Yi Li | Aberystwyth University (original) (raw)

Papers by Yi Li

Britain and the World, 2021

The enactment of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act in 1919 tore down a significant gender ba... more The enactment of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act in 1919 tore down a significant gender barrier and opened doors of the once exclusively male legal profession in the United Kingdom. This article focuses on its early beneficiaries in Burma, a less studied colony of the Empire in the late 1920s and early 1930s. It traces the first four women barristers from colonial Burma, and their odyssey to gain tradecraft and skills through seeking legal education at the Inns of Court in London. It evaluates their performances at the Bar Examination and explores the challenges they faced as they beat a path into the traditionally male-dominated legal profession. Finally, the paper shows how these pioneering women barristers were able to utilise the fruits of their legal education to further the cause of promoting gender equality upon their return to Burma. However, their professional success also reveals the persistence of gender and racial hierarchies across the Empire despite ongoing legal reformation and political activism, as they were subjected to confrontations and discriminations throughout their career.

Journal of Burma Studies, Jun 2016

This article examines the Chinese community in Moulmein, a cosmopolitan center of a newly establi... more This article examines the Chinese community in Moulmein, a cosmopolitan center of a newly established British colony after the First Anglo-Burmese War (1824-26), in the nineteenth century, and investigates interchanges and influences facilitated by the first port city in colonial Burma. As Chinese merchants and workers established commercial, social and religious networks during the formative years of British Burma, they interacted with their multi-ethnic neighbors within and beyond colonial market places. However, if the early experience of these Chinese migrants suggests a porous ethnic boundary, the impression of China and the Chinese dominating the European public sphere in Moulmein indicates a gap between the real-life Moulmein Chinese, which was encountered every day, and the imaginary China as a potential market to an eastern-looking British Empire, especially during the Opium War (1839-42). Taking the Moulmein Chinese as a case study, this paper investigates the limitation of J.S. Furnivall’s ‘market place’ where people ‘mix but do not combine’. Instead of a reflection of the colonial markets operating rigidly along ethnic lines, this paper argues, Furnivall’s mid-twentieth-century observation is a direct result of colonial discourse and policies emphasizing ethnic segregation and stereotypes, when the discrepancies between real-life and imaginary China and the Chinese were further enhanced and eventually dominated the later years of British rule in Burma.

South East Asia Research, Mar 2016

This article analyses the development of the governing mechanism in British Burma relating to one... more This article analyses the development of the governing mechanism in British Burma relating to one particular ethnic group, the Chinese, between the 1890s and 1920s. Recognizing its limited knowledge of China and the Chinese, British Burma relied in the early days on experiences from other colonies to govern its Chinese immigrants and to handle Sino-Burmese border issues. The transfer of colonial knowledge, however, proved insufficient when the state witnessed increasing localization at the turn of the twentieth century. Interlocutors and communal elites therefore replaced imperial expatriates to form the main governing body, and in turn to some extent undermined and reconstructed colonial knowledge, as well as practice.

ISEAS: Trends in Southeast Asia, Jul 21, 2015

Book chapters by Yi Li

Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao, Hui Yew-Foong, and Philippe Peycam eds., Citizens, Civil Society and Heritage-making in Asia, 185-207, 2017

Victor H. Mair and Liam C. Kelley, eds., Imperial China and Its Southern Neighbours, 219-315, Jul 2015

Reviews by Yi Li

Asian Review of World Histories, Jul 2014

by Tamson PIETSCH, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. 256pp. ISBN: 978-0719085024 The... more by Tamson PIETSCH, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. 256pp. ISBN: 978-0719085024 The Colonisation of Time: Ritual, Routine and Resistance in the British Empire, by Giordano NANNI, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012. xviii + 254 pp. ISBN: 978-0719091292 The British colonial world once formed a vast commercial, political, military, and cultural entity, whose sphere of influences stretched from the Far Eastern port of Formosa to the nomadic Patagonian plain of the New World in South America. As a dominant European seaborne Empire, Britain, albeit a latecomer

Books by Yi Li

Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series, 2017

Using previously unexplored archives from colonial institutions and individuals, and primary mate... more Using previously unexplored archives from colonial institutions and individuals, and primary materials produced by the Burmese Chinese, this comprehensive study investigates over a century of history of the Burmese Chinese under British colonial rule. Due to the peculiar position of Burma in the British imperial world and the Southeast Asian Chinese network, the Chinese community had a unique experience in a Southeast Asian colony governed by Europeans with an India-based system. This book reveals, through everyday life experience, prominent community figures, and milestone events, the internal rivalry and integration among different regional groups within the community, and the general impressions it left in contemporary observations and communal memories. The book also traces historical roots of some unsolved ethnic issues in present-day Myanmar.