Hong Kong's History

Hong Kong's History
Author: Tak-Wing Ngo
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2002-09-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1134630948

Rewriting Hong Kong's history from the bottom up, the chapters investigate vital, but hitherto obscured, aspects of the colony's rise. They cover the Chinese collaboration with the colonial regime, legal discrimination and intimidation, rural politics, social movements, government-business relations, industrial policy, flexible manufacturing and colonial historiography. Drawing together contributions from historians, sociologists and political scientists, the book highlights the role played by a variety of social actors in Hong Kong's history and differs both from recent celebrations of British colonialism and anti-colonial Chinese nationalism.

Edge of Empires

Edge of Empires
Author: John M. CARROLL
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2009-06-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674029232

In Edge of Empires, Carroll situates Hong Kong squarely within the framework of both Chinese and British colonial history, while exploring larger questions about the meaning and implications of colonialism in modern history.

The Hong Kong Region 1850-1911

The Hong Kong Region 1850-1911
Author: James Hayes
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2012-05-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9888139118

First published in 1977, The Hong Kong Region is a historical reconstruction of long-settled vil­lage and township society in Hong Kong's New Territories between 1850 and 1911. The book's central argument is that the gentry and bureau­cracy played almost no role in these commu­nities, which were run by local peasants and shopkeepers who had to deal virtually unaided with routine administration and with every form of disaster, natural or man-made. A sub­stantial new introduction reviews the research and its wider implications for our understand­ing of traditional Chinese society in the light of later scholarly studies.

Chronicling Westerners in Nineteenth-Century East Asia

Chronicling Westerners in Nineteenth-Century East Asia
Author: Robert S.G. Fletcher
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2022-04-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 1350238899

This book presents intimate, engaging, and largely untold portraits of Western lives and livelihoods in Japanese and Chinese treaty ports, as well as in the British colonies of Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand, during the 19th century. It does so by examining how Westerners 'chronicled' their overseas lives in personal letters, diplomatic dispatches, business records, and academic papers. By utilizing these rich but often overlooked sources, Chronicling Westerners in Nineteenth-Century East Asia presents new insights into the pace and challenges of daily life, especially in the Japanese treaty ports of Nagasaki and Yokohama but also in Shanghai and Hong Kong. In the process, the volume stresses the 'connectivities' between its subjects, as Westerners' lives intersected, and as they moved between Japanese and Chinese port cities. Contributors based in the USA, Japan, the UK, New Zealand and Switzerland reveal the various commercial, maritime, and imperial connections, linked in surprising ways to Westerners in East Asia portrayed here, which shaped colonial development in Australia and New Zealand. Through a broad investigation of Westerners recording their lives, the book re-examines wider histories of the so-called 'openings' of China and Japan in the 1850s and 1860s, as well as how Westerners sought to make sense of these events, and to narrate their place within them. Finally the volume considers how flows of people, capital, commerce, and communications not only cut across the histories of distinct treaty ports in Japan and China, but also shows their implications for empire and exchange beyond East Asia, including Australia, New Zealand, and the 19th-century maritime world.

Fortune's Bazaar

Fortune's Bazaar
Author: Vaudine England
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2023-05-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 1982184515

A timely, well-researched, and vibrant new history of Hong Kong that reveals the untold stories of the diverse peoples who have made it a multicultural world metropolis--and whose freedoms are endangered today. Hong Kong has always been many cities to many people: a seaport, a gateway to an empire, a place where fortunes can be dramatically made or lost, a place to disappear and reinvent oneself, and a mixing pot of diverse populations from literally everywhere around the globe. A British Crown Colony for 155 years, Hong Kong is now ruled by the Chinese Communist Party. Here, renowned journalist Vaudine England delves into Hong Kong's complex history and its people--diverse, multi-cultural, cosmopolitan--who have made this one-time fishing village into the world port city it is today. Rather than a traditional history describing a town led by British Governors or a mere offshoot of a collapsing Chinese empire, Fortune's Bazaar is the first thorough examination of the varied peoples who made Hong Kong. While British traders and Asian merchants had long been busy in the Indian and South East Asian seas, there were many from different cultures and ethnic backgrounds who arrived in Hong Kong, met and married--despite all taboos--and created a distinct community. Many of Hong Kong's most influential figures during its first century as a city were neither British nor Chinese--they were Malay or Indian, Jewish or Armenian, Parsi or Portuguese, Eurasian or Chindian--or simply, Hong Kongers. England describes those overlooked in history including the opium-traders who built synagogues or churches, ship-owners carrying gold-rush migrants, property tycoons, and more. Here, too, is the visionary who plumbed Hong Kong's harbor depths to spur reclamation, the half-Dutch Chinese gentleman with two wives who was knighted by Queen Victoria, and the landscape gardeners who settled Kowloon and became millionaires. A story of empire, race, and sex, Fortune's Bazaar combines deep archival research and oral history to present a vivid history of a special place--a unique city made by diverse people of the world, whose part in its creation has never been properly told until now.