Imperial fortunes: Britain and the romance of China, 1750--1850.

摘要

The British were among the last Europeans to discover China, trailing Renaissance voyagers and missionaries from Portugal, Italy, and Belgium. The inheritors of an unappealing policy of Jesuit accommodation, the British aimed to develop their own mission in China. Operating within the ideological system of free trade and national sovereignty, the British sought to "open up" China to commerce and establish diplomatic relations of equality. To the British, China represented a market that could inexhaustibly absorb British goods such as tin, cotton, and, most importantly, opium. But as the Macartney Mission in the eighteenth century and the Opium and Arrow Wars in the nineteenth century made clear, China eluded easy assimilation into Britain's project. In my dissertation, I reveal that the difficulty of resolving the China question on the political and economic planes was reflected in the unsettled semiotic construction of China. I explore the contrasting visions of China in novels by Daniel Defoe, Jane Austen, and Emily Eden; poetry by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and Peter Pindar; and travel narratives by John Bell, John Barrow, George Macartney, and George Staunton. The continuance of radically opposing interpretations of China cemented the representation of China as a problematic and unknowable sign. The century-long embattled discourse on China produced the stereotype of the "inscrutable Chinese" that has persisted in contemporary western culture.