China’s status in the world of expanding European empires of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has long been under dispute. Its unequal relations with multiple powers, secured through a system of treaties rather than through colonization, has invited debated over the degree and significance of outside control and local sovereignty. In this talk, Anne Reinhardt will discuss her recent book, Navigating Semi-colonialism: Shipping, Sovereignty, and Nation-Building in China, 1860-1937, which examines steam navigation as a constitutive element of the treaty system in order to elucidate both conceptual and concrete aspects of the semi-colonial regime.
Text and Image from the Harvard Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies