This eloquent study follows the circulations, relocations, and diasporic practices of Cantonese merchant communities in the Pearl River Delta. Based on extensive research, Steven B. Miles has written a book that maps a borderless riverine landscape and links the experiences of Cantonese merchants to wider discourses of diaspora and empire. Connecting two seemingly disparate fields, Upriver Journeys is a conceptual bridge between studies of “overseas Chinese” diasporic practices and comparative studies of imperial projects and state-making (2). This book will attract readers seeking to understand ambulatory merchants in the late Ming to late Qing, anyone interested in the history of trade and commerce in southern China, and students and historians of Chinese diaspora(s). Although perhaps written for specialists, Upriver Journeys could easily enliven advanced undergraduate courses in Chinese or East Asian history as well as graduate seminars on a variety of subjects. Miles has crafted a dense and informative study, deftly pulling anecdotes from documentary evidence to compel readers toward the narrative.

Upriver Journeys begins with a meditation on death and belonging from the early nineteenth century. As Zhao Jiansheng, “an elderly literatus,” goes upriver from the Guangdong coast to the city of Wuzhou to retrieve the bodies of his deceased nephews, readers meet the first of many travelers through this riverine frontier (1–2). Pivoting from this anecdote, Miles unfurls the themes of the book: “the circulation of people … the relationship between diaspora and empire in an upriver frontier, and the role of migration in sustaining families and lineages in the homeland of what would become a global diaspora” (4). Miles ties these themes to the source material as well as to wider scholarship, including studies of diasporas, migrations, and, most interestingly, the “Zomia” heuristic (8–12).

Subsequent chapters elaborate the relationship between diaspora and empire. Arranged in two parts, “Imperial Intermediaries” and “Diasporic Families,” five chapters chart the movements of Cantonese speakers from littoral Guangdong into the Guangxi interior. Chapter One, “Officials: Agents of Empire in the Upriver Frontier, 1570–1740,” opens with a scene from the eighteenth-century gaitu guiliu campaigns 改土歸流, which attempted to bring tusi 土司 or “native chieftains” (29) into a more routinized, centrally controlled imperial administration. Miles narrates the “imperial consolidation of the frontier” (30, 33–34) in inland Guangxi by these Cantonese “agents of empire,” or “cogs in the machine of Qing expansion” (54). Chapter Two, “Students: Migration and Civil Examinations, 1570–1760,” connects the changes wrought by gaitu guiliu to the ambitions of downriver students, many of whom moved “between delta and upriver destinations” (107). Like the “agents of empire” in Chapter One, “migrant students brought the West River frontier more firmly within the empire” (107). Death returns in Chapter Three, which begins with a deceased merchant in Longzhou and enlarges the narrative arch of the book into Vietnam, considering the role of pawnshops, local lore, and firewood for Qing imperial expansion. The two chapters of Part II, “Husbands and Wives in the West River Basin” and “Upriver Settlers and Delta Lineages,” “explore the human, experiential dimensions of diasporic strategies.” (161–62) Drawing from genealogies of prominent families as well as travel accounts, these chapters take readers into the diverse “frontier defined by the middle and upper West River basin.” (240) Miles navigates what we might call, in contemporary terms, the multi-ethnic complexity of this region, navigating sources that often use terms such as “Zhuang” 獞 (altered to 僮 and, later, 壮 in the twentieth century) and “Yao” 猺 (瑶), terms that signal an imperial vocabulary perhaps ill-suited to contemporary notions of ethnicity. Laudably, Miles also avoids reductionist terms for collective and individual identities, choosing instead to emphasize how claims of Han-ness often meant “gestures of attachment to the imperial state” (201). In the conclusion, Miles offers comparative thoughts and restates the importance of diasporic strategies for Qing imperial expansion. Incredibly helpful maps appear throughout the book, which also includes a comprehensive bibliography and a glossary.

For this book, “frontier,” as an analytical frame, is essential. Miles states an ambition to write “from the perspective of the frontier” (11). Chinese terms for “frontier” (bianjiang 邊疆 or bianjie 邊界) do not appear in the glossary, perhaps owing to the fact that these terms did not feature in the materials Miles consulted, but the concept of a frontier animates this book. In this respect, Upriver Journeys contributes to a scholarly discussion that has included recent work by Laura Hostetler, Elif Akçetin, C. Patterson Giersch, Kwangmin Kim, and many others. Although it does not contend with the vast body of work that responds to Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 “Frontier Thesis,” the idea of a large, blank, challenging, and foreboding zone that serves as the testing-ground for empire structures the analytic narrative of Upriver Journeys. Writing on European history, Eve-Marie Halba recognizes the significance of the concept of the frontier for researchers “interrogating the delimitation of countries and peoples,” citing the work of Arnaud and Jannin to remind scholars about the odological character (“un espace ‘odologique’”) of frontiers.Footnote ¹ For these and other like-minded scholars, rather presenting a barrier or limit, frontiers exist to be crossed. In the late nineteenth century, Turner's “Frontier Thesis” argued that western frontier of North America was “the meeting point of savagery and civilization,” a stage for the performance of a particular kind of political (imperial) project. For critics of Turner, this project was violently tethered to discourses of property and progress that deny or at the very least delimit the historical agency of non-Euro-Americans.Footnote ² Writing “from the perspective of the frontier” brings the growth of Qing imperial control over Guangxi into focus, allowing readers to appreciate the complex intersections of state and non-state actors. Although Miles does not allot space for frontier historiography, readers will find that this book raises comparative and conceptual questions through its deep dives into empirical sources.

In Upriver Journeys, Miles makes more explicit connections to the academic work on “Zomia,” a term coined by Willem van Schendel in 2002 and popularized by James Scott in The Art of Not Being Governed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). Appeals to Zomia, an idea that posits vertical limits for state projects and aims to capture the range of responses by those subjected to them, bookend his narrative of Qing imperial expansion. Interestingly, Scott's subtitle to The Art of Not Being Governed, An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, suggests that “Zomia” might explain upland–lowland dynamics in a manner that eschews or inverts the binary confines (i.e. civilization and savagery) of frontier discourse. Much of the scholarly response to Scott, including work by Victor Lieberman, Leif Jonsson, and Jean Michaud, has elaborated on the political and philosophical claims, as well as the empirical evidence, that inform this “anarchist” approach. In this book, Miles makes a very different claim, namely that Zomia can help explain migrants, merchants, and “imperial agents” “bringing the state into the highlands” (12). A device for dismantling state-centric narratives becomes, in this application, a method for tracing imperial expansion.

In Upriver Journeys, Miles suggests that another concept, diaspora (specifically “diasporic families”), which other scholars use to overcome the strictures of nation and region, can also chart the course of Qing imperial expansion. This is an exciting premise, one that brings “the human, experiential dimensions of diasporic strategies” into the narrative of empire (162). Among the source material for this study, Miles draws on family histories or “genealogies,” which, as he notes, “are of course products of (and tools to build) patrilineal lineages, and they are written from the vantage point of the delta” (174). Together with travel writings, stelae, and archival sources, these genealogies supply Miles with rich information. Cantonese merchants, members of the Cen 岑 “clan,” tusi throughout Guangxi, and various non-Chinese groups and individuals appear through the lens of these sources. Miles's solid work should inspire other scholars to reflect on Chinese genealogies as genre or, in a Nietzschean sense, on the “genealogy” of genealogies as historical sources.

A few questions haunt Upriver Journeys. Despite the invocation of Zomia, diaspora, and the work of Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, two historians of empire who examine “imperial intermediaries” (8), Miles crafts his argument in terms that largely harmonize with the political goals of empire. “Upriver Journeys helps to explain why imperial expansion on the Southwest frontier was successful and, more broadly, how the expansive empire, and the nation that followed it, cohered” (7). This argument accounts for the recurrence of imperial language throughout the book: “the consolidation of state control on the frontier” (30), “the imperial consolidation of the frontier” (33–34), the “conversion” of tusi (54, 93), and the argument that “migrant students brought the West River frontier more firmly within the empire” (107). In the conclusion, Miles restates the case: “the Cantonese diaspora and the Ming and Qing empires together expanded into the frontier defined by the middle and upper West river basin.” (240) Miles artfully weaves diaspora, empire, and frontier together, but as an explanation of the role played by the Cantonese diaspora in Qing expansion, the argument often reads like an imperial echo.

As a study of the intersection between Qing imperial ambitions and Cantonese diasporic practices, this book demonstrates why accounts of imperial expansion portrayed that imperial expansion as successful and how this might contribute to claims of national coherence. Miles has written an excellent study based on copious and thoughtful research, and he displays a lucid understanding of this fascinating “riverscape.” (23) Readers will find themselves enriched, enlivened, and inspired by both the richly detailed narrative that Miles fashions as well as the questions and avenues for future research that this book calls forth.