In charting the Canton era of Sino-Western interactions, Imperial Twilight achieves something more than just bringing new perspectives to general readers. Through archival research, the author unearths intriguing new details of this historical period. Those historical details dug up from unexamined and newly discovered materials provide a weapon against a prejudicial view of the historical events. Imperial Twilight offers perhaps the best account anywhere of the history on the Canton period for general readers, a group that technically includes most historians outside the field of Chinese history. The commercial life of the port thrived on the export of luxury products like silk and porcelain, while the growing tea trade considerably boosted the prosperity of the port, and thus Sino-Western trade. By the early 19th century opium smuggling started to play a larger role in the port’s life, and quickly threatened the old Canton world. The result was the infamous Opium War, an event that violently altered the course of Sino-Western relations. After the war, relations between Britain and China were established on the basis of treaties arrived at through intimidation of war those treaties acted as the scaffolding for a whole new relationship between China and the West, known as the treaty port system, which lasted until the Second World War. The British, by this point, had outstripped the other European trading communities and played an increasingly important role in the port. The Qing court believed that, by limiting the foreign presence to Canton, it could quarantine the threat while still collecting lucrative tax revenue from trade in the port.
Canton succeeded in their control of China’s European trade in 1757. These Western traders were also regarded as a threat by the Qing, who feared that they would join forces with domestic rebels to overthrow the dynasty. Publications on these important periods have been coloured by, among other things, Anglocentric viewpoints, including a whiggish modernist worldview that pits the progressive West against a backward China, as well as semi-disguised and overt nostalgia by apologists for imperialism. One could add to this list the viewing of China through a capitalist market economic framework that focuses on China’s contributions to the making of the globalised world.įully aware of the pitfalls of these perspectives and armed with revisionist literature that was mostly developed by academics in the field of Chinese history in America, Stephen Platt’s Imperial Twilight charts the history of the Canton trade era that started in 1759 and ended at the conclusion of the Opium War in 1842. During these crucial eight decades, the Qing Empire confined China’s European trade to a single port, the port of Canton. This history requires some broader context. The first Europeans to establish regular contact with China were Portuguese traders and Jesuit missionaries who arrived in the early 16th century. The Portuguese settled in Macao and traded in Canton. The Jesuit missionaries produced for Western readers largely positive images of Chinese civilization, yet the Qing disliked the missionaries because they saw Christianity as a threat to their Confucian-Legalist-based state ideology. In the early 18th century, therefore, the Qing government expelled the missionaries from China. Exploiting the Qing dynasty’s sense of insecurity, merchants of Canton lobbied for the port’s monopoly of European trade and presented it as the best way of controlling Western traders. Chinese history for English readers is a quietly contested field: quiet because discussion and developments take place in the margins of the English-speaking world and contested both because the market for trade books is growing and, more importantly, because new publications are offering ever more diverse and complex ways of seeing China. Two seminal events, the Opium War (1839-42) and the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), play an outsized role in attempts to introduce China to the world. Books on these events, especially on Mao and the Mao era, are more readily available than books on any others. The issue is not whether these two super events should receive less attention but rather whether new publications are challenging old prejudices in productive ways.