Fuzhou in Its Worlds: Empire and the Global in Modern China, 1844–1937

My poster will illustrate the role played by American, British and French actors in the making of global China. Following the defeat of the Qing in the First Opium War (1842), foreign powers forced China to sign a series of ‘unequal treaties’ creating a system of settlements—known as the ‘Treaty Ports’—along its maritime frontier. European and North American merchants, diplomats, engineers and missionaries used these treaties and treaty ports to make multiple incursions into China’s sovereignty. Ostensibly these treaty ports were meant to be bridgeheads for further expansion into China’s interior, but in many cases they themselves became sites of significant development and intercultural interactions. Originally, there were only five such ports: Canton, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Ningbo and Shanghai. At the height of the system in 1917, however, foreigners claimed access to 92 such cities, river and coastal ports. My poster focuses on Fuzhou, one of the original five treaty ports. As a global tea port, as a missionary center and a settler community, the history of Fuzhou allows us to investigate multiple themes in the everyday working of empire and globalization.

Based on research in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, France and China, my study of Fuzhou sheds light on the relationships between empire and globalization, as foreign actors used their treaty-stipulated access to link the port into commercial and cultural global networks. To regard empires as the crucible for globalization, however, would be reductive. My research of Fuzhou instead demonstrates that, while empires did aid globalization, the competition between them also destabilized its coherency. These new insights make a contribution to recent historical debates on the connections between empire and the global. In effect, this poster argues that concentrating on China allows scholars to tease out the histories of these two processes as Fuzhou was a microcosm of the international economic and cultural competition, as well as collaboration that shaped their reach and their limits.

Specifically, this poster will outline the growth of Fuzhou as a colonial and global space hosting a range of foreign tea merchants and missionary-humanitarians. It develops the many local histories of the port by examining a wealth of visual material—maps, photographs, newspapers, advertisements and statistical charts—supported by business and diplomatic records. It looks at the role foreigners played in the tea boom that consumed the port from the 1860s to 1880s. The poster also outlines the maturation of the missionary establishment in Fuzhou after 1900, showing how a humanitarian impulse underpinned a transnational exchange of mission culture. More broadly, the poster pays close attention to the material networks that these British and American expatriates made into the interior of China, along with the new pathways they forged into North America, Great Britain and Europe. By combining powerful visuals with archival research, my poster will illuminate the historical development of a single port, and how foreign agents positioned it within a global circulation of people, goods and ideas.