Preetam Prakash

I am currently a PhD candidate in Stanford’s history department. I was initially drawn to the study of late imperial Chinese history while serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Yibin, Sichuan from 2012-2014. Some of my primary interests are in legal history, Qing state formation, early modern bureaucratic technologies and information management, and the history of the Qing borderlands.

My PhD dissertation project, titled “Weighing Life and Death: Punishment, Knowledge, and Sovereignty in the Qing Autumn Assizes,” focuses on the Autumn Assizes, the ritual central institution which granted the Qing emperor the final verdict in all capital cases. Using large numbers of previously unexamined Chinese and Manchu language archival documents directly produced for the Assizes, which I gathered over multiple rounds of fieldwork in China and Taiwan, I reconstruct the operation of this critical procedure across the entire course of the dynasty’s rule. My dissertation argues that the enormous circulation of people, documents, and resources involved in the Autumn Assizes served two fundamental purposes: to render the legal reality of the empire legible to authorities at the center and to subsequently impose standardized judicial procedures throughout the Qing territories. Though never entirely successful, the Assizes still served as a powerful representation of central knowledge and authority. While Qing law was evidently oriented towards leniency for most offenders, the death penalty remained indispensable to the Qing vision of justice. Many of the distinct features of Qing law, most notably the annual imprisonment of thousands of individuals under sentences of “delayed execution,” can only be understood in light of this basic, seemingly contradictory impulse.