Macabe Keliher

I am a historian of early modern and modern China. My scholarship is driven by an inquiry of how humans throughout history have developed and institutionalized political, cultural, and economic practices, and how those practices organize society and shape outcomes. My research focuses on points of rupture and transformation; I look at change and how new practices and institutions form.

My book on symbolic power in early modern China, The Board of Rites and the Making of Qing China, examines how disparate groups of political and social actors with conflicting political visions and ambitions formed a cohesive organization, called themselves Manchus, and became invested with a sense of common purpose to conquer and rule China and parts of Inner Asia for nearly three centuries as the Qing empire (1636-1912). It received the Tso Shun-sheng award from Academia Sinica and the Joseph Levenson Prize honorable mention from the Association for Asian Studies.

I am currently completing a book on Hong Kong and economic development in the second half of the twentieth century. Hong Kong and the Transformation of Global Manufacturing: Practices of Production and Exchange, 1950-1990 re-examines Hong Kong’s miracle economy and asks how East Asia transformed the nature of global manufacturing and became the workshop of the world. This book tells the story of Hong Kong’s economy from the perspective and activities of the entrepreneurs and workers engaged in the production of goods, and shows that social relations and culture shaped practices of manufacturing and work, which engineered a worldwide shift of supply chains and a change from mass production to just-in-time production.