Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai / Edition 1

by Robert Bickers

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231131322
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	01/13/2004
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	739,653
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.10(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Robert Bickers is senior lecturer in East Asia and colonial history at the University or Bristol.

Table of Contents

The Empire World
Before Shanghai
Shanghai 1919
Shanghai Municipal Police
Shanghai policeman
Learning to be a man
The end of the good old China
What we can't know
Adrift in the empire world
Empire's civil dead
Aftermath
We are the dead

Editorial Reviews

Robert Bickers has written a book providing a new perspective on empire.

Journal of World History - Marcia R. Ristaino

Bickers guides us deftly through a wealth of local archives...and personal interviews to fashion a richly layered social history of Shanghai's foreign police.

China Review International - Carolyn Wakeman

Bickers brings this world of Britain overseas alive in this fascinating study. This book is both a 'good read' and a solid history.

International History Review - Parks M. Coble

Bickers' detailed recovery of an obscure and 'unimportant' policeman's life gives a valuable street-level view of a complex scene.

Financial Times, London - Robin Blake

A superb account.

Conde Nast Traveler (UK) - Giles Foden

A work of dedicated and original scholarship.... What emerges is the portrait of a singular and heroic man.

Sunday Times, London - John Carey

Informative... energetically written. Making his way warily between the anti-imperialists and the nostalgists of empire, placing a 'marginal' man in his full context, Bickers does lift a corner of the curtain on a nearly lost world, a world as ordinary then as it may seem extraordinary to us.

The Guardian - John Sperling

A breathtaking transportation to an utterly fascinating time, place, and individual history.

Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History - Karen Fang

Bickers had done a wonderful job of showing the human face of empire, and bravely, through a distinctively unattractive personality.

Philippa Levinen Historical Review

fascinating piece of historical detective work...it is probably the best Old Shanghai book I have read...superb

China Economic Review - Anton Graham

Empire Made Me is a fascinating and intimate portrait of Shanghai at its apex.

Asian Review of Books

One of the most intriguing true-life books of the year.

South China Morning Post

One of the most intriguing true-life books of the year.

South China Morning Post - David Wilson

Bickers had done a wonderful job of showing the human face of empire, and bravely, through a distinctively unattractive personality.

American Historical Review - Philippa Levine

Robert Bickers has written a book providing a new perspective on empire.

— Marcia R. Ristaino

Journal of World History

A breathtaking transportation to an utterly fascinating time, place, and individual history.

— Karen Fang

Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History

Bickers had done a wonderful job of showing the human face of empire, and bravely, through a distinctively unattractive personality.

— Philippa Levine

American Historical Review

Bickers brings this world of Britain overseas alive in this fascinating study. This book is both a 'good read' and a solid history.

— Parks M. Coble, University of Nebraska

International History Review

Bickers guides us deftly through a wealth of local archives...and personal interviews to fashion a richly layered social history of Shanghai's foreign police.

— Carolyn Wakeman

China Review International

A superb account.

— Giles Foden

Conde Nast Traveler (UK)

fascinating piece of historical detective work...it is probably the best Old Shanghai book I have read...superb

— Anton Graham

China Economic Review

Informative... energetically written. Making his way warily between the anti-imperialists and the nostalgists of empire, placing a 'marginal' man in his full context, Bickers does lift a corner of the curtain on a nearly lost world, a world as ordinary then as it may seem extraordinary to us.

— John Sperling

The Guardian