Robert A. Bickers | |
|---|---|
 Robert Bickers in 2017 | |
| Born | Robert Bickers Wiltshire, England |
| Occupation | Historian |
| Alma mater | SOAS University of London |
Robert A. Bickers FBA (born 1964) is a British historian of modern China and colonialism. [1] He is currently a professor of history at the University of Bristol. [2] Bickers is the author of six books and editor or co-editor of three more.
Born in a Royal Air Force hospital in Wiltshire, UK, Bickers grew up living on Royal Air Force bases across England, in Germany, and in Hong Kong. [1] He studied Chinese language at SOAS University of London during the mid-1980s, including a year studying in Taiwan. After holding fellowships in Oxford University and Cambridge University, Bickers joined the department of history at the University of Bristol in 1997, where he is currently a professor of history and associate pro vice-chancellor. [3]
Bickers' book Out of China was shortlisted for the 2018 Wolfson History Prize. [4] Rana Mitter in the New York Review of Books described it as "a panoramic examination of the increasingly powerful articulation of China's national identity in the twentieth century and the country's painful encounter with Western imperialism." [5] Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai (Allen Lane/Penguin and Columbia Univ. Press, 2003) was awarded the Morris D. Forkosch Prize of the American Historical Association. [6]
Bickers directs the Hong Kong Kong History Project and the Historical Photographs of China digitization initiative. [7] [8] He is the former co-director of the British Inter-university China Centre and the REACT Knowledge Exchange Hub and is currently associate pro vice-chancellor (PGR) at the University of Bristol. [9] [10] [11]
Edited works:
Sir Charles Kao Kuen was an electrical engineer and physicist who pioneered the development and use of fiber optics in telecommunications. In the 1960s, Kao created various methods to combine glass fibers with lasers in order to transmit digital data, which laid the groundwork for the evolution of the Internet.
The Treaty of Nanking was the peace treaty which ended the First Opium War (1839–1842) between Great Britain and the Qing dynasty of China on 29 August 1842. It was the first of what the Chinese later termed the Unequal Treaties.
The Second Opium War, also known as the Second Anglo-Sino War, the Second China War, the Arrow War, or the Anglo-French expedition to China, was a colonial war lasting from 1856 to 1860, which pitted the British Empire and the French Empire against the Qing dynasty of China.
The Shanghai International Settlement originated from the merger in the year 1863 of the British and American enclaves in Shanghai, in which British and American citizens would enjoy extraterritoriality and consular jurisdiction under the terms of treaties agreed by both parties. These treaties were abrogated in 1943.
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Broadway Mansions is a nineteen-floor Art Deco five-star hotel in Shanghai, China. and was for over five decades one of the primary symbols of Shanghai.
The May Thirtieth Movement was a major labor and anti-imperialist movement during the middle-period of the Republic of China era. It began when the Shanghai Municipal Police opened fire on Chinese protesters in Shanghai's International Settlement on May 30, 1925. The shootings sparked international censure and nationwide anti-foreign demonstrations and riots.
Sir Robert Hart, 1st Baronet, was a British diplomat and official in the Qing Chinese government, serving as the second Inspector-General of China's Imperial Maritime Custom Service (IMCS) from 1863 to 1911. Beginning as a student interpreter in the consular service, he arrived in China at the age of 19 and resided there for 54 years, except for two short leaves in 1866 and 1874.
John Adam Tooze is an English historian who is a professor at Columbia University, Director of the European Institute and nonresident scholar at Carnegie Europe. Previously, he was Reader in Twentieth-Century History at the University of Cambridge and Gurnee Hart Fellow in History at Jesus College, Cambridge. After leaving Cambridge in 2009, he spent six years at Yale University as Professor of Modern German History and Director of International Security Studies at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, succeeding Paul Kennedy. Through his books and his online newsletter (Chartbook), he reaches a varied audience of historians, investors, administrators, and others.
The Shanghai Municipal Police was the police force of the Shanghai Municipal Council which governed the Shanghai International Settlement between 1854 and 1943, when the settlement was retroceded to Chinese control.
The Shanghai Russians, a sizable part of the Russian diaspora, flourished in Shanghai, China between the World Wars. By 1937 an estimated up to 25,000 Russians lived in the city; they formed the largest European group there by far. Most of them had come from the Russian Far East, where, with the support of the Japanese, the Whites had maintained a presence as late as the autumn of 1922.
Edward Ivo Medhurst Barrett, was an English Army officer, cricketer and rugby union international. A right-handed batsman who was considered one of the finest and hardest hitters of his day, he played first-class cricket for Hampshire, mainly between 1896 and 1912, with additional matches in 1920 and 1925.
Harry Edward Arnhold was for five years the chairman of the Shanghai Municipal Council, the body that administered the Shanghai International Settlement in Shanghai, China; the chairman of Arnhold & Co., which is now Arnhold Holdings Ltd.; and the chairman of the Shanghai Land Investment Company, which owned the Broadway Mansions apartment building in the Hongkou District of Shanghai. Arnhold was a close business associate of Sir Victor Sassoon, and managed various Sassoon enterprises.
Hong Kong was a colony of the British Empire and later a dependent territory of the United Kingdom from 1841 to 1997, apart from a period of Japanese occupation from 1941 to 1945 during the Pacific War. The colonial period began with the British occupation of Hong Kong Island in 1841, during the First Opium War between the British and the Qing dynasty. The Qing had wanted to enforce its prohibition of opium importation within the dynasty that was being exported mostly from British India and was causing widespread addiction among the populace.
Bertram Lenox Simpson (1877–1930) was a British author who wrote about China under the pen name "B. L. Putnam Weale". Lenox Simpson was the son of Clare Lenox-Simpson, who had been in the Chinese Maritime Customs Service since 1861; he had a brother, Evelyn, a mining engineer who worked in China, and a sister, Esme. His education was at Brighton College, after which he too joined the Service. He was in China during the Boxer Rebellion and during the siege of the legations. After this, he became Brigade Interpreter for the British Expeditionary Force.
Jardine Matheson Holdings Limited is a Hong Kong-based, Bermuda-domiciled British multinational conglomerate. It has a primary listing on the London Stock Exchange and secondary listings on the Singapore Exchange and Bermuda Stock Exchange. The majority of its business interests are in Asia, and its subsidiaries include Jardine Pacific, Jardine Motors, Hongkong Land, Jardine Strategic Holdings, DFI Retail Group, Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group, Jardine Cycle & Carriage and Astra International. It set up the Jardine Scholarship in 1982 and Mindset, a mental health-focused charity, in 2002.
Alan Maxwell Boisragon was a British Army officer, and author, and was Captain Superintendent of the Shanghai Municipal Police from 1901 to 1906.
Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai is the 2003 biography of the Shanghai policeman Richard Maurice Tinkler by the British historian Robert Bickers. Tinkler, a British veteran of World War One turned policeman in interwar Shanghai, was described by Bickers as an extremely tough, able, violent and racist policeman operating in one of the world's most crime-ridden and dangerous cities; who loathed the Chinese as a people and treated them with much brutality. Tinker worked in the Shanghai Municipal Police, the police force of the International Settlement, the district of Shanghai jointly administered by Great Britain and the United States. The New Zealand author John Grant Ross wrote in a review of 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."
Anarchism in Hong Kong emerged as part of the Chinese anarchist movement, when many anarchists sought refuge from the Qing Empire in the territory. It grew alongside the Chinese revolutionary movement, before the territory again became a safe haven for anarchists, following the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War. Since then anarchists have formed a part of the Hong Kong opposition movement, first to British colonial rule and then to the rising authoritarianism of the Government of Hong Kong.
Douglas Kerr is a British writer and academic who is best known for his work on Arthur Conan Doyle and George Orwell.
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