Tricks of the Trade: Debt and Imposed Sovereignty in Southernmost Kham in the Nineteenth to Twentieth Centuries

Abstract

Southernmost Kham, which borders Burma and Yunnan Province, remained at the juncture of several mutually competing political centers until the first half of the twentieth century. On the fringes of Tibetan, Naxi, and Chinese expansion and increasing political control, several Tibeto-Burman-speaking groups such as the Drung and Nung gradually became integrated into their neighbors' polities. Their political dependency often arose from trading with and accepting loans from commercial agents and from the intermediaries of local rulers, Naxi and Tibetans alike. This article addresses this practice of providing credit, which was developed at the expense of impoverished groups who were often obliged to accept the terms of the transaction. The author particularly emphasizes the connections between this system of debt dependency, the relationship between creditors and debtors that has to be considered in terms of exchange and reciprocity, and the question of political legitimacy. Within this broader context of regional interethnic relations, the article provides a detailed analysis of the concrete terms of the political relationship that existed between Drung communities and Tibetan chiefs of Tsawarong, which contributes to an understanding of the workings of this relationship and its economic, territorial, and even ritual components.

4. Trade, Territory, and Missionary Connections in the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands

“…quickly discovered, the Ganden Phodrang, the Tibetan administration in Lhasa, exercised a high degree of autonomy. Nevertheless, the Qing administration employed a parallel and overarching network of officials not only in Lhasa but also in regional centres such as benefitted from more recent scholarship, especially Coleman (2014), Deshayes (2008), and Gros (1996Gros ( , 2001Gros ( , 2016. See also my own earlier articles on the M.E.P.…”

“…The difficulty of meeting these demands meant that it was all too easy for ordinary peasants to fall into debt to local landowners or to monasteries. Debt obligations could well lead to one of several different forms of servitude, including local forms of slavery (Gros 2016). Alternatively, peasants might flee the land altogether.…”

Frontier Tibet

“…Borders of Kham are not just with China; this is not simply 'the Sino-Tibetan borderlands'. Instead, borders of Kham and Tibet are also with a range of other peoples (Atwill 2014;Bhutia and Holmes-Tagchungdarpa 2019;Gros 2016b;Roche 2016). An orientation toward China is only one way to situate Kham, albeit a very potent way given the current geopolitical situation.…”