Luther Cenci | Ruling Babel: British Imperial Governance and the Problem of Chinese Diaspora in Penang, 1787-1805

Please join us for the third Eurasian Empires Workshop of the winter quarter 2023.

Luther Cenci is a doctoral candidate in History at Stanford University. He is working on a dissertation entitled A Sea of Law: Communal Politics and Vernacular Legal Culture in the Chinese Diaspora, 1780-1920. His project examines the collisions and collusions between Dutch, British, and Qing imperial governance projects and Chinese diasporic communities in the South China Sea over the long 19 century. He argues that as diasporic political entrepreneurs collaborated in, resisted, or evaded imperial efforts to make diaspora governable, they borrowed and elaborated on late imperial Chinese legal culture, drawing a range of mainland practices into circulation far beyond the boundaries of the Qing state. He has recently published an article related to this research project in Late Imperial China. More generally, his research priorities include framing Chinese history within a global context and asking what historical experiences with living with (and making) diversity have to contribute to contemporary discussions about globalization, migration, and pluralism.