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Friends of Sir Robert Hart: Three Generations of Carrall Women in China . By Mary Tiffen . Crewkerne, U.K. : Tiffania Books in association with Queen's University Belfast , 2012. xviii, 333 pp. £14.99 (paper).
Book Reviews--China
Anchored by the letters that Sir Robert Hart wrote to three generations of women in a British family associated with the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, Mary Tiffen's book, Friends of Sir Robert Hart, narrates the lives of the Carrall family in China and explores Hart's personal story. Sir Robert Hart (1835-1911) was the renowned inspector general of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service during the second half of the nineteenth century. Until the workshop on Hart and the Customs Service held at Queen's University Belfast in 2003, scholarly interest in Sir Robert Hart and the Customs Service had undeservedly waned in the wake of a China-centered history. This workshop and its published papers complement the herculean task that Hans van de Ven and Robert Bickers undertook in the early 2000s to catalogue and digitize the records of the Customs Service at China's Number Two Historical Archive.7Tiffen's contribution to this renewed interest in the Customs Service is to humanize the public Sir Robert Hart, who has been praised for...