Captain Elliot and the Founding of Hong Kong
Captain Elliot and the Founding of Hong Kong

Author: Jon Bursey

Publisher: Grub Street Publishers

Published: 2018-03-30

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13: 1526722577

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An in-depth look at the life of Captain Charles Elliot—from his Royal Navy career to his controversial role in establishing Hong Kong as a British colony. On January 26, 1841, the British took possession of the island of Hong Kong. The Convention of Chuenpi was immediately repudiated by both the British and Chinese governments and their respective negotiators recalled. For the British this was Capt. Charles Elliot, whose actions in China became mired in controversy for years to come. Who was Captain Elliot, and how did he find himself at the center of this debate? This book traces Elliot’s career from his early life through his years in the Royal Navy before focusing on his role in the First Anglo-Chinese War and the founding of what became the Crown Colony of Hong Kong. Elliot has been demonized by China and for the most part poorly regarded by historians. This book shows him to have been a man ahead of his time whose views on slavery, armed conflict, the role of women and racial equality often placed him at variance with contemporary attitudes. Twenty years after the return of Hong Kong to China, his legacy is still with us.

Sir Charles Elliot Collection
Sir Charles Elliot Collection

Author:

Publisher:

Published: 1842

Total Pages:

ISBN-13:

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This collection largely reflects the Imperial duties performed by Sir Charles Elliot (1801-1875), and particularly the role he played during a period of strained Sino-Anglo relations. Sir Charles became Her Majesty's Chief Superintendent and Plenipotentiary in China in 1836, and remained the most important British presence there during the Opium War (1839-1842). Opium from India had been imported into China to help the British restore a balance of trade deficit, with the result that millions of Chinese became drug dependent, and the Chinese economy began to drain of its silver reserves. When the Chinese Commissioner at Canton imposed trade restrictions, the British navy intervened and enforced a treaty upon China. Two items in this collection give a particularly good account of the financial implications of the opium trade and the effects of the war. After China, Sir Charles continued to represent the British Empire in a number of other countries. His conduct as British Charge d'Affaires in Texas, 1842-1846, is reported favourably in an extract from a newspaper, and there is a copy of a valedictory address to the Legislative Council of Trinidad, where he was Governor, 1854-56. Sir Charles was also Governor of St. Helena, 1863-69, and there is an interesting report of an experiment to try and establish the Chinchona plant there. A monograph on financial grievances of civil and military officers in India, added to the collection after Sir Charles' death, together with a copy of an act to authorize the payment of pensions to colonial governors, 1865, portrays the economic aspects of a career in Imperial service. Other items added after the death of Sir Charles feature an address to the Archdeacon of Lucknow, an extract of the proceedings of the prosecution of a member of staff at Punjab University for the acceptance of bribes, and a picture book depicting the evils of alcoholism.

Unfinished Revolution
Unfinished Revolution

Author: Sam W. Haynes

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2010-11-04

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 0813930804

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After the War of 1812 the United States remained a cultural and economic satellite of the world’s most powerful empire. Though political independence had been won, John Bull intruded upon virtually every aspect of public life, from politics to economic development to literature to the performing arts. Many Americans resented their subordinate role in the transatlantic equation and, as earnest republicans, felt compelled to sever the ties that still connected the two nations. At the same time, the pull of Britain’s centripetal orbit remained strong, so that Americans also harbored an unseemly, almost desperate need for validation from the nation that had given rise to their republic. The tensions inherent in this paradoxical relationship are the focus of Unfinished Revolution. Conflicted and complex, American attitudes toward Great Britain provided a framework through which citizens of the republic developed a clearer sense of their national identity. Moreover, an examination of the transatlantic relationship from an American perspective suggests that the United States may have had more in common with traditional developing nations than we have generally recognized. Writing from the vantage point of America’s unrivaled global dominance, historians have tended to see in the young nation the superpower it would become. Haynes here argues that, for all its vaunted claims of distinctiveness and the soaring rhetoric of "manifest destiny," the young republic exhibited a set of anxieties not uncommon among nation-states that have emerged from long periods of colonial rule.

The Road to Disunion
The Road to Disunion

Author: William W. Freehling

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1991-12-05

Total Pages: 655

ISBN-13: 0199840326

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Far from a monolithic block of diehard slave states, the South in the eight decades before the Civil War was, in William Freehling's words, "a world so lushly various as to be a storyteller's dream." It was a world where Deep South cotton planters clashed with South Carolina rice growers, where the egalitarian spirit sweeping the North seeped down through border states already uncertain about slavery, where even sections of the same state (for instance, coastal and mountain Virginia) divided bitterly on key issues. It was the world of Jefferson Davis, John C. Calhoun, Andrew Jackson, and Thomas Jefferson, and also of Gullah Jack, Nat Turner, and Frederick Douglass. Now, in the first volume of his long awaited, monumental study of the South's road to disunion, historian William Freehling offers a sweeping political and social history of the antebellum South from 1776 to 1854. All the dramatic events leading to secession are here: the Missouri Compromise, the Nullification Controversy, the Gag Rule ("the Pearl Harbor of the slavery controversy"), the Annexation of Texas, the Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Freehling vividly recounts each crisis, illuminating complex issues and sketching colorful portraits of major figures. Along the way, he reveals the surprising extent to which slavery influenced national politics before 1850, and he provides important reinterpretations of American republicanism, Jeffersonian states' rights, Jacksonian democracy, and the causes of the American Civil War. But for all Freehling's brilliant insight into American antebellum politics, Secessionists at Bay is at bottom the saga of the rich social tapestry of the pre-war South. He takes us to old Charleston, Natchez, and Nashville, to the big house of a typical plantation, and we feel anew the tensions between the slaveowner and his family, the poor whites and the planters, the established South and the newer South, and especially between the slave and his master, "Cuffee" and "Massa." Freehling brings the Old South back to life in all its color, cruelty, and diversity. It is a memorable portrait, certain to be a key analysis of this crucial era in American history.

The Opium War, 1840-1842
The Opium War, 1840-1842

Author: Peter Ward Fay

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2000-11-09

Total Pages: 439

ISBN-13: 0807861367

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This book tells the fascinating story of the war between England and China that delivered Hong Kong to the English, forced the imperial Chinese government to add four ports to Canton as places in which foreigners could live and trade, and rendered irreversible the process that for almost a century thereafter distinguished western relations with this quarter of the globe-- the process that is loosely termed the "opening of China." Originally published by UNC Press in 1975, Peter Ward Fay's study was the first to treat extensively the opium trade from the point of production in India to the point of consumption in China and the first to give both Protestant and Catholic missionaries their due; it remains the most comprehensive account of the first Opium War through western eyes. In a new preface, Fay reflects on the relationship between the events described in the book and Hong Kong's more recent history.

Soldiers of Misfortune
Soldiers of Misfortune

Author: Sam W. Haynes

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2010-07-22

Total Pages: 451

ISBN-13: 0292786441

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This historical study offers “a new understanding of the human cost of the [Republic of Texas’s] vainglorious attempt to attack Mexico” (Western Historical Quarterly). The Somervell and Mier Expeditions of 1842, culminating in the famous "black bean episode" in which Texas prisoners drew white or black beans to determine who would be executed by their Mexican captors, still capture the public imagination in Texas. But were the Texans really martyrs in a glorious cause, or undisciplined soldiers defying their own government? How did the Mier Expedition affect the border disputes between the Texas Republic and Mexico? What role did Texas President Sam Houston play? In Soldiers of Misfortune, Sam W. Haynes addresses this and other important historical questions. Expertly researched yet accessible and engaging, Haynes’s narrative includes many dramatic excerpts from the diaries and letters of expedition participants./DIV