Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai
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Book Overview
Richard Maurice Tinkler was an ordinary man in an extraordinary time and place. This riveting "biography of a nobody" offers a rare glimpse of imperialism and the making of modern China seen from the perspective of a working-class Englishman enforcing the order of everyday life on the streets of Shanghai. Culled from Tinkler's many personal letters, Empire Made Me meticulously documents his astonishingly revealing life in the service of the British Empire between 1919 and 1939, one of hundreds of young men who joined the Shanghai Municipal Police. Responsible for maintaining order in Shanghai's International Settlement, the SMP expanded and enforced British dominion in China's most important political, commercial, and cultural center.
Tinkler would have remained just another anonymous and forgotten colonial policeman were it not for his unexpected death, at the hands of Japanese marines and an incompetent local doctor, in June 1939. His suspicious death created a noisy diplomatic incident that was picked up by journalists and splashed across the front pages of Britain's newspapers. Many of Tinkler's personal letters survived, and they describe his personal life in unusually vivid detail, including his relationships, his knowing masculinity, his travels, and his bitter meditations on his lowly position in a powerful but waning empire. Robert Bickers absorbing biography uses Tinkler's letters as well as extensive archival research to tell the story of this man's everyday life and violent decline in a colonial world--a story that offers an uncommonly candid history of twentieth-century imperialism.Format:Hardcover
Language:English
ISBN:0231131321
ISBN13:9780231131322
Release Date:January 2004
Publisher:Columbia University Press
Length:409 Pages
Weight:1.30 lbs.
Dimensions:1.2" x 5.8" x 8.4"
Grade Range:Postsecondary and higher
Customer Reviews
2 ratings
Excellent history of pre-world war two Shanghai
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 14 years ago
This is the story of Richard Maurice Tinkler an ordinary Englishman who after fighting for his country in World war one found that his country has no job for him. He saw an ad of a policeman in Shanghai- Applicant must be unmarried, with good teeth, about 20 to 25 years of age. Salary is Taels 85 per month equivalent to 13 pounds per month. He was given free passage to Shanghai. Sailed from Glasgow and arrived in 1919 via Port Said, Penang, Singapore and Hong Kong. ( See p 31-33 Bickers ) Coming from poverty-stricken England Tinkler was taken in by the prosperity he saw in Shanghai. Thus Tinkler became a man made by the British Empire and ended up An Englishman adrift in Shanghai. Bickers has written a good history of Shanghai pre-World war two. He has used the life of a nondescript Englishman to illustrate well the social and political pre-war Shanghai.
Ode to the Imperial Everyman
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 20 years ago
This is brilliant theatre of the absurd. It captures the pathos of the imperial everyman Maurice Tinkler toiling away for a small pay at the distant edge of empire - and his decline which mirrors and echoes the decline of the British Empire in the far east in the 1930's - faced by the surge of Asian nationalisms. Maurice Tinkler is falling apart, emotionaly, mentaly, spiritualy and physicaly - and so is the Brittish Empire which he loves and to which he has devoted his life. He died an imperial martyr - it was the only way he wished to go.
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