| Summary: | My dissertation examines the historical transformation of two peripheral regions, Ningxia and Xining, in Northwest China from military borderlands to zones of rebellious Muslim communities between 1720s and 1860s. During this era, two historical processes went through at each peripheral region. One was the empire building of the Qing (1644-1911) that aimed to construct the system of the civilian government at the peripheral regions. The other was the rise of strong Muslim communities which eventually became great rebellious powers. That the two processes went through the same temporal-spatial span challenges the ethnic frontier thesis, the leading frame in the studies of the political peripheries of the empires. Many studies using this thesis tend to think that the potentials of conflicts between the center and the peripheries could be checked by effective indirect rule that gave the political actors at the peripheries, especially the ethnic groups, enough political autonomy. In this regard, the transitional period from the indirect rule to the direct rule is the most opportune time for the rise of ethnic rebellions because this transition increases the imperial centers' control over the peripheries and thus alienates the political autonomy of the peripheral ethnic groups. Though this thesis has provoked many compelling studies of the empire, it cannot fully explain why the direct imperial rule not antedated by a period of indirect rule could go side by side with the growth of strong ethnic communities. The contemporaneity of the empire building and the rise of strong Muslim communities thus provides an interesting case to search for some alternative approaches in the studies of empires and their peripheries. In this dissertation, I argue that the Qing Empire developed subtle mechanisms of deethnicization in its governance of the Muslim subjects. Using a variety of historical sources, including the memorials, the legal documents and the gazetteers, I represent how the Qing, quite unintendedly, deemphasized the ethnic salience of the Muslim identity in its criminalization of the Muslim violence as well as in the political restructuring at the two regions. Deethnicization thus worked to weaken the Qing's imperatives to devise a specialized political agency to manage the Muslim affairs. The gap between the empire and the Muslim communities due to the absence of such a special agency was greatly exacerbated after the Muslims in the Northwest China, including Ningxia and Xining, were reorganized by the strong Sufist leadership. Thus this dissertation argues that it is the co-evolution of the empire building and reorganization of the Muslim communities that best explains the historical transformations of the two regions. My study dissolves the historical narratives and the theoretical these which overstate the potential of conflicts between the imperial center and the peripheries. Based on this study, I propose a formative approach which examines the center-peripheral relationships by taking serious considerations of how the central and the peripheral agencies come into being.
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