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.
In the early stages of the Second World War, the vast crescent of British-ruled territories stretching from India to Singapore appeared as a massive Allied asset. It provided scores of soldiers and great quantities of raw materials and helped present a seemingly impregnable global defense against the Axis. Yet, within a few weeks in 1941-42, a Japanese invasion had destroyed all this, sweeping suddenly and decisively through south and southeast Asia to the Indian frontier, and provoking the extraordinary revolutionary struggles which would mark the beginning of the end of British dominion in the East and the rise of today's Asian world. More than a military history, this gripping account of groundbreaking battles and guerrilla campaigns creates a panoramic view of British Asia as it was ravaged by warfare, nationalist insurgency, disease, and famine. It breathes life into the armies of soldiers, civilians, laborers, businessmen, comfort women, doctors, and nurses who confronted the daily brutalities of a combat zone which extended from metropolitan cities to remote jungles, from tropical plantations to the Himalayas. Drawing upon a vast range of Indian, Burmese, Chinese, and Malay as well as British, American, and Japanese voices, the authors make vivid one of the central dramas of the twentieth century: the birth of modern south and southeast Asia and the death of British rule.
This collection of essays collects the leading scholars on British colonial thought in Southeast Asia to consider the question: what was the relationship between liberalism and the British Empire in Southeast Asia? The empire builders in Southeast Asia: Lord Minto, William Farquhar, John Leyden, Thomas Stamford Raffles, and John Crawfurd - to name a few - were fervent believers in a liberal free trade order in Southeast Asia. Many recent studies of British imperialism, and European imperialism more generally, have addressed how the anti-imperialist tradition of Eighteenth century liberalism was increasingly intertwined with the discourses of empire, freedom, race and economics in the nineteenth century. This collection extends those studies to look at the impact of liberalism on. British colonialism in Southeast Asia and early nineteenth century Southeast Asia we see some of the first attempts at developing multicultural democracies within the colonies, experiments in free trade and attempts to use free trade to prevent war and colonisation.
This study investigates the connections between opium policy and imperialism in Burma. It examines what influenced the imperial regime's opium policy decisions, such as racial ideologies, the necessity of articulating a convincing rationale for British governance, and Burma's position in multiple imperial and transnational networks.
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.
No figure has had a more global impact than Alexander the Great, whose legends have encircled the globe and been translated into a dizzying multitude of languages, from Indo-European and Semitic to Turkic and Austronesian. Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia examines parallel traditions of the Alexander Romance in Britain and Southeast Asia, demonstrating how rival Alexanders - one Christian, the other Islamic - became central figures in their respective literatures. In the early modern age of exploration, both Britain and Southeast Asia turned to literary imitations of Alexander to imagine their own empires and international relations, defining themselves as peripheries against the Ottoman Empire's imperial center: this shared classical inheritance became part of an intensifying cross-cultural engagement in the encounter between the two, allowing a revealing examination of their cultural convergences and imperial rivalries and a remapping of the global literary networks of the early modern world. Rather than absolute alterity or strangeness, the narrative of these parallel traditions is one of contact - familiarity and proximity, unexpected affinity and intimate strangers.
Using previously unexplored archives from colonial institutions and individuals, and primary materials produced by the Burmese Chinese, this comprehensive study investigates over a century of history of the Burmese Chinese under British colonial rule. Due to the peculiar position of Burma in the British imperial world and the Southeast Asian Chinese network, the Chinese community had a unique experience in a Southeast Asian colony governed by Europeans with an India-based system. This book reveals, through everyday life experience, prominent community figures, and milestone events, the internal rivalry and integration among different regional groups within the community, and the general impressions it left in contemporary observations and communal memories. The book also traces historical roots of some unsolved ethnic issues in present-day Myanmar.
A compelling history of the British Army in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—showing how the military gathered knowledge from campaigns across the globe “Superb analysis.”—William Anthony Hay, Wall Street Journal At the outbreak of the War of Austrian Succession in 1742, the British Army’s military tactics were tired and outdated, stultified after three decades of peace. The army’s leadership was conservative, resistant to change, and unable to match new military techniques developing on the continent. Losses were cataclysmic and the force was in dire need of modernization—both in terms of strategy and in leadership and technology. In this wide-ranging and highly original account, Huw J. Davies traces the British Army’s accumulation of military knowledge across the following century. An essentially global force, British armies and soldiers continually gleaned and synthesized strategy from war zones the world over: from Europe to the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Davies records how the army and its officers put this globally acquired knowledge to use, exchanging information and developing into a remarkable vehicle of innovation—leading to the pinnacle of its military prowess in the nineteenth century.