| Sumario: | Using a multiscopic approach to the study of global history, this article shows how a military campaign of rural pacification in southeastern China fostered entangled state-building in China and in the British colony of the Straits Settlements on the Malay Peninsula. Two nineteenth-century polities in the early stages of development—one colonial, one provincial—sought to subjugate the same set of freewheeling Chinese sojourners who long had operated beyond the orb of governmental authority. In so acting, these states became transformed themselves. Entangled state-building is a transnational process in which emerging states approach developmental equilibrium as a result of shared historical experiences and global economic trajectories. In the case of China and Southeast Asia, entangled state-building was accelerated by the circulation, consumption, and taxation of the most profitable commodity traded in the region, opium. Multiscopic analysis enables us to discern the human experience of global change and thereby determine how disparate local arenas are shaped by similar global processes. A historical event that occurred in two ostensibly separate geographical places in fact occurred in one social and economic translocal sphere that long had been dominated by Chinese merchants and laborers.
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