Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. viii, 362 pp. (Tables, maps.) US$39.95, cloth. ISBN 9780691213484
Melissa Macauley’s Distant Shores: Colonial Encounters on China’s Maritime Frontier is a game-changer for early modern Chinese maritime history. The field has long been dominated by studies of Hokkien overseas networks, with most other groups usually cast in supporting roles. Distant Shores puts Chaozhou, the culturally and linguistically distinct southeastern portion of Guangdong Province, at the centre of its story by showing that the Chaozhouese also forged overseas networks. These “entanglements” (as Macauley calls them) facilitated the emergence of maritime Chaozhou, a process that deserves a central place in both Chinese and global maritime history.
The introductory chapter, “The Great Convergence,” is a reference to Kenneth Pomeranz’s influential Great Divergence (Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). This is crucial for understanding the logic behind the entanglement of the book’s many cleverly told stories. Pomeranz argues that part of the reason England industrialized around 1800, while the equally economically developed Jiangnan region of China did not, was because the former had access to vast resources imported from North America. Macauley sets out to show that although Jiangnan may have lacked access to significant quantities of overseas resources, Chaozhou did not; the Chaozhouese did not allow themselves to become trapped in an ecological cul-de-sac that would have placed a hard ceiling on their region’s economic development. They expanded Chaozhou’s “territory” (several pages are devoted to explaining the broad usage of this term) into Siam, Borneo, the Malay Peninsula, and eventually Shanghai and Hong Kong. Millions of Chaozhouese sailed to these paces as sojourners, pulled by economic opportunities and pushed by poverty, feuding, and state aggression at home. The sojourners transformed these new territories and transformed Chaozhou through remittances of money, the import of cultural traits such as opium smoking, and simply through the demographic imbalance their absences caused.
Macauley shifts her focus from chapter to chapter geographically as well as thematically while maintaining a roughly chronological structure. The first three chapters create the foundation of the book. They reinforce each other by introducing the interconnected stories of the Qing Empire’s maritime order, the eighteenth-century beginnings of Chaozhouese overseas activity, and the emergence of subtly anti-Qing secret societies within Chaozhou. The fourth and fifth chapters are the heart of the book. They first recount the brutal pacification campaign within Chaozhou undertaken in the wake of the Taiping Rebellion by Fang Yao, a regional military commander, then turn to the effects of this campaign on maritime Chaozhou as the outflow of migrants to Southeast Asia surged.
The book’s final four chapters are more loosely tied together than its first half. Each of these could stand alone, although Fang Yao’s campaign continues to lurk at all of their edges. Two of them analyze the struggles for control over the commercial worlds of Shanghai and Chaozhou itself after the opening of China’s treaty ports, and Macauley shows that in both cases British merchants were outfoxed by their Chaozhouese rivals. The book’s penultimate chapter zooms in on the demography of maritime Chaozhou and especially the place of women and families.
The final chapter begins with a biography of the Lows (or Lius), one of the most influential Chaozhouese families in both China and Southeast Asia from the 1890s to the 1920s, but then turns to the larger story of maritime Chaozhou’s development during these decades. The most crucial question raised by the chapter is the effect of remittances sent by overseas Chaozhouese back to their home communities. Macauley’s brief overview of this issue returns to the introduction’s claim of a “great convergence” contra Pomeranz. She draws upon a range of sources to show that through remittances, money flowed into Chaozhou, allowing the population to enjoy a standard of living beyond the limits that ecology imposed on the region’s agriculture.
The book could have explored the fascinating implications of this situation further. The contrast with Pomeranz’s thesis is of limited usefulness here because what was important for the Great Divergence was not simply the transfer of wealth, but the transfer of the raw resources necessary for industrialization. In Macauley’s account of maritime Chaozhou, it is actually Southeast Asia that undergoes industrialization as a result of the relationships between Chaozhouese overseas communities and their homeland (269). A more interesting comparison is one that Macauley hints at in the introduction. She states that in “the South China Sea, ‘periphery’ and ‘core’ … were complicated and fungible” (9). Though she does not cite him directly, she is probably thinking of Immanuel Wallerstein’s world systems analysis, and as the quote rightly suggests, it is the world systems approach that maritime Chaozhou’s history complicates (see Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction, Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). Where was the core and where was the periphery? European colonies were centres of financial and military authority, but as the book shows, economic power often lay in the hands of translocal Chinese families. And despite the unrest that plagued China’s southern coast, Macauley shows that it was to Chaozhou that much of the wealth generated in Southeast Asia flowed. In the opinion of this reviewer, the greatest value of Distant Shores is how its multi-layered story asks us to reconsider our historical models of power relationships across transnational or translocal space.
This reviewer has one small complaint about the decision not to include Chinese characters (likely made by the publisher rather than the author), which would have been even more useful than usual in this book. Distant Shores is rich in detail, introducing many places, organizations, and people that are not well known even among specialists. Many of these also had translocal identities that caused variance in the romanization of their names (e.g., the Low family, whose name is sometimes Liu or Lau), so being able to know the Chinese characters would have been extremely helpful.
This minor issue aside, Distant Shores is an incredibly important book that will influence historical scholarship on the Qing Empire, Southeast Asia, and the global economy for years to come. The fact that it is packed with so many colourful characters and poignant vignettes is just icing on the cake.
Ryan Holroyd
National Chengchi University, Taipei City