Comparative Diasporas: Europeans in China and Chinese Abroad, 1870–1940

AHA Session 249
Immigration and Ethnic History Society 2
Sunday, January 9, 2022: 9:00 AM-10:30 AM
Galerie 5 (New Orleans Marriott, 2nd Floor)
Chair:
Loughlin Sweeney, Endicott College of International Studies
Papers:
Imperial Transits: Chinese Labor Networks on German Shipping Lines and the Glocalized Nature of Chinese Diasporas in Hamburg and Bremen/Bremerhaven, 1870–1940
Christian Mueller, University of Nottingham
Imperial Nationhood? Regional and Occupational Networks Linking Ireland and China, 1870–1930
Loughlin Sweeney, Endicott College of International Studies
Configuring Diaspora Modernity and Mapping Chinese Communities in Australasia: The Perspective of a Chinese Nationalist, 1921–23
Mei-Fen Kuo, Macquarie University
Post-Habsburg Central Europeans in Republican China: The Shanghai Hungarian Relief Fund and the Roots of Jewish Refugee Assistance, 1924–40
Matyas Mervay, New York University
Comment:
Isabella Jackson, Trinity College Dublin

Session Abstract

Recent years have seen an explosion in new work examining foreign encounters with China in the nineteenth century, a period which saw the establishment of extraterritorial ‘treaty ports’ in the major trading cities of the Qing Empire. From these semi-imperial contact zones emerged questions concerning sovereignty, citizenship, race, empire, commerce, and modernity, with important resonances for the present. This panel examines the communities of migrants who transferred through these cities, and sheds new light on the interactions between China and European imperial powers. The speakers, which include both early-career and established academics working across Asia, Australia, and North America, will present new work on a diversity of foreign communities within China, as well as the corresponding experiences of Chinese diasporic communities abroad.

Audiences will receive new insights into questions of migration and nationality, cultural encounter and international relations, and the construction of modernity, as the latest scholarship in English and Chinese is brought into conversation.

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