Name pronounced Yee-Ming (tones: Yi1 Ming2)
I am a historian of Early Modern/Late Imperial China working within a Eurasian framework of war and empire. I am currently an Assistant Professor of History at Hong Kong Baptist University.
My book project, tentatively titled In Defense of the Qa’an: The Mongol Military in North China and Eurasia, 1235-1368,” draws from a variety of central and local-level sources such as Yuan-era legal cases, dynastic histories, private histories, local gazetteers, and literati writings to reconstruct the lives of the soldiers in the Mongol-Yuan. It argues that both nomads and Chinese had to negotiate with new socioeconomic structures and institutions and successfully adapted to the conditions established by the Mongol-Yuan. Meanwhile, the Mongol rulers paid close attention to the military and implemented pragmatic and flexible measures to deal with issues within the military. Additionally, it considers how Mongol pastoralist notions of military mobilization and provisioning transformed the Chinese state that had been developing since the Song (960-1279). My book would be the first English language study on the Mongol-Yuan military in East Asia since Hsiao Ch’i-ch’ing’s 1978 The Military Establishment of the Yuan Dynasty. Although the Yuan military has garnered scholarly attention in China and Japan, much of the scholarship approaches the subject through the lens of decline and collapse. My project instead focuses on how the Mongols successfully maintained a balance between pastoralist and sedentary modes of warfare. My book will also provide a comparative discussion of the Mongol empire in China with Ilkhanate Persia (1256-1335) to show how Mongol rulers of sedentary societies adapted their pastoralist militaries to function in new socioeconomic conditions. In doing so, I aim to decenter the Yuan from the predominant Sinocentric narratives.
In addition to this, I am also broadly interested in military history, nomadic history, comparative Eurasian empire-building, social history, the cultural history of bureaucracy, and the history of maritime interactions in early modern East Asia. I received my BA, MA, and PhD from UCLA and an additional MPhil degree from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Before coming to HKBU, I was the Rand Postdoctoral Fellow in Asian Studies at Pomona College. I am the founder and current host of The Chinese History Podcast and the book review editor for the journal Ming Studies.
Yiming Ha 哈一鳴 