RAS Shanghai – Robert Bickers on Britain, China and India 1830s-1947 – 14/4/12

RAS WEEKENDER

Saturday 14th April 2012 at 4.00pm

Tavern, Radisson Plaza Xingguo Hotel 78 Xing Guo Road, Shanghai

PROFESSOR ROBERT BICKERS

ON

Britain, China and India 1830s – 1947

British China was, in origin, an off-shoot of British India. Most notoriously, it was the prime market for Indian opium, and a key factor in British Indian revenues through the tea trade. This talk explores the history of this triangular relationship, and the ways in which the British story in China was shaped by its Indian roots and connections. The Indian factor remained a live and important one until the end of the treaty era in the 1940s, and remained prominent in Hong Kong after the establishment of the PRC. While Sir Victor Sassoon charmed the city’s elite, Sikhs policed China’s two international settlements and several British concessions. British Indian forces were deployed four times on active service to protect the British establishment as it promenaded to tiffin along its bunds. Britons besieged at Peking in 1900 chatted about the parallels with Lucknow in 1857. Where precisely did the British in China think they actually were?

Robert Bickers is Professor of History at the University of Bristol, and the author of Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai (2003) and The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire (2011, just published in paperback). He has recently contributed a new foreword to the Earnshaw Books reprint of E.W. Peters’ Shanghai Policeman, and is preparing a new work on China’s coastal lighthouses.