Distant Shores

Colonial Encounters on China's Maritime Frontier

Melissa Macauley

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English

Princeton University Pres
18 May 2021

History; Asian history; Maritime history; Colonialism & imperialism; National liberation & independence, post-colonialism; Political structure & processes

Series: Histories of Economic Life

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 rivalled 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 labourers and merchants across a far-flung maritime world linked the Chinese homeland to an ever-expanding frontier of settlement and economic extraction.

By: Melissa Macauley
Imprint: Princeton University Pres
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 235mm, Width: 156mm,
ISBN: 9780691213484
ISBN 10: 0691213488
Series: Histories of Economic Life
Pages: 376
Publication Date: 18 May 2021
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , General/trade , Primary , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Melissa Macauley is associate professor of history at Northwestern University. She is the author of Social Power and Legal Culture: Litigation Masters in Late Imperial China.

Reviews for Distant Shores: Colonial Encounters on China's Maritime Frontier

Winner of the Bentley Book Prize, World History Association [A] deeply researched study. . . . Distant Shores succeeds in its objective to further nuance the conventional narrative of China's decline throughout the long 19th century by shifting the gaze to the southeastern littoral. ---Yorim Spoelder, Asian Review of Books