Robert Bickers

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2018 WOLFSON HISTORY PRIZE The extraordinary and essential story of how China became the powerful country it is today. Even at the high noon of Europe's empires China managed to be one of the handful of countries not to succumb. Invaded, humiliated and looted, China nonetheless kept its sovereignty. Robert Bickers' major new book is the first to describe fully what has proved to be one of the modern era's most important stories: the long, often agonising process by which the Chinese had by the end of the 20th century regained control of their own country. Out of China uses a brilliant array of unusual, strange and vivid sources to recreate a now fantastically remote world: the corrupt, lurid modernity of pre-War Shanghai, the often tiny patches of 'extra-territorial' land controlled by European powers (one of which, unnoticed, had mostly toppled into a river), the entrepôts of Hong Kong and Macao, and the myriad means, through armed threats, technology and legal chicanery, by which China was kept subservient. Today Chinese nationalism stays firmly rooted in memories of its degraded past - the quest for self-sufficiency, a determination both to assert China's standing in the world and its outstanding territorial claims, and never to be vulnerable to renewed attack. History matters deeply to Beijing's current rulers - and Out of China explains why.

How the Chinese Ended the Era of Western Domination

Out of China

Shanghai in the wake of the First World War was one of the world's most dynamic, brutal and exciting cities a swarming metropolis of nightclubs, opium-dens, gambling, sex and murder. Threatened from within by gangsters, communists and nationalists, and from without by Chinese warlords and the Japanese military, the hold of the British-dominated administration seemed increasingly fragile. Robert Bickers' account of this corrupt and mesmerizing city is illuminated of a forgotten Englishman - a tough, resourceful policeman who stepped into the maelstrom of post-war Shanghai. Told through the moving story of one man's life and death while working for a governing class he could never belong to, Empire Made Me provides an intriguing glimpse into how the British Empire really worked.

An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai

Empire Made Me

Out of China: How the Chinese Ended the Era of Western Domination (Penguin history)

Isabella Jackson

This book presents a wide range of new research on the Chinese treaty ports – the key strategic places on China’s coast where in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries various foreign powers controlled, through "unequal treaties", whole cities or parts of cities, outside the jurisdiction of the Chinese authorities. Topics covered include land and how it was acquired, the flow of people, good and information, specific individuals and families who typify life in the treaty ports, and technical advances, exploration, and innovation in government.

Law, Land and Power

Treaty Ports in Modern China

This is a study of Britain's presence in China both at its peak, and during its inter-war dissolution in the face of assertive Chinese nationalism and declining British diplomatic support. Using archival materials from China and records in Britain and the United States, the author paints a portrait of the traders, missionaries, businessmen, diplomats and settlers who constituted "Britain-in-China", challenging our understanding of British imperialism there. Bickers argues that the British presence in China was dominated by urban settlers whose primary allegiance lay not with any grand imperial design, but with their own communities and precarious livelihoods. This brought them into conflict not only with the Chinese population, but with the British imperial government. The book also analyzes the formation and maintenance of settler identities, and then investigates how the British state and its allies brought an end to the reign of freelance, settler imperialism on the China coast. At the same time, other British sectors, missionary and business, renegotiated their own relationship with their Chinese markets and the Chinese state and distanced themselves from the settler British.

Britain in China

'Powerful, astute and readable . . . meticulously researched, and written with flair and feeling' John Keay, Literary Review From opium wars, conquest and rebellion to the end of the Qing imperial dynasty, the history of the European colonial 'scramble' for China is one of brutality and idealism, oppression and adventure - a story that is still central to the country's image of itself today. Robert Bickers' extraordinary book tells this epic story from both European and Chinese viewpoints, as 'foreign devils' gathered around China's weakened empire and tried to build a new world. 'At every airport bookshop, the traveller is offered shelves of volumes that purport to tell us how an emerging, powerful China will deal with the world. Those who wish to understand these issues more closely might be better advised to read this fair and fascinating account' Chris Patten, Financial Times 'Packed with interesting stories from a range of official and unofficial sources, The Scramble For China at times reads like historical fiction, veering at times into action-packed tales of intrigue. Throughout it maintains a humanity and sympathy for many of the individuals depicted in its pages' Beijing Today

Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire, 1832-1914

The Scramble for China

Christian Henriot

"This volume will be of interest to students and scholars of the history and anthropology of imperialism, colonialism's culture, and East Asian history."--Jacket.

Imperialism's New Communities in East Asia, 1842-1953

New Frontiers

Ray Yep

This is the first sustained exploration of the anti-colonial campaign that was inspired by the Cultural Revolution in China, recent events in Macao, and fuelled by inequalities in Hong Kong society. The riots presented a sustained challenge to British authority. As leftist-led demonstrations evolved into a terrorist bombing campaign, the British security response was also markedly strengthened. Using recently opened archival records, the authors explore the course of the events, their international and imperial contexts, and their connection to the upheaval in China, and Britain's own changing world role. The events of 1967 are also grounded in the wider sweep of Hong Kong's history.The second part of the book presents testimonies from Hong Kong residents, participants in different ways in the unfolding events, which speak to the salience of 1967 in Hong Kong's popular memory. There has been an awkward silence about this episode for almost forty years, and this book begins to normalize discussion about it, and its place in Hong Kong, Chinese and British imperial history.

Riot and Emergency in 1967

May Days in Hong Kong

In the new world order mapped out by Japanese and Western imperialism in East Asia after the mid-nineteenth century opium wars, communities of merchants and settlers took root in China and Korea. New identities were constructed, new modes of collaboration formed and new boundaries between the indigenous and foreign communities were literally and figuratively established. Newly available in paperback, this pioneering and comparative study of Western and Japanese imperialism examines European, American and Japanese communities in China and Korea, and challenges received notions of agency and collaboration by also looking at the roles in China of British and Japanese colonial subjects from Korea, Taiwan and India, and at Chinese Christians and White Russian refugees. This volume will be of interest to students and scholars of the history and anthropology of imperialism, colonialism’s culture and East Asian history, as well as contemporary Asian affairs.

Robert Bickers

About

Books

Join the club