in the relationship between migrant laborers and their home nations lay the ground for China and French West Africa to support the Allied war effort by sending laborers to Europe during World War I.

Between 1880 and 1910, as barriers to Chinese emigration arose across the Pacific Rim, European colonial administrations and entrepreneurs in Africa increasingly sought to divert Chinese labor emigration toward Africa. These efforts met with only limited success. Yet the growing labor flows linking China and Africa also helped to spark new scholarly and diplomatic interest in Africa among Chinese officials and literati. This presentation explores how three types of Chinese-language sources on Africa, scholarly atlases, fictionalized personal accounts and the experiences of migrant laborers, influenced elite views of Africa and government policy toward labor migration to the continent. Although nineteenth-century Chinese-language sources on Africa drew primarily from European works, these works depicted Africa through analogies to tropical regions more familiar to Chinese audiences, notably Qing China's southern frontier and Southeast Asia. Atlases such as Xu Jiyu's Brief Account of the Maritime Circuit (Ying huan zhi lue) explicitly sought to reconcile historical Chinese knowledge of Africa with recent Euro-American geographic sources. In contrast, fictionalized travelogues such as Ding Lian's Record of Travels across Three Continents (San zhou you ji) translated European travel narratives as first-hand accounts of Chinese travelers. Still, both types of works "Sinicized" Euro-American sources on Africa by reformulating Euro-American colonial and racialist discourses into Chinese imperial and ethnographic tropes. Despite an increasing number of Chinese laborers with first-hand knowledge of Africa, laborer perspectives remained marginalized until the Chinese imperial government named a consul in Johannesburg, South Africa. As a result, new Chinese-language sources on Africa served less to provide an accurate description of the continent than to familiarize Chinese elites with Euro-American civilizational discourse. Armed with this new knowledge, Qing officials began to develop a narrative of Chinese migrant laborers as civilizing agents as a means to defend Qing China's own precarious place within contemporary Euro-American civilizational thought.

In the two decades following the 1955 Asian African Conference in Bandung, Asian and African jurists sought to reshape international law to better incorporate the aspirations of formerly colonised peoples. The Asian-African Legal Consultative Committee (AALCC), founded one year after the Bandung Conference, helped formulate a common Afro-Asian and Third World international legal agenda by bringing together jurists and ideologically diverse Asian and African governments while collaborating with UN institutions working to codify and develop international law. The AALCC’s work and the contemporaneous writings of African and Asian jurists reveal a shared ambition to weaken the international protection of foreign-owned property by pursuing a legal agenda anchored in the structure and principles of the post-World War II international legal system. The Afro-Asian international legal agenda combined efforts to eliminate pre-war rules incompatible with the foundational principles of the UN Charter while elaborating the content of these principles through UN institutions.