Robert Bickers: 5 books

China’s new nationalism is rooted not in its present power but in shameful memories of its former weaknesses. Invaded, humiliated, and looted by foreign powers in the past, China looks out at the twenty-first century through the lens of the past two centuries. History matters deeply to Beijing’s current rulers, and Robert Bickers explains why.

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In the early nineteenth century China remained almost untouched by British and European powers - but as new technology started to change this balance, foreigners gathered like wolves around the weakening Qing Empire. Would the Chinese suffer the fate of much of the rest of the world, carved into pieces...

After 1914, between tiffin and a day at the race track, the British in Shanghai enjoyed a life far removed from the horrors of the Great War. Shanghai's status as a treaty port - with its foreign concessions home to expatriates from every corner of the globe - made it the most cosmopolitan city in...

Describes the exceptional wealth of missionary archives and the major contributions they can make not only to the study of the processes of Christian evangelism and Western imperialism but also their value in documenting and analysing the nature of Western encounters with indigenous societies.