 | |
| Author | Robert Bickers |
|---|---|
| Subject | Rickard Maurice Tinkler |
| Genre | Biography |
Publication date | 2003 |
Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai is a 2003 non-fiction book by the British historian Robert Bickers which details the life of Richard Maurice Tinkler, an Englishman who served in the British Army during World War I before joining the Shanghai Municipal Police during the interwar period. [1]
The book details the life of Richard Maurice Tinkler, who was born into a working-class Lancashire family in 1898 and during World War I enlisted in the British Army in 1915 by lying about his age. [2] Decorated and recommended for an officer's commission, Tinkler left the army at the rank of corporal in August 1919 and joined the Shanghai Municipal Police (SMP). Following a promotion to inspector and being employed on both criminal investigation and police intelligence duties, he was demoted to sergeant for being drunk on duty. Tinkler resigned from the SMP in October 1930 rather than rebuild what had initially been a promising career. Employed five years later as a supervisor at a Shanghai textile mill, he died in June 1939 after being bayoneted by Japanese marines. [3]
The British historian Robert Bickers spent 13 years researching Tinkler's life, which was helped by the fact that much of his correspondence survived. Bickers argued in Empire Made Me that Tinkler's life in Shanghai was marked by a sense of resentment towards the city's wealthy European residents, which led him to express intense anti-Chinese racism as a way of compensating. [4] [2]
Bickers wrote in Empire Made Me that "This book is about Empire, and specifically about the ways in which it shaped and distorted twentieth-century British lives". [5] Bickers argues in this "biography of a nobody" that though Tinkler was an unimportant man who only achieved a brief moment of fame following his death, Tinkler's life as a policeman in Shanghai encapsulated the racial and class dynamics of the city during the interwar period. The historian Karen Fang noted that "As the title announces, Empire Made Me shows how a single individual can embody global history." [2] Another theme of the book is gender, with Bickers "thoughtfully [illustrating] how the strong masculinity essential to British imperial ideology required constant performance and self-indoctrination—a telling instability in Tinkler's history that suggests how empire was already breaking down."
The book received largely positive reviews, although several reviewers criticised Bickers' harsh assessments of Tinkler. Writing for The Guardian , the playwright John Spurling argued that although some of Bicker's assessments of Tinkler were "unfair", "if Bickers has treated Tinkler unfairly in resuscitating him, he has done so in a good cause." [1] In her review of the book, the historian Carolyn Wakeman praised Bickers for his colourful and evocative portrayal of Shanghai as experienced by Tinkler. [6] Wakeman also positively highlighted Bicker's attention to class, race and gender along with the way that Bickers was able to "deftly" recreate Tinkler's life via his letters, PRO records, newspaper accounts, guidebooks, family histories, local archives and interviews. [7]
The journalist Jonathan Mirsky, in his review of Empire Made Me, felt that the book's title was misleading, arguing that its real focus was on the Shanghai International Settlement and SMP instead of Tinkler. [8] Mirsky argued the full story of Tinkler can never really be known due to a lack of records, though he praised Empire Made Me as a "good book with a superb title". [8] The historian Marcia R. Ristaino, reviewing the book, concluded that the story of Empire Made Me was the "life of an ordinary Britisher, sucked into the design and requirements of empire service, who becomes shaped and often distorted by its very force. Tinkler, by his own frustrations, violence, and racism, forfeits the personal qualities and talents that might have served him well in life." [9]
One reviewer noted how Tinkler was something of a fascist in terms of personality, if not politics, writing that:
"Bickers tried to design the book as one about colonialism, but the story kept frustrating anything so simple. In many ways, this is a story about policing, about modernity, about the ways fascism didn’t take in British culture and the ways it did, and about emigration. Tinkler’s letters, which survive, show him becoming an angrier and angrier man, an expat with a grudge against the world. But this doesn’t reduce to mere racism, as the races he despised included the Scots, former members of the Royal Navy, and the British public (in his words “the most prejudiced, uneducated, ignorant people in the world”). In fact, he sounds more like a classic fascist, craving war and glorying in contempt for the masses, whoever they were." [10]
The historian James Schoonmaker praised Empire Made Me, arguing that Bickers offered "a window into an otherwise closed world". [11] Schoolmaker concluded his review by arguing that Bickers "[explored] the humanity behind the functionary and so goes some way towards giving historical life to someone who would have otherwise remained a narrative function – simply an ‘imperialist’ or a ‘policeman’... What can at times be a heart-breaking narrative can also reveal the ugliest of prejudice and character. Perhaps that's what makes the book so appealing and a must-read for students of both Britain and Empire, as well as general historians." [11] In a largely positive review, the author John Grant Ross wrote regarding Empire Made Me that: "Some books get under your skin, keep you awake at night long after you’ve finished reading them. This biography of a policeman in Shanghai’s International Settlement in the 1920s and 1930s is such a book." [12] However, Ross argued that he felt that the book was somewhat "politically correct" in its harsh assessment of Tinkler and noted the problem of researching the life of an ordinary man, writing:
"Robert Bickers is, as you’d expect with a career academic, no apologist for the British empire. We’re told that British rule in treaty ports such as Shanghai was racist and cruel. However, we’re not given any reference points for comparison. What was the state of Chinese law and order outside the foreign settlements? How was the policing in Shanghai before and after the SMP period? Much worse of course. Then there’s the inconvenient fact that the great majority of the population in the small International Settlement was Chinese – and that they had moved there of their own free will...
Many books on the old Shanghai describe the decadence and glamour, the shocking contrasts of wealth and poverty, the whores, gangsters, and foreign elites. Empire Made Me has plenty of background colour, but the focus is on the daily graft of the cogs of empire: men like Tinkler. In a biography of an ordinary man, however, Bickers faces the inevitable difficulty of a lack of evidence. There were letters to Tinkler’s sister and documents from British and Chinese archives, though not much else. The result is gaps in the story – such as several missing years in the early 1930s; Bickers actually has included a chapter titled “What We Can’t Know.”" [12]
Ross argued that the book was unfair in the sense that it was difficult to fully understand Tinkler today given that so much of his life went undocumented such as the "missing years" from 1931 to 1934, that such flaws were a tribute to how "thought-provoking" Empire Made Me was, and that a less ambitious historian than Bickers would have produced a less interesting book. [12]