RELINQUISHED--Mekong governance: state officials at the margins of empire

Asia’s upper-Mekong region is a zone of ongoing conflict, disorder and international competition. This project brings a historical perspective to this vexatious zone of governance. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries three imperial projects intersected here: British, French and Siamese. Each of these imperial powers posted officials to this remote region. This project will explore how the cross-empire interaction of these marginal officials created a distinctive zone of hybrid and compromised governance which blurred the political demarcation between Burma, Indochina and Siam. This project will show how officials at the margins of empire played a foundational role in some of the region’s contemporary governance challenges.