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Distant Shores: Colonial Encounters on China's Maritime Frontier
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.
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.
- GenresHistory
376 pages, Hardcover
First published May 18, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 16, 2025
Brilliant dive into the expansion of the horizon of Chinese Chaozhou-dialect-speaking community.
Worth noting that it is exceptionally well written for an academic book, the author being often nothing short of delightfully witty and humourous. She also has a eye for the epic life stories of some of the characters.
Overall, it's a really good book which engages both with some of the most interesting historical debates of the moment (K. Pommeranz) and some of the current political questions (9-Dash Line).
In essence, the book shows how the large-scale migation of Chaozhouese across SE Asia from 1600 onwards had a effect on the homeland (principally their home region but on China as a whole too) very similar to the on colonisation had on Britain and Europe more generally.
All the more interesting because in the West many of the Chinese community actually descend from those Chaozhouese pioneers.
Worth noting that it is exceptionally well written for an academic book, the author being often nothing short of delightfully witty and humourous. She also has a eye for the epic life stories of some of the characters.
Overall, it's a really good book which engages both with some of the most interesting historical debates of the moment (K. Pommeranz) and some of the current political questions (9-Dash Line).
In essence, the book shows how the large-scale migation of Chaozhouese across SE Asia from 1600 onwards had a effect on the homeland (principally their home region but on China as a whole too) very similar to the on colonisation had on Britain and Europe more generally.
All the more interesting because in the West many of the Chinese community actually descend from those Chaozhouese pioneers.
December 16, 2024
My ancestral home is in Chaozhou. I often listened to the stories told by my family members about 下南洋 when I was young. I was deeply touched after reading this book
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews