Alex Haskins

Doctoral candidate (ABD), Department of Political Science, University of Chicago

Alex Haskins is a doctoral candidate (ABD) in the University of Chicago’s Political Science department. His research interests include the history of political thought (East Asian and European), comparative political theory, and intellectual history, with a focus on questions concerning sovereignty, empire, religion & politics, and international law. Before coming to Chicago, Alex received his Master of Theological Studies (MTS) from Harvard Divinity School with a dual focus on religion & politics and East Asian religions, and his BA in Government & Legal Studies and East Asian Studies from Bowdoin College.

“Ends of Empire: Domination and Resistance in Wei Yuan's Political Thought”

In this paper, I argue that Wei’s efforts at resisting foreign imperial domination relied on apprehending foreign conditions—the linguistic, political, historical, economic, and technological developments of Western countries—through extensive engagement with global geography. From there, Wei developed military, political, and economic strategies to resist European domination of China. The paper explores how Wei gained access to information concerning the global territorial possessions of European countries and how this information shaped his strategies of resistance. My turn to Wei’s statecraft cartography is motivated more by how he situates the Western threat of domination in terms of earlier Chinese categories of thought, in keeping with recent moves in the scholarly literature. By emphasizing Wei’s revisionist moves as ones that are simultaneously imperial and against foreign domination, I offer a new framework for understanding Wei’s political thought than has been previously offered by historians of East Asia.