Abstract
“The Chinese puzzle” was a metaphor employed by British commentators to sum up the difficulties of dealing with the Chinese and with the complexities of their society, culture, and politics.1 It was used as the title of a British play, first performed in London in 1918, about a diplomatic scandal involving a Chinese ambassador, his Caucasian wife (played by Lillian Braithwaite), and their associates.2 Arthur Ransome, the noted British journalist, similarly titled his book on China The Chinese Puzzle (1927).3 David Lloyd George endorsed the book and wrote its preface. Although Ransome’s experience in China was limited to a few weeks, The Chinese Puzzle was acknowledged as an important contribution to the subject. As one reviewer commented, unwittingly highlighting a persistent trend in Britain, an author did not need to possess extensive knowledge of the Chinese in order to be publicly recognized as an authority on them.4
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Notes
Marian Bower and Leon Lion, The Chinese Puzzle: An Original Play in Four Acts, acting ed. (New York: Samuel French, 1919); Times (London), July 12, 1918, 9. The play received critical acclaim and was adapted for the screen the following year. Times (London), October 13, 1919, 10.
Robert Bickers, Britain in China: Community, Culture, and Colonialism, 1900–1949 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 35–36;
Hugh Brogan, The Life of Arthur Ransome (London: Jonathan Cape, 1984), 293.
Review of The Chinese Puzzle, by Arthur Ransome, and Explaining China, by John Earl Baker, Journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs 7, no. 1 (January 1928): 57.
A point emphasized in John Seed’s recent article, “Limehouse Blues: Looking for Chinatown in the London Docks, 1900–1940,” History Workshop Journal 62 (2006): 68–69. See also Colin Holmes, “The Chinese Connection,” in Outsiders and Outcasts: Essay in Honour of William J. Fishman, ed. Geoffrey Alderman and Colin Holmes (London: Duckworth, 1993), 85.
Thomas C. Holt draws on the work of Henri Lefebvre in his argument that race was “mutually constituted … in the global and the everyday.” Thomas C. Holt, “Marking: Race, Race-Making, and the Writing of History,” American Historical Review 100, no. 1 (February 1995): 10.
For China serving as a role model for the British Empire in the nineteenth century, see Barry Milligan, Pleasures and Pains: Opium and the Orient in Nineteenth-Century British Culture (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 52. Philippa Levine describes the barriers that the British erected around themselves in the imperial context in The British Empire: Sunrise to Sunset (Harlow, U.K.: Pearson Longman, 2007), 126–27. Colin Mackeras discusses the general evolution of Western opinion on China in Western Images of China (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1989) and in his edited anthology, Sinophobes and Sinophiles: Western Views of China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
David Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Chinese workers were also essential to the agricultural labor force in European imperial territories in the nineteenth century.
Lynn Pan, Sons of the Yellow Emperor: A History of the Chinese Diaspora (New York: Kodansha International, 1990), 90.
Rozina Visram, Ayahs, Lascars, and Princes: Indians in Britain 1700–1947 (London: Pluto, 1986), 38–39.
In 1851, the official tally of China-born residents in London stood at 110. Ng Chee Choo, The Chinese in London, published MA thesis, University of London (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 5.
Poverty, unsanitary conditions, and violence between Chinese seamen and among Lascar seamen in the East End had attracted official attention on several occasions in the early nineteenth century. Michael Fisher, Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travelers and Settlers in Britain, 1600–1857 (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004), 172–73.
For a broader view of anti-immigrant sentiment in the prewar period, see Colin Holmes, John Bull’s Island: Immigration and British Society, 1871–1971 (London: Macmillan, 1988), 65–85.
Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, vol. 4 (London: Griffin, Bohn, 1861–62; New York: Dover, 1968) 232–33. Citations are to the Dover edition.
Count E. Armfelt, “Oriental London,” in Living London, ed. George R. Sims (London: Cassell, 1901–3), 84; George A. Wade, “The Cockney John Chinaman,” London Illustrated Magazine, July 1900, 302.
Walter Besant, East London (London: Chatto and Windus, 1901), 205–6. Pan, Sons of the Yellow Emperor, 86–87.
Joseph Charles Parkinson, “Lazarus, Lotus Eating,” in Places and People, Being Studies from Life (London: Tinsley Bros., 1869), 36–37, reprinted from All the Year Round 15 (May 12, 1866).
Mayhew, London Labour, 232–33; Parkinson, Places and People, 28; Joseph Salter, The East in the West; or Work Amongst the Asiatics and Africans in London (London: S. W. Partridge, 1895), 35.
Ross G. Forman, “Peking Plots: Fictionalizing the Boxer Rebellion of 1900,” Victorian Literature and Culture 27 (1998): 19–48;
Paul A. Cohen, History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 191–97.
The postcolonial critique rightly insists that any examination of race must take into account both the power dynamics inherent in European racial discourse and the ways that racial “others” responded to and contested these dynamics. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978);
Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Larry Grossberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 271–313;
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890–1940 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989);
Ranahit Guha, Gayatri Spivak, and Edward Said, eds., Selected Subaltern Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989);
Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).
In the British context, Laura Tabili has emphasized black workers’ contestation of racial subordination in interwar Britain. Laura Tabili, “We Ask for British Justice”: Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 2–5.
Terence Gomez and Gregor Benton, Chinese in Britain: Economy, Transnationalism, and Identity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
Important early works include Douglas A. Lorimer, Colour, Class, and the Victorians (Leicester, U.K.: Leicester University Press, 1978);
Nancy Leys Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain 1800–1960 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1982).
This concept of race and its linkages with the social, cultural, economic, and political dynamics of empire in the nineteenth century animates much of the recent scholarship on these subjects. In the British context, see Paul Rich, Race and Empire in British Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Tabili, British Justice;
Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995);
Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995);
and Zine Magubane, Bringing the Empire Home: Race, Class, and Gender in Britain and Colonial South Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
For work on the subject after World War II, see Paul Gilroy, “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987),
and Kathleen Paul, Whitewashing Britain: Race and Citizenship in the Postwar Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).
Prominent examples of this scholarship include Ron Ramdin, The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain (Aldershot, U.K.: Gower, 1987); Tabili, British Justice and “Women ‘of a Very Low Type’: Crossing Racial Boundaries in Imperial Britain,” in Gender and Class in Modern Europe, ed. Laura Frader and Sonya O. Rose (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1996);
Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, ed., Black Victorians/Black Victoriana (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003);
Antoinette Burton, At the Heart of Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late Victorian Britain (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1998);
Shompa Lahiri, Indians In Britain: Anglo-Indian Encounters, Race and Identity 1880–1930 (London: Frank Cass, 2000); Visram, Ayahs, Lascars, and Princes;
Jonathan Schneer, London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), chap. 8 and 9;
Paul Deslandes, “‘The Foreign Element’: Newcomers and the Rhetoric of Race, Nation, and Empire in ‘Oxbridge’ Undergraduate Culture, 1850–1920,” Journal of British Studies 37, no. 1 (January 1998): 54–90;
Marika Sherwood, “Lascar Struggles against Discrimination in Britain 1923–1945: The World of N. J. Upadhyaya and Surat Alley,” The Mariner’s Mirror 90, no. 4 (November 2004): 438–55.
For the difficulties involved in applying Said’s theories in the Chinese context, see Simon Leys, ed., The Burning Forest (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1985).
For a recent response, see Chen Xiaomei, Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-Discourse in Post-Mao China (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Homi K. Bhabha identifies some of the weaknesses of “Orientalism” as a theoretical approach to colonial discourse in “The Other Question: Homi K. Bhabha Reconsiders the Stereotype and Colonial Discourse,” Screen 24, no. 6 (1983), 23–25.
Laura Tabili discusses the importance of grounding and contextualizing racial dynamics in social relations and the pitfalls of relying on “intolerance, bigotry, and ignorance” as givens and therefore as sufficient explanations alone for racism. Laura Tabili, “The Construction of Racial Difference in Twentieth-Century Britain: The Special Restriction (Coloured Alien Seamen) Order, 1925,” Journal of British Studies 33, no. 1 (January 1994): 55–56. She further develops and expands this argument in “We Ask for British Justice”: Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).
Bhabha explores this complex process in “The Other Question.” Joan W. Scott also argues that both race and gender are constructed categories and therefore cannot be naturalized. Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” The American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (December 1986): 1053–75.
The majority of scholarship on “whiteness” has emerged from American labor history. David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991);
Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995).
For “whiteness” in Britain, see Alastair Bonnett, “How the British Working Class Became White: The Symbolic (Re)formation of Racialized Capitalism,” Journal of Historical Sociology 11 (1998): 316–40.
According to Anne McClintock, “race, gender, and class are not distinct realms of experience, existing in splendid isolation from each other … rather they come into existence in and through relation to each other—if in contradictory and conflictual ways.” McClintock, Imperial Leather, 5. For the relationship between class and race, see Jonathan Hyslop, “The Imperial Working Class Makes Itself ‘White’: White Labourism in Britain, Australia, and South Africa Before the First World War,” The Journal of Historical Sociology 12, no. 4 (December 1999): 398–421.
See also Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 6;
Ruth Lindeborg, “The ‘Asiatic’ and the Boundaries of Victorian Englishness,” Victorian Studies 37, no. 3 (1994): 381–404;
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on theOrigins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983);
Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990);
and Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001).
For a discussion of the methodological pitfalls of “whiteness” as an analytical category, see Eric Arnsen, “Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagination,” International Labour and Working-Class History 60 (Fall 2001): 3–32.
I am particularly conscious of Antoinette Burton’s assertion that Britain itself served as “an imperial contact zone.” Burton, Heart of Empire, 1. This relationship in the modern period is also examined in Catherine Hall and Sonya O. Rose, eds., At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006);
Andrew Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back: The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Harlow, U.K.: Pearson Education, 2005);
John M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984); Schneer, London 1900;
Richard Price, “One Big Thing: Britain, Its Empire, and Their Imperial Culture,” Journal of British Studies 45, no. 3 (July 2006): 602–27.
Kathleen Wilson, “Introduction: histories, empires, modernities,” in A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840, ed. Kathleen Wilson, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1.
See Antoinette Burton, “Introduction: On the Inadequacy and the Indispensability of the Nation,” in After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and Through the Nation, ed. Antoinette Burton (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003) for a comprehensive assessment of work in this field.
For a recent study of Europe’s broader impact on Chinese culture and society, and for Britain’s particular role in this context, see James Hevia, English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
David Feldman and Gareth Stedman Jones, eds., Metropolis London: Histories and Representations since 1800 (London: Routledge, 1989);
Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Danger in Late Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992);
Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993);
Susan Pennybacker, A Vision for London: Labour, Everyday Life, and the LCC Experiment (London: Routledge, 1995);
Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation and the City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995);
Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets, and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000);
Simon Joyce, Capital Offenses: Geographies of Class and Crime in Victorian London (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 2003);
Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 50.
For a social history of the former, see Maria Lin Wong, Chinese Liverpudlians: A History of the Chinese Community in Liverpool (Birkenhead, U.K.: Liver Press, 1989).
Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980);
Carolyn Conley, The Unwritten Law: Criminal Justice in Victorian Kent (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991);
A. James Hammerton, Cruelty and Companionship: Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Married Life (London: Routledge, 1992);
George Behlmer, “Summary Justice and Working-Class Marriage in England, 1870–1940,” Law and History Review 12, no. 2 (Fall, 1994): 229–76;
Ginger Frost, Promises Broken: Courtship, Class, and Gender in Victorian England (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1995);
Margot Finn, “Working-Class Women and the Contest for Consumer Control in Victorian County Courts,” Past and Present 161, no. 1 (November 1998): 116–54;
Gail Savage, “‘The Magistrates Are Men’: Working-Class Marital Conflict and Appeals from the Magistrates’ Court to the Divorce Court after 1895,” in Disorder in the Courts: Trials and Sexual Conflict at the Turn of the Century, ed. George Robb and Nancy Erber (New York: NYU Press, 1999), 231–49.
Shompa Lahiri, “Contested Relations: The East India Company and Lascars in London,” in The Worlds of the East India Company, ed. H. V. Bowen, Margaret Lincoln, and Nigel Rigby (Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell, 2002), 178–79.
Ronald Hyam, Britain’s Imperial Century, 1815–1914, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 76–77.
For the broader relationship between law and literature in Britain, see Shani D’Cruze, Crimes of Outrage: Sex, Violence, and Victorian Working Women (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1998);
Margot Finn, “Victorian Law, Literature and History: Three Ships Passing in the Night,” Journal of Victorian Culture 7, no. 1 (2002): 134–46;
Hal Gladfelder, Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England: Beyond the Law (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).
See also Gillian Spraggs, Outlaws and Highwaymen: The Cult of the Robber in England from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century (London: Pimlico, 2001);
Donna T. Andrew and Randall McGowan, The Perreaus and Mrs. Rudd: Forgery and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century London (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001).
Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001);
Mary Ting Yi Lui, The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York City (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005);
Andrew Gyory, Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
For the legal historiography, see Richard Cole and Gabriel Chin, “Emerging from the Margins of Historical Consciousness: Chinese Immigrants and the History of American Law,” Law and History Review 17, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 325–64.
The analysis of a nineteenth-century global “white labor” discourse, for example, has provided very useful insights, as demonstrated in a recent article by Matthew Guterl and Christine Skwiot, “Atlantic & Pacific Crossings: Race, Empire, and the ‘Labor Problem’ in the Nineteenth Century,” Radical History Review 91, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 40–61.
For some pertinent examples of how the models of cultural history can be usefully applied to the study of race, nation, and empire, see Bhabha, Nation and Narration; Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s Cultures: Anthropology, Travel and Government (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); McClintock, Imperial Leather;
Paula M. Krebs, Gender, Race, and the Writing of Empire: Public Discourse and the Boer War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999);
Ann Laura Stoler, Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
For a more general overview of the methodology, see Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, eds., Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999).
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© 2009 Sascha Auerbach
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Auerbach, S. (2009). Introduction. In: Race, Law, and “The Chinese Puzzle” in Imperial Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230620926_1
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