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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the entanglement between geology and the inter-imperial legal battles over talc and magnesite in Manchuria in the early 20th century. It asks how we can incorporate changes at vastly different scales and rates into the same narrative about the environment in the Anthropocene.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines how a group of magnesium-based minerals – talc, magnesite, and periclase – gave the native landowners of southern Manchuria outsized agency in their engagements with Japanese and Russian colonizers over mining rights in the early 20th century. During that time, Manchuria was an inter-imperial borderland between the great states of China, Japan and Russia. Each of these states aimed to control the resources of the region through a state-centric regime of resource laws and treaties. Drawing on new archival sources from all three states and recent advances in the earth sciences of Northeast Asia, I argue that these legal instruments of the state had unintended effects because of the entanglement between the geological, technological, and juridical environments. Geological events in deep time shaped the peculiar ways talc interacted with humans and their empires through the mediation of local technologies of extraction. Whereas the mining of coal helped create a juridical space of the state, the excavation of talc and magnesite facilitated the development of a non-state world of transnational legality. Incorporating the geological and environmental sciences into the history of law and empire, I aim to explore how legal structures of the Anthropocene mapped onto environmental transformations in the deep past, even as those legal regimes enabled the rapid depletion of resources millions of years in the making.