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 from the 17th-early 19th century, and early modern bureaucratic technologies and information management.

My PhD dissertation project, titled “Ordering Life and Death: Punishment, Mercy, and Sovereignty in the Qing Autumn Assizes 1644-1850”, focuses on the Autumn Assizes, the ritual central institution that granted the Qing emperor the final verdict in all serious legal cases involving the death penalty. Using large numbers of previously unexamined Chinese and Manchu language summary memorials, registers, and other documents from archives in China and Taiwan, I reconstruct the patterns of sentencing, imprisonment, and pardons that existed at the apex of the Qing legal system across two centuries. I additionally examine the priorities and considerations that informed decisions related to the Assizes on various levels of the Qing state. My dissertation research aims to historicize and interrogate the extent and nature of Qing legal centralization at different periods and to consider how the specific form of Qing bureaucratic technologies and documentation shaped the course of justice in the empire’s core and in border regions. I received a Fulbright dissertation grant to carry out archival research in Taiwan in 2021-2022 and conducted several months of supplementary research at the First Historical Archives in Beijing in 2024.