Preetam Prakash

"Some of my primary research interests are in legal history, Qing state formation, early modern bureaucratic technologies and information management, and the history of the Qing borderlands. At Stanford I have created and taught classes on late imperial legal history and on the history of imperial Chinese foreign policy and diplomacy.

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 final authority over all capital cases. Using large numbers of previously unexamined Chinese and Manchu language archival documents, I argue that in the eighteenth and nineteenth century the death penalty – in particular, precise regulation of various degrees of capital punishment and sentence reductions in the Assizes – became indispensable to the dynasty’s conceptions of justice. Although standardized legal protocols and archiving practices of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries certainly served to expand and consolidate central judicial authority, they also bore more ambiguous consequences for the Qing Court. Gaps persisted in the reports the center received on penal matters, as did the disconnect between the information it did possess and its ability to act; the complexity of Assizes procedures created various spaces for action from below."