Mark McNicholas
Mark McNicholas, associate professor of history, has published his first book, Forgery and Impersonation in Imperial China: Popular Deceptions and the High Qing State (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016).
The book uses archival sources to introduce and examine a lively area of criminal activity that has gone virtually unnoticed in historical scholarship. Across eighteenth century China, at the height of the Qing dynasty (1644-1912), a wide range of common people forged government documents or pretended to be officials or other agents of the imperial state. This book, which is based on research McNicholas conducted in Qing archives in China and Taiwan, uses criminal case records, law codes, and popular literature to trace the social and political contexts of small-time swindles that were punished as grave political transgressions.