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
Book 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.
About the Author
Robert Bickers is senior lecturer in East Asia and colonial history at the University or Bristol.
Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai FROM THE PUBLISHER
"Shanghai in the wake of the First World War was one of the world's most dynamic, brutal and exciting cities, rivalled only by New York and Berlin. Its waterfront crammed with ocean freighters, gunboats, junks and myriad coastal craft, it was the focus for trade between China and the world, creating, for Chinese and foreigner alike, immense if precarious opportunities. Shanghai's great panorama of nightclubs, opium dens, brothels, racetracks and casinos was intertwined with this industrial powerhouse to create a uniquely seductive but also terrifying metropolis." "Keeping order in such a place was never easy, but for the British-run administration in the 1920s and 1930s life became increasingly desperate. Threatened both from within by gangsters and from without by Chinese warlords and the Japanese military, the Shanghai miracle was in reality a very fragile thing." Into this maelstrom stepped a tough and resourceful ex-veteran Englishman to join the Shanghai police. It is his story, told in part through his rediscovered photo-albums and letters, that Robert Bickers tells here. Aggressive, bullying, racist, self-aggrandizing, Maurice Tinkler was in many ways a typical Briton-on-the-make in an empire world that gave authority to its citizens purely through their skin colour. But Tinkler was also very much more than this - for all his bravado, he could not know that the history that packed him off to Shanghai could just as readily crush him.
SYNOPSIS
Richard Maurice Tinkler was one of hundreds English working-class men to serve in the colonial Shanghai Municipal Police in the first half of the 20th century. Bickers (East Asian and colonial history, U. of Bristol, UK) uses the unusually detailed accounts of his service that he left behind, as well as a number of other sources, in order to reconstruct his career and shed light on the day-to-day operations of colonial keepers of order in the Chinese portion of the British Empire. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Art & Photography
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