In Constituting Modernity: Private Property in the East and the West, edited by Huri

Several studies in this volume examine property rights in specific local contexts within two Asian empires and several others look at the interaction between British property concepts defined by law and political theory and the social realities of England or colonial India. They describe how new imperial laws and changes in the economic power of local actors transformed claims to land. If we shift our attention to the contemporaneous Qing Empire of China (1644- 1911 CE), we can also find analogous changes. A number of scholars have recently begun to publish studies that pursue these themes. Here, however, I look at a different, but related question: how Western observers from the eighteenth century to the present have represented Chinese property rights. Even though Europeans never fully colonised China, they shared with British colonial administrators underlying assumptions about the nature of Asian societies which determined their conceptions of Chinese property rights. These stereotypes of imperial property rights, like cognitive maps, imposed static simplifications on unruly practice. Like imperial cadastral surveys, they served as tools in significant political debates and supported European mastery of the East. I aim to criticise the flaws in these conceptions and demonstrate the lineage tha