Distant shores : colonial encounters on China's maritime frontier

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Bibliographic Information

Distant shores : colonial encounters on China's maritime frontier

Melissa Macauley

（Histories of economic life / Jeremy Adelman, Sunil Amrith, and Emma Rothschild, series editors）

Princeton University Press, c2021

Available at  / 3 libraries

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Note

Includes bibliographical references (p. 331-353) and index

Summary: "China has conventionally been considered a land empire whose lack of maritime and colonial reach contributed to its economic decline after the mid-eighteenth century. Distant Shores challenges this view, showing that the economic expansion of southeastern Chinese rivaled the colonial ambitions of Europeans overseas. In a story that dawns with the Industrial Revolution and culminates in the Great Depression, Melissa Macauley explains how sojourners from an ungovernable corner of China emerged among the commercial masters of the South China Sea. She focuses on Chaozhou, a region in the great maritime province of Guangdong, whose people shared a repertoire of ritual, cultural, and economic practices. Macauley traces how Chaozhouese at home and abroad reaped many of the benefits of an overseas colonial system without establishing formal governing authority. Their power was sustained instead through a mosaic of familial, brotherhood, and commercial relationships spread across the ports of Bangkok, Singap

Contents of Works

  • The great convergence
  • Pacifying the seas: imperial campaigns and the early modern maritime frontier, 1566-1684
  • Back in the world: the emergence of maritime Chaozhou, 1767-1840
  • Brotherhood of the sword: peasant intellectuals and the cult of insurgency, 1775-1866
  • Qingxiang: pacification on the coastal frontier, 1869-1891
  • Qingxiang: the translocal and transtemporal repercussions of village pacification, 1869-1975
  • Narco-capitalism: confronting the British in Shanghai, 1839-1927
  • "This diabolical tyranny:" domesticating the British at Chaozhou, 1858-1890s
  • Translocal families: women in a male world, 1880s-1929
  • Maritime Chaozhou at full moon, 1891-1929
  • Territorialism and the state

Description and Table of Contents

Description

A pioneering history that transforms our understanding of the colonial era and China's place in it China has conventionally been considered a land empire whose lack of maritime and colonial reach contributed to its economic decline after the mid-eighteenth century. Distant Shores challenges this view, showing that the economic expansion of southeastern Chinese rivaled the colonial ambitions of Europeans overseas. In a story that dawns with the Industrial Revolution and culminates in the Great Depression, Melissa Macauley explains how sojourners from an ungovernable corner of China emerged among the commercial masters of the South China Sea. She focuses on Chaozhou, a region in the great maritime province of Guangdong, whose people shared a repertoire of ritual, cultural, and economic practices. Macauley traces how Chaozhouese at home and abroad reaped many of the benefits of an overseas colonial system without establishing formal governing authority. Their power was sustained instead through a mosaic of familial, fraternal, and commercial relationships spread across the ports of Bangkok, Singapore, Saigon, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Swatow. The picture that emerges is not one of Chinese divergence from European modernity but rather of a convergence in colonial sites that were critical to modern development and accelerating levels of capital accumulation. A magisterial work of scholarship, Distant Shores reveals how the transoceanic migration of Chaozhouese laborers and merchants across a far-flung maritime world linked the Chinese homeland to an ever-expanding frontier of settlement and economic extraction.

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