Claiming Possession: Asia, Europe and Empire

This project reassesses the nature of claims to possession across the early modern world by shifting the focus to Asia. It examines how Europeans actually claimed possession over people, lands and resources in the shadow of powerful Asian states while also charting the emergence of local counterclaims and processes of legal resistance. Claiming was never only a European enterprise. The proposed research draws key Asian polities into the analysis by considering historical claiming practices across borderland areas. Asia was and remains an active site for claiming and this project examines how the practices developed in the early modern period exert unexpected influence over current sovereignty disputes in the South and East China Seas.