Trade and Diplomacy: The Failure of Preparing for the Chinese Exhibition in the Crystal Palace in 1851

For over two thousand years, European travellers and traders have found their way to the country now known as China. The Romans, for example, referred to this territory as Seres, the land of silk (Hughes, 1937: 4). The Travels of Marco Polo, published in the late thirteenth century, created in Europe strong images of China as an advanced and sophisticated culture. Yet, over the centuries, travellers have been periodically welcomed and expelled by the Chinese ruling elite, as the country opened and then closed its doors to foreigners. Notably, in 1435, China severed contact with the outside world and commenced a long period of isolation; for the remainder of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) only the occasional outsider managed to obtain access beyond the coastal regions. The Italian Jesuit, Matteo Ricci (1552-1610), perhaps came closest to China and the Chinese, for he was one of the few foreigners to reside in the capital, Beijing (Spence, 1985). The establishment of the Canton system by the Qing (1644-1911) rulers in 1756 at last permitted foreign merchants to trade at the port of Canton (Guangzhou) , but they were strictly confined to their compounds, the Chinese city being off limits (Levien, 1982: 13). Despite the lack of contact with everyday culture, the idea of ‘China’ gripped the European imagination during the eighteenth century, with the various waves of chinoiserie permeating the decorative arts and literature (Porter, 2010). From the late eighteenth- early nineteenth century, the reports of the British expeditions, the Macartney (1792-4) and Amherst (1816-17) trade embassies, served to create hitherto unseen representations of this land – fanciful images of pagodas, mandarins, canals and the courtly life in Beijing (Peyrefitte, 1993). Confined and carefully monitored, however, Europeans were never able to see everyday Chinese life. It was the Opium Wars in the mid-nineteenth century which most dramatically transformed the image of the country in the West. During this time, soldiers travelled to regions previously closed to the outside world. This chapter takes as its focus the period of the First and Second Opium Wars (1839-42; 1856-60), documenting the perceptions of China constructed by British travellers at this time. It argues that the idea of China shifted dramatically, from romantic and idealized images, to an ambivalent but largely negative position at the conclusion of the Second Opium War in 1860.

Karl Marx, a pioneer of anti-imperialism (or anti-mercantilism), was exiled in the 1850s in London. A decade later, he wrote nearly 500 editorials for The New York Herald Tribune. Although a handful of these editorials offer important clues for understanding Marx’s thinking on imperialism, these writings have been largely ignored. This study fleshes out Marx’s thinking, especially with respect to the relationship between wars and capital accumulation. This article employs the example of the Second Opium War, launched in the mid-1850s. The dominant Western powers at the time, such as Great Britain and France, advocated mercantilism, usually supported by military force, and regarded wars as a quick method to accumulate capital for national wealth. Additionally, Britain skillfully maneuvered its cultural hegemony by using its official periodical, The Economist, to legitimize the wars against Qing China. In the mid-nineteenth century, Marx had already clearly observed the close relationship between the Opium Wars and capital accumulation.

This article discusses the policies of British administrators towards the Malays’ coconut cultivation as a commercial crop for export purposes. In commercial coconut cultivation for export purposes, the British administrators not only refrained from hindering but also encouraged the Malays to continuously plant coconuts. However, the British administration’s policies towards Malays on coconut cultivation is not detailed in past writings. On the contrary, previous writings only focused on British effort in commercialising coconut products and the socio-economic effects resulting from the development of coconut cultivation. Therefore, this study will concentrate on the British administrators’ policies towards Malays coconut cultivation, why the British administrators adopted such a policies and the efforts made to ensure that Malays continue to cultivate coconuts. This writing argues that the British administrators endeavored to encourage and influence the Malays to continue planting coconuts in order to diversify agricultural products for export, thus reducing dependence on rubber cultivation and subsequently increasing income through exports. Additionally, this effort aimed to meet the needs of the manufacturing sector within Malaya itself. The British administrators’ efforts to promote coconut cultivation among the Malays were not only through positive encouragement but also implemented through coercion. This writing uses a historical approach, specifically the method of analysing primary sources in the form of official records of the British administrators, such as the Year Book And Manual of Statistics, Malayan Agricultural Journal, Federated Malay States Gazette Agricultural Bulletin of the Straits and Federated Malay States, and other related records.

In the late 1850s and early 1860s, the idea of building a passage through the Isthmus of Kra in the Malay Peninsula was hotly debated amongst British officials, merchants, and investors. This study finds that the British East India Company's rule over the Straits of Malacca had been a dilemma for itself and British merchants in China. The Second Opium War and the Indian Revolt of 1857 exacerbated the dilemma and pushed some British policymakers and investors to seek an alternative route between India and China. The proposal of the Kra passage was the response and solution to the Malacca dilemma. In historicising the Kra passage proposal and putting it in the context of the British empire's simultaneous crises in Asia in the mid-nineteenth century, the case of the proposed Kra passage reveals the complex relations between different actors within the British empire and the challenges of integrating multiple imperial interests into a British world system

Piracy was considered a crime in international law, and British authorities felt its suppression justified the extension of state power into Asian waters. Only after the Opium War and the colonisation of Hong Kong, however, did Britain gain an interest and the wherewithal to act against pirates off the coast of South China. Ships of the Royal Navy, enforcing British ideas of international and maritime law in Chinese waters, together with the criminal justice system in Hong Kong, proved limited in their capacity to deal with piracy in South China in the mid-nineteenth century. Agents of British state power on the coast of China thus sought the assistance of their international counterparts, culminating in an international punitive expedition to Coulan. This article examines interstate cooperation in the effort to suppress piracy and the light this sheds on the relationship between piracy and state power. It argues that such collaboration required compromises between different understandings of piracy and the jurisdiction that different states had over it, and that interstate power was ultimately limited in its impact on the activities of pirates in South China.

What is AmericaÕs place in the history of international law, and what is ChinaÕs? From the beginning, international law was premised on the exclusion of those outside of Europe, first on the basis of religious, then cultural, difference. In declaring its independence in 1776, the United States overthrew its colonial yoke and insisted on political parity with the sovereign states of Europe. Yet it remained an open question how the young nation would organize its political relations with the extra-European world. The United States rejected (ostensibly) all forms of territorial imperialism, and it appeared during the first decades of the nineteenth century that it would in fact treat ÒOrientalÓ states as sovereign equals. However, in its first treaty with ChinaÑa Treaty of Peace, Amity and Commerce, signed in 1844Ñthe United States obtained the right of extraterritorial jurisdiction in China. For the next century, Americans in China were subject only to the laws of the United States, each U.S. citizen becoming effectively a floating island of American sovereignty in the middle of the Chinese empire. Ultimately, the expectation of ÒextraterritorialityÓ in dealings with states of the Asia-Pacific region became a hallmark of American-style non-territorial imperialism through the beginning of the twentieth century. To explain the ideological transformation in American diplomacy from an assumption of equality among states to an Orientalist expectation of extraterritorial privileges for American citizens among ÒuncivilizedÓ peoples, this essay first considers AmericaÕs place in the global expansion of (Western) international law and then analyzes how the United States re-configured its legal relationship to Europe and the rest of the world in the post-Revolutionary era. After a short account of AmericaÕs early trade relations with China, Ruskola analyzes the conventional narrative about BritainÕs aggressive role in opening China for free trade in the Opium War, and then contrasts it with the received wisdom about AmericaÕs Òspecial relationshipÓ with China. Questioning the latter view, the essay suggests that the 1844 Treaty of Wanghia was a constitutive moment in U.S. political relations with Asia. By re-narrating the early history of American foreign relations, the main author of the treaty, Caleb Cushing, invented a historically unfounded but politically potent form of American imperial sovereignty, which became dominant in the Pacific in the second half of the nineteenth century. Moreover, this practice of American imperial sovereignty became a model for various European imperial nations that entered into their own extraterritoriality treaties in the following years, thus signaling AmericaÕs rise to the status of imperial state in its own right. Finally, the essay turns to the Chinese Exclusion Laws in the United States, to analyze how the differential construction of sovereignties operated on this side of the Pacific. Remarkably, the law of nations was seen to give Americans both the right to ÒopenÓ China for the entry of Americans and the right to exclude Chinese from the United States.

As the history of capitalism has garnered increased attention over the past decade, scholars of gender and sexuality have found themselves wondering: Where are all the women in the history of capitalism? In Bawdy City, Katie M. Hemphill has crafted a stunning response. While it might be tempting to see prostitution as an illicit and shadowy enterprise—one that exists on the marginal edges of the “real” economy—Hemphill convincingly argues that commercial sex was not peripheral to the development of industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century. Instead, sex workers provided much of the labor, services, and capital that fueled economic development in American cities. While most scholarship on prostitution focuses on either the antebellum period or the Progressive Era, Bawdy City provides a connective thread between these two historical moments, effectively balancing a sweeping change-over-time argument with a nitty-gritty analysis of prostitution as a social practice, legal category, and economic phenomenon.The narrative begins in Baltimore during the 1790s, when prostitution was still a “largely informal, subsistence trade” (7). The situation changed in the late 1820s, as brothels began to dot city streets and sex work attained a new degree of centralization. By the mid-nineteenth century, illicit sex had become an immensely profitable enterprise—one that was financed by real estate speculators, wealthy landlords, and genteel men of the middling and upper classes. Because prostitution was so lucrative—and so central to Baltimore's budding market economy—city officials did not attempt to eradicate it entirely. Instead, they tried to “contain, control, and monitor” it (120). Although they prosecuted women who sold sex on the streets, they typically tolerated those who plied their trade behind brothel walls. Bawdy-house proprietors occasionally got slapped with fines, to be sure, but they rarely struggled to pay them. Even when madams found themselves short on cash, “they could usually count on their wealthy, real-estate owning landlords to bail them out” (122).The Civil War was a further boon for the commercial sex trade in Baltimore. When the Union Army took over the city, a crop of occupying soldiers provided sex workers with a new base of customers. By the 1870s, however, city officials had begun to crack down on prostitution, and the enterprise “came to be understood as inflicting injury on the economic, social, and health interests of the urban middle class” (172). Never mind that sex workers had helped to build the city's market economy. And never mind that the city's wealthy investors and landlords had been handsomely profiting from the commercial sex trade for years. Middle-class Baltimoreans increasingly decried prostitution as a “moral blight” and grumbled that the mere presence of brothels decreased property values in their neighborhoods (141). The courts backed them up, pushing brothels into red-light districts that were usually located in the city's poorest areas and inhabited by Black Baltimoreans. The result was a racialized geography of sex work.By the turn of the twentieth century, prostitution underwent a process of recasualization. The rise of “cheap amusements” resulted in a more informal social and sexual culture where men could “treat” women to drinks and food “in exchange for dances, company, or sex” (240). By the Progressive Era, though, an alliance of moral reformers, public health officials, women's rights activists, and “social purity campaigners” combined to launch an assault on the commercial sex trade (275). City commissioners started evicting brothel inhabitants, shutting down red-light districts, and passing laws that made prostitution less profitable and more dangerous for those who engaged in it. As Bawdy City reveals, these social and governmental “reforms” almost always ignored the voices and experiences of sex workers themselves.By illustrating the connections between the illicit sex trade and Baltimore's nascent industrial economy, Hemphill deftly exposes the intersections between the history of capitalism and the history of prostitution. Despite decades of high-quality scholarship by historians of gender and sexuality, many economic histories continue to privilege the stories of male investors, artisans, factory owners, clerks, and low-wage laborers. Bawdy City, by contrast, emphasizes the experiences of female workers and the men they forged social, sexual, and economic connections with. In this book, brothel landlords become real estate speculators who wrung profits from the bodies of marginalized women. Madams emerge as middle managers who supervised the time, labor, and behavior of their employees. And sex workers come into focus as working-class people who increasingly found themselves monitored by the scrutiny of intrusive employers.Hemphill also reminds readers that madams and their employees were not just laborers but also consumers who funneled money into a developing urban economy. Sex workers expended large sums on elegant apparel, and they hired people to cook, clean, and launder their clothing. Madams furnished their parlors with extravagant furniture and purchased food, alcohol, and luxury goods from local merchants. Because of the social stigma attached to prostitution, brothel managers often rented rooms at inflated prices. Through all these activities, sex workers propped up a vibrant and often exploitative urban marketplace.Bawdy City simultaneously depicts sex workers as vulnerable women and as complicated people with a wide array of personal, economic, and erotic priorities. As Hemphill points out, many women engaged in sex work because they had no other choice, but many others sold sex to gain access to independence, excitement, or luxury goods. While the book provides passing vignettes of women's stories, readers may find themselves longing for a more human portrait of how sex workers experienced the legal, historical, and economic developments that Hemphill so beautifully outlines. Of course, the voices of marginalized women are notoriously difficult to uncover in the archives, and Hemphill has produced a carefully researched, lucidly written, and well-argued book that will appeal to legal historians, historians of capitalism, and scholars of gender and sexuality. By depicting prostitution as a uniquely gendered form of labor, she has given us an important reminder: the history of capitalism is entangled with the history of gender and sexuality—and sex work is, above all else, work.

This article surveys a Chinese coastal map (haitu), similar to the sea charts used in the west. The map was produced in the late eighteenth century under the official supervision of the Qing court. Titled Qisheng yanhai tu (A coastal map of the seven provinces), this was one of very few maps made before the First Opium War that charted the contours of coastal regions and the immediate sea space under the control of the Qing Empire. It is also notable for the detailed paratextual information printed on the map touching upon various issues, such as the importance of coastal defense, the significance of the Bohai Sea, the dividing logic between inner and outer sea spaces, as well as the topographies of strategic islands off the China coast. In line with cartographic depictions, these paratextual materials indicate the way that the Manchu Empire conceptualized the maritime frontier in a deliberate and preventive manner. Through careful analysis of this coastal map, we can reexamine the overriding, conventional conception of the Qing Empire as strictly a land-based, continental power that cared little about the ocean before the arrival of western gunboats in the mid-nineteenth century

In the late 1910s, 1920s, and even into the 1930s, “jazz” was the music of the age in the Republic of China, especially and primarily in Shanghai on China's east coast. It was enjoyed equally by sophisticated Chinese gentry and upper-class people in the many dance halls dotting various parts of Shanghai, and by the many Europeans, Russians, and Americans living and working in the so-called “Paris of the East.” These same foreigners also owned pieces of Shanghai, literally. This chapter asks how several foreign nations came to own sections of Shanghai, and have unrestricted access to numerous key ports throughout China's eastern coast? The answer to these questions can be found in a conflict initially between the British (and ultimately the French, Russians, and Americans) and the Chinese in the mid-nineteenth century: the Opium Wars, two wars that had roots in late eighteenth-century China.

Pidgin English appeared in China along the Pearl River Delta as a contact language composed of a mixture of English, Cantonese, Portuguese, Hindi, and Malay as early as the eighteenth century. It spread to the Yangzi River delta in the mid-nineteenth century when an increasing number of Cantonese merchants and workers traveled to other treaty ports after the First Opium War. Focusing on a series of poems called Pidgin Bamboo Branch Lyrics (Bieqin zhuzhici) published in the newspaper Shen Bao in 1873, this paper explores how pidgin was appropriated in Chinese poetry and altered the literary soundscape in late Qing China. I argue that these pidgin English terms created a heteroglot poetic space wherein Sinographs and European words, literary language and local tongues, and classical images and contemporary anecdotes intertwine to generate diverse and contradictory meanings. Through an innovative collocation of the graphic, literal, and phonetic features of Chinese characters, the pidgin words and expressions in these poems produce a multilayered structure of meanings with various possibilities for interpretation. Moreover, unlike traditional bamboo branch lyrics in which non-Chinese words are incorporated to domesticate strangeness and consolidate the imperial order of center and periphery, these poems have an inverse effect: their use of pidgin English instead alienates the native, the conventional, and the familiar landscape/soundscape. This poetry made of language crossings depicts modernity as an uncanny sonic experience and makes foreignness appear not in a faraway land but in one’s own poetic language and everyday life.

In the mid-nineteenth century, China and Japan faced the rising threat of western imperialism. Yet, despite the two countries' cultural ties and geographic proximity, their responses to that threat were quite different. When confronted with growing anti-Manchu rebellions at home and British demands for trade concessions in the 1830s, the Qing dynasty proved unable to mobilize the resources necessary to defend the empire. The first and second Opium Wars revealed disparities in military technology between China and the European great powers. Faced with internal unrest and the prospect of China's dismemberment, Chinese provincial leaders made an attempt at internal reform, the so-called Tongzi Restoration (1862–74), aimed at reforming the military, creating an arms industry, and strengthening traditional Confucian government. Although these and later reforms prolonged the Qing dynasty until 1911, they were insufficient to halt China's relative decline.

After Deng’s strategies of managing elite conflict and grooming pro-reform young leaders are reviewed, it is time to zero in on his efforts to put into action liberal measures in opening up the nation. Among major reform initiatives introduced by post-Mao leaders, few have caught as much attention as the opening of China. Thus in examining national reform policies, the Open Policy is chosen as the case study. Whether or not to open up China’s economy to the outside world was a highly controversial and sensitive issue concerning national pride among the elites and the populace. The forced opening of China after its defeat in the Opium War in the mid-nineteenth century, called the Open Door Policy, is different from the Open Policy engineered by Deng Xiaoping. The Open Door Policy has been viewed by the Chinese as a national disgrace as well as an imperialist imposition of trade preferences on a sovereign country. Communists came to power in 1949 with a strong anti-imperialist tone that deeply influenced the Chinese for the coming decades. For fervent nationalists, the nation’s opening in any form resembled a sell-out of national economic interests to foreign intruders and abandoning of decades-old hard-line policy against the West.

China’s long history has yielded an abundance of cultural relics. Unfortunately, since the mid-nineteenth century, many Chinese cultural relics have been destroyed or removed from China by various means. The term ‘lost cultural relics’ refers to Chinese cultural objects looted, stolen, clandestinely excavated or illegally trafficked between 1840 and 1949. Although there are no definitive totals of the lost Chinese cultural relics, the Chinese Society of Cultural Relics estimates more than ten million pieces of invaluable Chinese cultural objects have ‘sunk into oblivion’ in Europe, the United States, Japan, and Southeast Asian nations since the First Opium War.

In the late nineteenth century, a large number of high-density streets emerged on the riverside of Canton city. By examining Canton’s historical port activities, this article considers how the city’s particular urban fabric was shaped. The Canton System of the Qing Dynasty implemented a series of foreign-trade controls. Western vessels were required to anchor at Whampoa harbour, and then unload their cargo on to ‘chop boats’ for transportation to the main urban area, where it was stored. This meant that the banks of the Pearl River near the city developed into an urban storage area. Numerous warehouses were erected along the river. After the Opium Wars in the mid-nineteenth century, the Canton System – along with its rules of ship anchorage, cargo transportation, and storage – came to an end. When rebuilding after the wars, many more merchants preferred to construct shop-lined streets. With increasing numbers of warehouses being replaced by streets, the urban morphology on the Canton riverside changed from dense houses to dense streets. Some of these still remain today. This article focuses on the urban district of Canton along the Pearl River, revealing that the dense streets on the riverside were the result of the port activities of Canton.

Reviewed by: The West and China since 1500 Ricardo K. S. Mak (bio) John S. Gregory . The West and China since 1500. Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. 233 pp. Hardcover $105.00, ISBN 0-333-99744-1. Paperback $32.95, ISBN 1-4039-0280-1. This book is a macro-analytical account of the changing relationship between the West and China since the sixteenth century. It divides the history of the five-century Sino-Western cultural, economic, and political interaction into three phases: "coming together, rather slowly and on China's terms (1500-1800 )" (chapter 2), "close encounters, on the Western terms (1800-1900)" (chapter 3 ), and "hither and thither, in search of comfortable common ground (1900-2001 )" (chapter 4). Its narrative structure carries the optimistic implication that having passed through a Chinese-dominated and then a Western-dominated period, the West and China are now gradually overcoming their differences and are trying to work out new forms of cooperation. One distinctive feature of Gregory's book is that it addresses this complicated topic from a cultural perspective. In defining the term "the West," Gregory emphasizes that "it is an underlying assumption of this book that there was an entity one can call 'the West' which, whatever its internal variations and rivalries, has displayed a recognizably distinct and consistent set of values and assumptions in its relations with other traditions" (p. 2). These values and assumptions include extensive trade within a free market, Christian faith, and diplomatic equality founded on international laws, all of which have developed from the unique geographical and historical conditions of Europe. The West thus stands in vivid contrast to the Chinese Empire, which was built on an inward-looking economy, a centralized dynastic government, a lack of any revealed religion, and rule by "good men" rather than by rational laws. Gregory, probably drawing on the findings of sinologists such as Mark Elvin and Weberian sociologists, emphasizes that while these cultural elements enabled China to create high levels of social, economic, and technological development before the eighteenth century, they also helped to cultivate among the Chinese people, particularly the ruling elite, a conservativism and an attitude of suspicion toward the wider world that left it ill equipped to meet the challenges of the nineteenth century. Gregory thus reaffirms a mainstream but nonetheless controversial opinion in Western sinology that the conflicts between the West and China in the last five hundred years originated from cultural rather than political differences. While careful to avoid exaggerating the intensity of Sino-Western interaction in the premodern era, Gregory admits that the contacts between the two great civilizations were initiated by small groups of European traders, missionaries, and diplomats in a few contact zones such as the Imperial Palace in Beijing and the [End Page 355] commercial city, Canton. Confined by cultural barriers and restricted by regulations imposed by the Chinese emperors, whose indifference to the Western "barbarians" was reflected in events such as the Rites Controversy and Lord McCartney's unsuccessful visit to China, the cultural agents from Europe had to be contented with a few social and economic activities within these contact zones. Gregory pointedly concludes that in China "what was rising over this period was not so much European influence as European presence" (p. 71). In Europe, similarly, apart from a few eighteenth-century admirers of Confucianism, Chinese gardening, and Chinese-style systems of rule, knowledge of which had been introduced by the Jesuits and the philosophes, Chinese civilization was still a remote territory. Like many scholars, Gregory maintains that the major factors that transformed Sino-Western relations were the Opium War and the consequential "treaty system," which benefited not only the British but also other Western powers. However, his observation that the treaties concluded between China and the Western powers in the mid-nineteenth century were "unequal but limited" is disputable. For him, that the delegates from Britain, in the summer of 1842, surprised the Chinese officials in the negotiation by asking for so little in the way of concessions, showed that "acquisition of territory was not what these treaties were essentially about, except for the Russians. None of the Western powers involved sought more than...