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Britain in China: Community, Culture and Colonialism 1900-1949. By ROBERT BICKERS. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999. xii, 276 pp. $79.95 (cloth); $29.95 (paper).
One of the more important developments in the Chinese history field in recent years has been the breaking down of the "China" side of the China-foreign binary, derived from a recognition that umbrella abstractions like "China" mask immense diversity and variation. A parallel dismantling of the "foreign" side of this binary has been slower to emerge, particularly if we train our sights on the meaning of "foreign" in the century of imperialist encroachment. James Hevia took us in the right direction, in his study of the Macartney embassy, by his portrayal of Macartney as an exemplar of a specific stratum of late eighteenth-century British society rather than a "Westerner" in some undifferentiated, timeless sense. Robert Bickers now takes us still farther along this path, greatly complicating our picture of the British presence in China in the first half of the twentieth century and, in the process, challenging conventional understandings of the dynamic of imperialism overall.
Most important, Bickers demonstrates convincingly that "Britain in China" was not a unitary, coherent phenomenon, but rather was composed of several fundamentally different and often fiercely contending strands. Although including government officials, expatriates, and missionaries, the most influential of...