Empire Made Me

This microhistory follows Richard Maurice Tinkler, a working-class English veteran who joined the Shanghai Municipal Police in 1919. Letters and photographs reveal his ambitions, resentments, relationships and repeated attempts to secure status within a foreign community divided by class as well as race. His police work placed him directly inside the coercive machinery of the International Settlement.

Tinkler’s rise, disciplinary collapse and later employment in a textile mill end with his violent death during the Japanese occupation in 1939. Bickers uses one ordinary and often troubling life to show how empire offered opportunity while cultivating prejudice, insecurity and brutality. The result is both biography and a street-level history of interwar Shanghai.