This talk explores the socioeconomic lives of Chinese servants who worked for British and American traders during the Canton trade period, as well as their political roles in shaping China’s relations with the West from 1700 to 1850. These servants’ responsibilities extended far beyond practical domestic tasks; they also acted as clerks, cashiers, interpreters, language tutors, cultural intermediaries, and providers of information about foreign traders and the Qing state to each other, effectively functioning as double agents. At their peak in the 1830s, these politically significant and multiskilled servants formed a group of approximately two thousand individuals who catered to the needs of fewer than five hundred foreigners, including traders and their families in Canton and Macao. The aim of this project is to shift the focus away from the prevailing narrative centred on officials and merchants, who have traditionally dominated the historiography of China-West relations. By investigating the lives of these ordinary individuals, the project highlights the everyday agency of the servants, demonstrating how their quotidian actions significantly influenced the dynamics between China and the West.
Dr. Song-Chuan Chen is an Associate Professor at Warwick University. His research focuses on social and political history, with an emphasis on history from below. He is currently examining British and Taiwanese state archives to trace the relations between the two countries and their peoples during the global Cold War. His first book, Merchants of War and Peace: British Knowledge of China in the Making of the Opium War, breaks new ground in our understanding of Anglo-Chinese relations. Dr Chen’s article, ‘The Power of Ancestors: Tombs and Death Practices in Late Qing China’s Foreign Relations, 1845–1914’, was published in Past and Present. His latest article, ‘The New Concerned Intellectuals and Civil Society: Democracy Movements in Taiwan’, appears in Reading the New Global Order: Textual Transformations of 1989 (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022).
