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Stephen Halsey

Prof. Dr. Stephen Halsey

Carson Fellow

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Stephen R. Halsey’s scholarship focuses on the intersection of state power, economic development, and environmental change in late imperial and modern China (1850–present). He completed his doctoral work at the University of Chicago and currently serves as an associate professor of history at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida. Halsey’s first book, Quest for Power: European Imperialism and the Making of Chinese Statecraft historicizes the country’s seemingly sudden political and economic ascendance after 1990. Halsey is currently completing a second book manuscript entitled Prometheus Bound: Environmental Crisis and the Developmental State in Modern China. It uses the “elements” of minerals, water, soil, and air in a series of four case studies to examine the environmental constraints on China’s growth in the twentieth century. He argues that government authorities preferred a technocratic approach to development, but time and again ecological limitations in place before the onset of modern growth forced them to employ an “involutionary” strategy defined by inefficient, low-tech, and labor-intensive principles. Halsey has received the following fellowships in support of his research: the Fulbright Senior Scholar Grant (China), Taiwan Fellowship, Fulbright-Hays DDRA Fellowship, Blakemore Foundation Language and Language Refresher Grants, FLAS, and Earhart Foundation Fellowship.

RCC Research Project: Prometheus Bound: Environmental Crisis and the Developmental State in Modern China


Selected Publications:

  • Quest for Power: European Imperialism and the Making of Chinese Statecraft. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015.
  • Zhuiqiu Fuqiang: Zhongguo Xiandai Guojiade Jiangou. Beijing: CITIC Press, 2018. (Chinese language edition). (斯蒂芬 哈尔西,追求富强: 中国现代国家的建构. 北京: 中心出版社, 2018).
  • “China’s Response to Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of East Asian History. (Forthcoming).
  • “Warfare, Imperialism, and the Making of Modern Chinese History: A Review Essay.” Frontiers of History in China 13, no. 1 (June 2018): 47-72.
  • “Sovereignty, Self-Strengthening, and Steamships in Late Imperial China.” Journal of Asian History 48, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 71-102.
  • “Money, Power, and the State: The Origins of the Military-Fiscal State in Modern China.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 56, no. 3 (2013): 392-432.