Cameron Foltz

Field: Tibetan and Chinese History
Advisor: Gray Tuttle
Email: c.foltz@columbia.edu

Cameron Foltz is a PhD candidate specializing in nineteenth and twentieth-century Chinese and Tibetan history. He is broadly interested in territoriality, migration, ethnicity, and governance in China’s western frontiers. 

His dissertation project draws on Chinese and Tibetan sources to demonstrate that an international wool boom (c. 1880–1930) driven by US carpet production profoundly reshaped the political geography of what would become Qinghai Province (f. 1928) in northwest China. Tibetan pastoralists, who supplied much of the wool, were enriched enough to build community monasteries to territorialize lands that they seized from Mongol communities. Following the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1912, this lucrative trade soon drew the attention of the Hui Muslim military rulers in Xining who sought to monopolize its profits and incorporate disparate communities into the new province. His second project focuses on decollectivization among pastoralists in Qinghai Province.