Before the late twentieth century, the Upper Yangzi River and its tributaries had long been formidable, so navigation along these river segments hinged on various shipping groups on the ground. Building on the long-term techno-social collaboration among themselves, these shipping groups had developed institutions to collectively negotiate their rights to trade, navigation security, and infrastructural maintenance at crucial sites along the Upper Yangzi River by the early nineteenth century.

How did these institutions transform from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, as the Upper Yangzi shipping industry went through multifaceted technological and business transitions? This talk chronicles the reorganization of the techno-social networks among the Upper Yangzi shipping groups from roughly 1850 to 1937 against the backdrop of the steam revolution, the inland extension of global economic interactions, and early industrialization. Bringing together multi-lingual archives, the talk traces how the agents associated with foreign imperial powers and Chinese regimes tried to institutionally incorporate the experiential knowledge and networks of local shipping groups to sustain both economic circulation and geopolitical contestation. It also reconstructs how local shipping groups leveraged the discourses of professionalization, industrialization, and nationalism to transfer their techno-social perspectives, hence actively shaping the new navigation infrastructure along the Upper Yangzi. More broadly, this talk invites conversations on how to write grassroots mobility back to the histories of global economic circulation and geopolitical transition during the modern period.