Caught between Empires: Colonialism and Resistance in Contemporary Hong Kong

I am currently working on a new project focusing on the 2019-2020 political protests in Hong Kong. With this work I am attempting to place the protests and the current political crisis in the city in a broader historical and global context. My focus is on the continuities between British colonial rule and the current Chinese administration of the city, looking in particular at the use of colonial legal instruments and policing practices. I am also looking at the repertoires of contention employed by protesters, at how they are developing on the ground, and at past experiences that have influenced the current movement, most notably the events around 2014’s Occupy Central. The project is based on extensive fieldwork in Hong Kong during the summer and fall of 2019, combined with archival research in British colonial collections.

Listen to a talk I gave on the project at the Cambridge World History Seminar in January 2020 here.

Imperial Expansion and Global Order in the Nineteenth Century Asia-Pacific

My other ongoing research project will carry forward some of the threads of my first book, focusing on the emergence of a global international system over the course of the long nineteenth century. The geographical focus is shifted to interactions and encounters in the Asia-Pacific region, drawing on historical cases from Singapore and the Strait of Malacca, Hong Kong and the South China Coast, the Kingdom of Hawai’i, and the Samoan Islands. The project explores how a specific vision of law and international order became a near-global phenomenon through the expansion of European empires and the varied adaptive strategies employed by non-European polities in the face of colonization. Importantly, with this project I seek to tell the story of nineteenth century globalizing empires not from the perspective of European or American metropoles but from the vantage point of those places where the struggle over colonization was fought and where the resulting political shifts rapidly transformed the fabric of daily life. The actors in this story include Pacific lawyers, Dutch and Scandinavian speculators, Polynesian monarchs, American missionaries, and Chinese magistrates.