Please note the new time and location for our 2017-18 lecture series.

Violent crime in the Chinese provinces of the empire was a growing concern for the Qing court over the course of the long eighteenth century (1683-1820). Part of a wider, unprecedented “legislative turn” in imperial rule that quadrupled the number of substatutes in the Qing code, successive emperors enacted a flood of new legislation that expanded the concept of criminal behavior and increased the number of death penalty offenses that were subject to annual review. The crackdown on crime swamped the judicial bureaucracy and created ideological, political, and institutional quandaries for the eighteenth-century criminal justice.

Tom Buoye is an Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Tulsa, Research Associate, Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, and Team Member, “Legalizing Space in China,” Institut d’Asie Orientale, ENS Lyon, France, an international collaborative project to translate the sub-statutes of the Qing dynasty law code. His research interests span social, legal, and economic history of late imperial China. His current research focuses on the crisis in eighteenth century criminal justice and the “legislative turn” in Qing rule.