11/8/2022 0 Comments Role of british east india company; impact on opium trade when eic’s monopoly ends![]() ![]() Global Interconnections and the Founding of Hong Kong For example, two Scots, William Jardine and James Matheson played a particularly pivotal role in the events leading to the founding of Hong Kong and in the colony’s early history. In referring to relations between China, Hong Kong and the UK, the whole of the UK is implicated-the British who traded with China, who lived and worked in colonial Hong Kong and the troops who defended it came from all parts of the UK (and elsewhere in its empire). In our coverage of specific developments within Britain, we refer mostly to the parts of the UK from which we recruited participants: England and Wales. Here it should be noted that there are differences in the histories of the constituent parts of the UK, for example in the particulars of legal and educational systems in Scotland, which were and are distinct from those in England and Wales. Our coverage of Britain in the same period is similarly sketchy. In the case of China, we focus on issues pertinent to British imperialism and Britain’s acquisition of Hong Kong and then provide a short overview of the history of the colony from its foundation. Given the brevity of our outline of this history, it necessarily simplifies complex events and processes, glossing over many details of China’s, Hong Kong’s and Britain’s past. This has implications not only for Hong Kong, but also for the world given China’s ‘aspirations to be a great, modern power restored to its rightful moral and geopolitical place’ (Brown 2017: 205). In particular, China’s current assertive nationalism ‘is rooted not in China’s present power, but in its past weakness’ (Bickers 2018: xxxii). History matters to the Chinese Communist Party (see Lovell 2012 Brown 2017, 2018 Bickers 2018), and it matters, too, in understanding China’s influence on the world stage. Finally, it is absolutely vital in order to understand Hong Kong’s current political situation in relation to China and the wider context of China’s global geopolitical ambitions. ![]() ![]() Secondly, it helps us to understand how conceptions of modernity and tradition relate to the past and how the past is now imagined, remembered or forgotten in the life narratives of the women we interviewed. Firstly, it provides an illustration of Bhambra’s (2007) argument that modernity is a product of connected histories rather than an endogenous European achievement. This history has not only made Hong Kong and the UK what they are today, with attendant consequences for personal life, but is also important in other ways. Undertaking a study of two generations of women in two locations has alerted us to the importance of history in making sense of the lives we seek to document. Before doing so, and in order to understand how the differences between Hong Kong and the UK developed, it is necessary to take a brief look at a longer history. We will then bring the discussion up to date by considering the challenges facing women today. This was a time in which social conditions in Hong Kong differed markedly from those in Britain and our data reveal some stark contrasts in these women’s biographies. In this chapter, we will locate the women’s lives in historical context, focusing primarily on the mothers’ experiences from their childhood to early adulthood, covering the period from the 1950s to the 1970s. ![]() Of course, cultural differences also figure here, but so to do material social, economic and political circumstances, which in turn have an impact on local culture and how ‘traditional culture’ is perceived. Crucially, Hong Kong’s history as a British colony has profoundly affected its current inhabitants and accounts for many of the significant differences between Hong Kong and British women as well as differences between Hong Kong and mainland China. Importantly, this specificity cannot be understood only in local contexts but is, in large part, a result of the intertwined histories of Hong Kong and the UK and of their wider global connections. Over this span of time, there have been immense changes in social relations, including gender relations, in both Hong Kong and Britain but these changes have not followed the same trajectory and have been mediated by specific economic, sociocultural and political conditions. The younger generation, their daughters, were born from the late 1980s to the beginning of the 1990s and came to adulthood in the twenty-first century. The older generation, the mothers, were born in the decades following the Asia-Pacific War and Second World War, from the late 1940s to the middle of the 1960s. The lives of the women we discuss in this book have been shaped by differing social circumstances in separate locales on the opposite side of the world from each other. ![]()
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