This House Is Not a Home: European Everyday Life in Canton and Macao 1730–1830

Series: 

Author:
Lisa Hellman
Lisa Hellman offers the first study of European everyday life in Canton and Macao. How foreigners could live, communicate, move around – even whom they could interaction with – were all things strictly regulated by the Chinese authorities. The Europeans sometimes adapted to, and sometimes subverted, these rules. Focusing on this conditional domesticity shows the importance of gender relations, especially the construction of masculinity. Using the Swedish East India Company, a minor European actor in an expanding Asian empire, as a point of entry highlights the multiplicity of actors taking part in local negotiations of power. The European attempts at making a home in China contributes to a global turn in everyday history, but also to an everyday turn in global history.
Copyright Year:
2019
E-Book (PDF)
Availability:
Published
ISBN:
978-90-04-38454-5
Publication:
16 Oct 2018
Hardback
Availability:
Published
ISBN:
978-90-04-36974-0
Publication:
25 Oct 2018
Cover This House Is Not a Home: European Everyday Life in Canton and Macao 1730–1830

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Lisa Hellman, Ph.D,. is an award-winning historian who combines global, social, gender and maritime history with Asian studies to explore Europeans’ lives abroad. She has published in five languages on intercultural interactions in Asia during the early modern period.
"Hellman’s book provides an important basis for further research on Canton as the core of a multi-pole, multi-scale, multi-empire urban network established across the ports of the Pearl River Delta. It should be read by anyone interested in the social and urban processes of globalization of the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries".
Regina Campinho, in Connections. A Journal for Historians and Area Specialists, October 2020.

"The book provides many new insights into the daily activities of the European community in Canton and Macao. [...] Maritime historians who are theoretically oriented will likely find much of interest in this study".
Paul A. Van Dyke, in The International Journal of Maritime History, 31(4).
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Abbreviations and Terminology

1 Entering Canton and Macao
 1 Asian Power and European Compliance
 2 The Daily Making of a Home
 3 The Practices of Daily Life
 4 Tactics in the Face of a Conditional Everyday Life
 5 What is Missing is the Commonplace Abroad
 6 The Remains of the Days

2 The Who’s Who of Canton and Macao
 1 The Foreign Trade Groups
  1.1 -Chinese Traders and Masculinities
  1.2 The Foreign Women
  1.3 Sailors and Slaves
 2 The People of Macao
 3 The Local Trade Groups
  3.1 The Merchants, the Officials – and ‘the mandarins’
  3.2 The Labourers of the Pearl River Delta
  3.3 The Prostitutes
 4 The ‘Chinese’
  4.1 ‘The Chinese men’
  4.2 ‘The Chinese women’
 5 Conclusion
 Colin Campbell and the 1730s

3 A Space for Intersections
 1 The City Space
 1.1 Walking Around the City
 1.2 City of Women
 2 The Factory Space
 2.1 nside the Factories
 2.2 The Dining Space
 3 Macao
 4 The Harbour Space
 5 The Water Space
 6 Conclusion
 Michael Grubb and the 1750s and 1760s

4 The Communication Struggle
 1 Separate Groups, Separate Languages?
  1.1 Circumventing the Rules
  1.2 Pidgin English
 2 Local and Global Communication Channels
  2.1 The Role of the Interpreters
  2.2 Letters from Near and Far
  2.3 Channels for Circulation of Knowledge<
 3 Conclusion
 Olof Lindahl and the 1770s and 1780s

5 Spending Time and Spending Money
 1 Domestic Consumption
 2 Food as Cultural Evaluation and Adaptation
 3 Drinking Right and Drinking Wrong
 4 Sharing a Cup of Tea and a Smoke
 5 What You Get from Giving Away
 6 Boredom and What to do about it
 7 Going Outside
 8 Conclusion
 Anders Ljungstedt and the Early Nineteenth Century

6 Finding and Becoming Trustworthy Men
 1 Spaces for Trust
 2 Finding a Language for Trust
  2.1 Gossip and Secrets
  2.2 The Myth of Special Friendship
 3 How to Look Trustworthy
 4 How to Act Trustworthy
  4.1 Finding a Certainty of Response
  4.2 Accepting Distrust
  4.3 Adapting Masculinities
 5 Conclusion

7 This House is Not a Home
 1 Multi-faceted Control and a Plurality of Responses
 2 Everyday Relations of Ethnicity, Class and Gender
 3 Globalisation, not European Expansion

 Bibliography
All interested in everyday life abroad, in the social and cultural history of East India Company trade, intercultural gender relations, in early modern Canton and Macao and in localised global history.
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Publisher:
Brill
Language:
English
Pages:
approx. 336 pp.
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004384545

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