Imperial Imperial Bandits

"Tells the story of migrants and communities in the Southeast Asian borderlands. The Black Flags raided their way from southern China into northern Vietnam, competing in the second half of the nineteenth century against other armed migrants and uplands communities for control of commerce (e.g., opium) and natural resources (e.g., copper for making coins). At the edges of 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. The history of these imperial bandits and the communities that resisted them 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. Historical studies of these areas tend to examine events only from the perspective of local communities or from the anxious view of imperial officials. By focusing on the Black Flags, upland communities, and their relationships to various empires, this study illustrates borderland processes at the violent edges of empire. It contributes to the ongoing reassessment of borderland areas as frontiers for state expansion, arguing that projects of empire often were instruments of power for armed migrants and their allies, and that, as a setting for forms of human activity that defy tight boundaries, borderlands continued to exist well after the establishment of formal boundaries"--