Britain in China

Robert Bickers reconstructs the British communities that lived and worked in China during the first half of the twentieth century. Traders, missionaries, diplomats, policemen and business employees created institutions that often served local expatriate interests more readily than any coherent imperial strategy. Their position depended on treaty rights, urban enclaves and assumptions of racial and legal privilege.

The book follows the mounting conflict between these communities, the British state and Chinese political movements. Boxer violence, nationalism, labour unrest, Japanese invasion and civil war progressively undermined settler authority. Bickers shows how missionary and commercial organisations adapted while the older culture of autonomous foreign settlement was brought to an end.