Britain and China, 1840–1970

Edited by Robert Bickers and Jonathan J. Howlett, this collection examines the changing relationship between Britain and China from the First Opium War to the early People’s Republic. Its contributors follow diplomacy, finance, warfare, migration, business and missionary activity across a period in which British power expanded through treaty rights and then contracted under the pressure of Chinese nationalism, global war and decolonisation.

The essays resist a simple two-country narrative. They show how India, Hong Kong, Australia, international banks, Chinese labour and imperial institutions shaped Sino-British relations. The result is a useful bridge between diplomatic history and the social history of people and organisations moving through the networks of empire.