EMPIRE MADE ME by Robert Bickers ( 9780231131322 ) - Books & Audio Books at Pickabook.co.uk

Item Details

Title:

EMPIRE MADE ME
AN ENGLISHMAN ADRIFT IN SHANGHAI

By:

Format:

Hardback

List price:	£22.00
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ISBN 10:

0231131321

ISBN 13:

9780231131322

Publisher:

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Pub. date:

23 December, 2003

Pages:

384

Description:

This riveting "biography of a nobody" offers a rare view of empire from the bottom up and a glimpse of the making of modern China. Robert Bickers mines the letters of Richard Tinkler along with archival files to create a fascinating and much-needed narrative of everyday life in the colonial world and an unvarnished portrait of the colonial experience that will permanently affect our view of it.

Synopsis:

Richard Maurice Tinkler was an ordinary man in an extraordinary time and place. This riveting "biography of a nobody" offers a rare glimpse of imperialism and the making of modern China seen from the perspective of a working-class Englishman enforcing the order of everyday life on the streets of Shanghai. Culled from Tinkler's many personal letters, Empire Made Me meticulously documents his astonishingly revealing life in the service of the British Empire between 1919 and 1939, one of hundreds of young men who joined the Shanghai Municipal Police. Responsible for maintaining order in Shanghai's International Settlement, the SMP expanded and enforced British dominion in China's most important political, commercial, and cultural center. Tinkler would have remained just another anonymous and forgotten colonial policeman were it not for his unexpected death, at the hands of Japanese marines and an incompetent local doctor, in June 1939. His suspicious death created a noisy diplomatic incident that was picked up by journalists and splashed across the front pages of Britain's newspapers.Many of Tinkler's personal letters survived, and they describe his personal life in unusually vivid detail, including his relationships, his knowing masculinity, his travels, and his bitter meditations on his lowly position in a powerful but waning empire. Robert Bickers absorbing biography uses Tinkler's letters as well as extensive archival research to tell the story of this man's everyday life and violent decline in a colonial world-a story that offers an uncommonly candid history of twentieth-century imperialism.

Publication:

Imprint:

Columbia University Press

Returns:

Returnable

Some other items by this author:

BRITAIN AND CHINA, 1840-1970