Victor Zatsepine – författare

Beyond the Amur describes the distinctive frontier society that developed in the Amur, a river region that shifted between Qing China and Imperial Russia as the two empires competed for natural resources. Although official imperial histories depict the Amur as a distant battleground between rival empires, this colourful history of a region and its people tells a different story.Drawing on both Russian and Chinese sources, Victor Zatsepine shows that both empires struggled to maintain the border. But much to the chagrin of imperial administrators, various peoples – Chinese, Russian, Indigenous, Japanese, Korean, Manchu, and Mongol – moved freely across it in pursuit of work and trade, exchanging ideas and knowledge as they adapted to the harsh physical environment.By viewing the Amur as a unified natural economy caught between two empires, Zatsepine highlights the often-overlooked influence of regional developments on imperial policies and the importance of climate and geography to local, state, and imperial histories.

Colonial powers in China and northern Indochina employed the built environment for many purposes: as an expression of imperial aspirations, a manifestation of colonial power, a tool in the mission to civilize, a recreation of a home away from home, or simply as a place to live and work for the colonizers and the colonized. In this volume, scholars of city planning, architecture, and Asian and imperial history provide a detailed analysis of how colonization worked both at the top and bottom levels of the society and how it was expressed in stone, iron, and concrete. The process of creating the colonial built environment was multilayered, complicated, and unpredictable. This book stresses the regional diversity of the colonial built form found from Harbin to Hanoi, diverse experiences of the foreign powers in Asia, flexible interactions between the colonizers and the colonized, and the many risks entailed in building and living in these colonies and treaty ports.