ABSTRACT
From 1907 to 1911, some 4000 commoners from Sichuan ventured west. Enticed by promises of large tracts of uncultivated land, they ascended the Tibetan Plateau seeking new lives – and new benefits for a changing Sichuan Province and Qing polity. Their presence was both the result of and a response to intensifying competition for authority within eastern Tibet between the provincial government and Lhasa, and perceived regional pressures from British India and Imperial Russia. Using Kham as a case study, this chapter explores the role such state‐supported settlement played in the consolidation of rule within a state’s borderlands and the relationship between shifting conceptions of territoriality within a globalizing structure of international law as substantiation for asserting sovereignty.
