Robert Bickers
Biography
Robert Bickers is Professor of History at the University of Bristol. Recent books include Empire Made Me: An Englishman adrift in Shanghai (2003), and May days in Hong Kong: Riot and emergency in 1997 (2009). He has just completed The Scramble for China, 1832-1913 (2011), and an edited volume for OUP, Settlers and Expatriates: Britons over the seas (2010). As well as developing work on the lighthouses of the Chinese Maritime Customs and their place in global networks of communications he has been running the ‘Historical Photographs of China’ project (http://chp.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/) and is a Co-Director of the British Inter-university China Centre.
Title of Paper
Linked by light: The Chinese Maritime Customs and the Lighting of the China Coast
Abstract
In the 50 years after 1860 new lights networks lit Ottoman and Indian coasts, Southeast Asia, China and Japan, providing a key element of the infrastructure of nineteenth-century globalisation. In 1868 Robert Hart, Inspector General of the Chinese Maritime Customs announced an ambitious plan to light the maritime highways along the China coast, a project that was deemed substantially complete by 1911. Allied to the programme were other endeavours, notably the establishment of a meteorological network providing data for research and for weather forecasting. This paper examines the rational behind the lights initiative and where it stood in global terms, and its impact on communications. The project became a key aspect of the presentation internationally of the work of Robert Hart’s Service, at international exhibitions for example, and in Customs publications. Modern French and British technology was secured and shipped to sites across the Chinese coast from Manchuria to the border with French Indo-China, which were staffed by European and local Chinese personnel. But as this paper also shows these beacons of technological modernity were also local colonial sites with an impact on marginal maritime communities as well as their local environments