Download or read book British Naturalists in Qing China written by Fa-ti FAN and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Western scientific interest in China focused primarily on natural history. Prominent scholars in Europe as well as Westerners in China, including missionaries, merchants, consular officers, and visiting plant hunters, eagerly investigated the flora and fauna of China. Yet despite the importance and extent of this scientific activity, it has been entirely neglected by historians of science. This book is the first comprehensive study on this topic. In a series of vivid chapters, Fa-ti Fan examines the research of British naturalists in China in relation to the history of natural history, of empire, and of Sino-Western relations. The author gives a panoramic view of how the British naturalists and the Chinese explored, studied, and represented China's natural world in the social and cultural environment of Qing China. Using the example of British naturalists in China, the author argues for reinterpreting the history of natural history, by including neglected historical actors, intellectual traditions, and cultural practices. His approach moves beyond viewing the history of science and empire within European history and considers the exchange of ideas, aesthetic tastes, material culture, and plants and animals in local and global contexts. This compelling book provides an innovative framework for understanding the formation of scientific practice and knowledge in cultural encounters. Table of Contents: Acknowledgments Introduction I. The Port 1. Natural History in a Chinese Entrepà ́t 2. Art, Commerce, and Natural History II. The Land 3. Science and Informal Empire 4. Sinology and Natural History 5. Travel and Fieldwork in the Interior Epilogue Appendix: Selected Biographical Notes Abbreviations Notes Index Fa-ti Fan's study of the encounter between the British culture of the naturalist and the Chinese culture of the Qing is both a delight and a revelation. The topic has scarcely been addressed by historians of science, and this work fills important gaps in our knowledge of British scientific practice in a noncolonial context and of Chinese reactions to Western science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In addition to the culture of Victorian naturalists and Sinology, Fan shows an admirable grasp of visual representation in science, Chinese taxonomic schemes, Chinese export art, British imperial scholarship, and journeys of exploration. His treatment of the China trade and descriptions of Chinese markets and nurseries are especially welcome. I learned a great deal, and I strongly recommend this book. --Philip Rehbock, author of Philosophical Naturalists: Themes in Early Nineteenth-Century British Biology By focusing on the experiences of British naturalists in China during a time when it was gradually being opened up to foreign influences, Fan makes at least two important contributions to history of science: He gives us an authoritative study of British naturalists in China (as far as I know the only one of its kind), and he forces us to rethink some of our categories for doing history of science, including how we conceive of the relationship between science and imperialism, and between Western naturalist and native. Fan's scholarship is meticulous, with careful attention to detail, and his prose is clear, controlled, and succinct. --Bernard Lightman, editor of Victorian Science in Context
Download or read book Anglo China written by Christopher Munn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-16 with total page 487 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the first three decades of British rule in Hong Kong, focusing on the troubled and controversial process of establishing a British colony at Hong Kong and on the reception of British rule by people in the region.
Download or read book British Trade and the Opening of China 1800 1842 written by Michael Greenberg and published by CUP Archive. This book was released on 1969 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book China Trade and Empire written by Alain Le Pichon and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2006-08-10 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 263 letters written by or to William Jardine and James Matheson... covers a period of rapid growth for Jardine, Matheson & Co, from 1827 when the founders first joined forces, to Jardine's death in 1843, shortly after the end of the Opium War
Download or read book Asian Empire and British Knowledge written by U. Hillemann and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-10-15 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: British knowledge about China changed fundamentally in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rather than treating these changes in British understanding as if Anglo-Sino relations were purely bilateral, this study looks at how British imperial networks in India and Southeast Asia were critical mediators in the British encounter of China.
Download or read book Imperial Twilight written by Stephen R. Platt and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As China reclaims its position as a world power, Imperial Twilight looks back to tell the story of the country’s last age of ascendance and how it came to an end in the nineteenth-century Opium War. As one of the most potent turning points in the country’s modern history, the Opium War has since come to stand for everything that today’s China seeks to put behind it. In this dramatic, epic story, award-winning historian Stephen Platt sheds new light on the early attempts by Western traders and missionaries to “open” China even as China’s imperial rulers were struggling to manage their country’s decline and Confucian scholars grappled with how to use foreign trade to China’s advantage. The book paints an enduring portrait of an immensely profitable—and mostly peaceful—meeting of civilizations that was destined to be shattered by one of the most shockingly unjust wars in the annals of imperial history. Brimming with a fascinating cast of British, Chinese, and American characters, this riveting narrative of relations between China and the West has important implications for today’s uncertain and ever-changing political climate.
Download or read book Britain in China written by Robert Bickers and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-01 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Opium Regimes written by Timothy Brook and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2000-09-18 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Opium Regimes draws on a range of research to show that the opium trade was not purely a British operation, but involved Chinese merchants and state agents, and Japanese imperial agents as well.
Download or read book The Past and Future of British Relations in China written by Sherard Osborn and published by . This book was released on 1860 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book British Rule in China written by Carol G. S. Tan and published by Wildy, Simmonds & Hill Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written using official records and other sources, British Rule in China is the first systematic account of the legal history of Weihaiwei, a small territory leased by China to Britain in 1898. It is a fascinating and accessible account of the territory's constitution, laws, courts, judges and magistrates, penal policy, and police force. The book explores the various problems and controversies faced by the local authorities in administering justice as well as their attempts to resolve them. This is the first work to examine thoroughly, through research into the law, the history of Weihaiwei under British rule. Whilst looking also at the legal status of Weihaiwei, its laws and institutions, this work also pays attention to particular aspects of the legal system which had the greatest impact on the lives of the ordinary villagers in this part of China. Based on extensive research of primary sources, British Rule in China is a fascinating and readable account of a legal system and the response of the territory's Chinese residents to it. Series Editors: Anthony Dicks and Michael Palmer
Download or read book Britain and China written by Evan Luard and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2019-12-01 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1962. This book is a study of relations between Britain and China. The first section surveys historical relations between the two nations and culminates with the Second World War. The second part examines British policy during the Chinese Civil War, the Korean War, and the Geneva Conference. The third part discusses what contemporary issues in British-Chinese relations were at the time the book was written.
Download or read book Merchants of War and Peace written by Song-Chuan Chen and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-01 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Canton Days written by John M. Carroll and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-02-12 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Canton Days offers the first comprehensive history of the British community in China from the mid-1700s to the end of the Opium War in 1842. During that period, Britons and other Westerners in China were restricted to trading and living in a tiny section of the city of Canton and the small Portuguese territory of Macao. At Canton, trade between China and the West was conducted through a group of Chinese merchant houses specially licensed by the Qing government. British encounters with China in this period have been seen mainly as a prelude to war, and Britons in China usually have been characterized as single-minded traders determined to open the Middle Kingdom by any means or missionaries bent on converting the Chinese “heathen” to Christianity. John M. Carroll challenges common assumptions about the British presence in China as he traces the lives and times of the expatriates at the heart of this vital center of trade and exchange. The author draws on a rich trove of archival sources to bring Canton and its leading figures to life, concluding with the deaths of three Britons, each revealing British concerns and anxieties about being in China. Written in a clear and lively style, his book will appeal to all readers interested in British imperial history, early modern Chinese history, and the worlds of expatriate and sojourning communities.
Download or read book Creating the Opium War written by Hao Gao and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-20 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Creating the Opium War examines British imperial attitudes towards China during their early encounters from the Macartney embassy to the outbreak of the Opium War – a deeply consequential event which arguably reshaped relations between China and the West in the next century. It makes the first attempt to bring together the political history of Sino-western relations and the cultural studies of British representations of China, as a new way of explaining the origins of the conflict. The book focuses on a crucial period (1792–1840), which scholars such as Kitson and Markley have recently compared in importance to that of American and French Revolutions. By examining a wealth of primary materials, some in more detail than ever before, this study reveals how the idea of war against China was created out of changing British perceptions of the country.
Download or read book The Opium War written by Julia Lovell and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2015-11-10 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This “crisp and readable account” of the nineteenth century British campaign sheds light on modern Chinese identity through “a heartbreaking story of war” (The Wall Street Journal). In October 1839, a Windsor cabinet meeting voted to begin the first Opium War against China. Bureaucratic fumbling, military missteps, and a healthy dose of political opportunism and collaboration followed. Rich in tragicomedy, The Opium War explores the disastrous British foreign-relations move that became a founding myth of modern Chinese nationalism, and depicts China’s heroic struggle against Western conspiracy. Julia Lovell examines the causes and consequences of the Opium War, interweaving tales of the opium pushers and dissidents. More importantly, she analyses how the Opium Wars shaped China’s self-image and created an enduring model for its interactions with the West, plagued by delusion and prejudice.
Download or read book Britain in China written by Robert A. Bickers and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Chinese in Britain 1800 Present written by G. Benton and published by Springer. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study points up the complex interplay of ethnic and national identities in the lives of Chinese in Britain, arguing that transnational studies reinforce essentialist conceptions of identity and cultural authenticity in diasporic communities, and thus frustrate the promotion of ethnic co-existence and social cohesion in multi-ethnic societies.
