The Prospects for British Imperial History: The View from Macau

This piece is the third in a series of essays on teaching British history outside the Anglophone academy, a topic that challenges our preconceptions of where British history is being taught and who it is for. As higher education in the US undergoes systematic attack by the federal government, this series also gives insight into how and under what circumstances it is possible for US-trained academics to find work elsewhere.

Could you find Macau on a map? Postal services struggle to do so. I have had packages for me missent to Brazil (where there is a town called Macau); Taipei (which reads like Taipa, the district where I live); and Bahrain (Sar, a suburb of Manama, can apparently be confused with Macau S.A.R., or Special Administrative Region). I too had little notion of the place in the Fall of 2017 when I applied for a job at the University of Macau; or when, after being invited for an interview, I first glimpsed from my approaching hydrofoil the pineal outline of the Grand Lisboa Casino. Macau is the world’s largest gambling hub – “Las Vegas on steroids” – and, like neighboring Hong Kong, a small, semi-autonomous region of China. It reverted to Chinese rule in 1999 after four and a half centuries of Portuguese administration. This might seem an unfitting locale for the study and teaching of British imperial history. On the contrary, it has proved a stimulating site from which to reassess the purpose and possibilities of the field.

“The East End of the Preya Grande, Macao,” by a pupil of George Chinnery, between 1826-1852. Public domain. Image courtesy Yale Center for British Art. https://collections.britishart.yale.edu/catalog/tms:8384

It is fruitful to think about British imperial history from a place where neither the fact nor the nature of its relevance is taken for granted. I register this phenomenon every semester among my undergraduate and graduate students. With certain exceptions, about half of these students come from Macau and the other half from mainland China. In either case, they will have previously learned mostly Chinese history, with a smattering of world and in the former case local history. Few have ever taken a course on the British Empire. To be sure, Britain figures in Chinese national narratives – as imperialist aggressor if also model of industrialization. To some extent, its imperial history is taught next door in Hong Kong. Yet in my students’ prior education, it seems not to have been seen to merit much attention. Instead of a detriment, in pedagogical terms, this is often a benefit. Students come to the subject with few fixed attitudes or preconceptions. Although I must start from a basic level, it is easy to spark their curiosity. Unable to fall back on set narratives, they frequently venture novel arguments. Even when I broach an episode familiar to them, like Macartney’s embassy, putting it in a new context elicits from them creative responses. More often, the topic itself is new, and the students must expand their conceptual repertoires to account for it.

What goes for my students goes for me: I have found it illuminating to study the British Empire from outside the Anglosphere. This interest is rare in Macau. I am the sole member of my department who does not study China; my title is Associate Professor of the History of East-West Interactions. Far from impeding my research, these circumstances have facilitated it. If I already tended to think of myself as a historian of other things besides the British Empire, then my broad remit has bolstered that tendency. I have taught courses on the British Empire alongside other ones on global history, comparative empires, and historiography. I have supervised theses and dissertations on everything from Byzantine military history to modern pan-Asian women’s history. My horizons have broadened in consequence. It is one thing to study the British Empire from the Anglosphere – or perhaps any former colony – where it looms large. It is another to do so from a place where it is remembered, if at all, as one empire among many. From this vantage, it appears not as a world unto itself but rather as part of a larger world. This is not to say, however, that its history as seen from Macau is insignificant.

Rather, the view from Macau prompts a reassessment of the prospects for British imperial history; it raises different questions from those currently dominant in the field. For Macau’s own history has been shaped profoundly by that of the British Empire – but not in ways that have interested many historians. From the seventeenth century, Portuguese Macau served as Britain’s main and then sole gateway to China, whose foreign trade British merchants grew to dominate. The Qing bade them trade in Canton but spend the off-season in Macau, where, unlike Canton, they could bring their families and engage in pursuits like printing. From 1842, foreign merchants shifted to the new British settlement in Hong Kong; Macau turned to businesses like the brutal coolie trade and, enduringly, gambling. The British presence next door had additional effects, including the regular movement back and forth of people, culture, and politics. Thus, the British Empire deeply impacted Macau but in ways that were largely informal or indirect. Few today in Britain or indeed Macau are aware of this impact. Nor have historians – even of “informal empire” – paid much attention to it. To do so would be to treat as intertwined the histories of the British, Chinese, Portuguese, and other empires, not to mention other powers and places spanning the globe. In other words, it would be to treat British imperial history as inextricable from trans-imperial if not global history – a proposition that, despite the rise of the phrase “Britain and the World,” has yet to be widely embraced. If the field since the 1990s has centered on questions of past and present British attitudes towards the British Empire, then the history sketched above offers a reminder that there are many other questions to be asked.

Here are some of the ones that my students have posed: In what sense or senses was Macau ever “British”? What role did the English language play locally? Did the British leave any legacy that is evident today – the popularity of the Londoner casino perhaps? How could Macau be claimed by two empires and be dominated, for a time, by a third? How did states, corporations, and people navigate the complexities of power and sovereignty in the region? Did these complexities create a globalized place or an insular one? To such questions I tend to reply that the full answer remains unknown – and that someone should investigate it.

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Joshua Ehrlich is a historian of knowledge and political thought with a focus on the East India Company and the British Empire in South and Southeast Asia. Currently Associate Professor of History at the University of Macau, he received his PhD and MA from Harvard University and his BA from the University of Chicago. He is the author of The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge (Cambridge, 2023).

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