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    Nineteenth-Century China

    Five Imperialist Perspectives

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    Contributor(s)
    Basu, Dilip (editor)
    Murphey, Rhoads (editor)
    Language
    English
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    Abstract
    Materials from the past that wrongly anticipate the future, or present information or judgments that are later proved misleading or erroneous, are sometimes overlooked in reconstructing the past. Yet such documents are as legimiate, and perhaps as important, as those that are vindicated by events or continue to share perspectives with later generations. The five documents reproduced in Nineteenth-Century China are typical of the periods from which they come, but each was overtaken or contradicted by events. Collected with a belief in the legitimacy of attempting to see every period as much as possible in its own terms, these texts offer a glimpse of what China looked like and suggested to Englishmen on the spot in Canton and Hong Kong in the first half of the nineteenth century, and how they viewed their own country and its role vis-à-vis the China they observed. The first two texts in Nineteenth-Century China exemplify the imperialist mind's eagerness to explore the world, to get a picture of all of its parts, and as rapidly as possible to "open" all areas to the benificent influence of the West, notably through an expanded commerce that would enrich its Western masters. Samuel Ball's "Observations" (1817) show how much detailed information was available to Westerners and what the mercantile British were after, and an anonymous dissertation (1838) provides an example of the dream of the China as El Dorado: an immense population of eager traders, hard workers, and willing buyers. The third text (1845) is an early foreshadowing by a colonial official, R. M. Martin, of Western imperial arguments, rationalizations, and attitudes that would become common fifty years later. The fourth selection consists of an exchange of correspondence in 1847 about British access to and use of land in the vicinity of Canton. A short statement of purpose (1848) from the Morrison Education Society, demonstrating a missionary enterprise combining Christian evangelism and English education, concludes the book.
    URI
    https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/41821
    Keywords
    History
    DOI
    10.3998/mpub.19047
    Publisher
    University of Michigan Press
    Publisher website
    https://www.press.umich.edu/
    Publication date and place
    Ann Arbor, 2020
    Grantor
    • National Endowment for the Humanities - [grantnumber unknown]
    • Andrew W. Mellon Foundation - [grantnumber unknown]
    Imprint
    U OF M CENTER FOR CHINESE STUDIES
    Series
    Michigan Monographs In Chinese Studies, 13
    Classification
    History
    Pages
    83
    Rights
    https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
    • Imported or submitted locally

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    License

    • If not noted otherwise all contents are available under Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

    Credits

    • logo EU
    • This project received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 683680, 810640, 871069 and 964352.

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