Stumbling towards Empire: The Shanghai Local Post Office, the Transnational British Community and Informal Empire in China, 1863–97

ABSTRACT

In the second half of nineteenth century, a small transnational British and foreign community grew up in the treaty ports scattered along China’s coast, a community literally caught between the great inner Asian empire of the Manchu Qing and British-dominated informal empire in Asia. Although scholars often contend that few major developments occurred in the foreign sector of the treaty port world until the very end of the nineteenth century, this article joins recent revisionist scholarship seeking to better understand the growth of this transnational treaty port community through a study of the Shanghai Municipal Council’s local post office in the context of informal empire prior to the rise of muscular Chinese nationalism in the early twentieth century.

As an institutional history of the virtually unknown local post office, this article is a study of the decades-long process by which the foreign settler community of Shanghai slowly built up the administrative capacity, trading networks and communications infrastructure of informal empire and semi-colonial order in the nineteenth-century treaty ports. The history of the local post office is largely unknown not because of its insignificance, but because we have not paid enough attention to the institutions that facilitated the emergence of transnational expatriate and settler communities throughout the world of British informal empire and the global and local influences that shaped them.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• treaty ports
• post office
• communications
• informal empire
• transnational
• British world

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Trotter, British Empire in India, 107.

2. Lester, ‘British Settler Discourse’,24–48; Potter, News and the British World. Many of these issues were also explored at the ‘British World’ conferences and in the resulting edited volumes: Bridge and Fedorowich, The British World; Buckner and Frances, Rediscovering the British World; Darian-Smith, Grimshaw, and Macintyre, Britishness Abroad.

3. Magee and Thompson, Empire and Globalisation.

4. Much of the recent work on formal communications networks in the nineteenth century focuses on telegraphs or the submarine cable network rather than on postal systems. Müller, Wiring the World; Britton, Cables, Crises, and the Press; Wenzlhuemer, Connecting the Nineteenth-Century World; Winseck and Pike, Communication and Empire.

5. Bickers, Britain in China; Bickers, Empire Made Me; Bickers and Henriot, New Frontiers; Bickers and Jackson, Treaty Ports in Modern China; Goodman and Goodman, Twentieth-Century Colonialism.

6. Osterhammel, ‘Britain and China, 1842–1914’, 146; for a fuller treatment of informal empire in China, seeOsterhammel, ‘Semi-colonialism and Informal Empire’.

7. Johnson, Shanghai, 345.

8. MacPherson, A Wilderness of Marshes; Goodman, ‘Improvisations on a Semi-Colonial Theme’; Bickers, ‘Shanghailanders’; Cassel, Grounds of Judgment.

9. Existing works in Chinese on the local post office are primarily of interest to philatelists. The exception, by Li Xia, argues that the local post office was essential to the modernisation of postal services in China. Li黎霞, ‘Gongbu shuxinguan’, 45–51.

10. Bickers, ‘Ordering Shanghai’, 173-94.

11. Bickers, The Scramble for China, 11.

12. On imagined geographies of British empire and their local articulations, see Veracini, ‘The Imagined Geographies’,179–97.

13. Asiatic Journal, July 1834, 190–91.

14. Canton Register, 5 Aug. 26 Aug. 1834, 121, 133; Canton Register, 14 July 1835, 109.

15. Canton Register, 23 June, 30 June, 7 July, 14 July, 22 Sept., 6 Oct. 1835, 97, 99, 101, 105–06, 113, 151–52, 159.

16. Canton Register, 29 Aug. 1837, 145, 7 Nov. 1837, 184.

17. Chinese Repository 7, no. 7, 1 Nov. 1838, 386–87.

18. Chinese Repository, 10. no. 9, Sept. 1841, 528; Chinese Repository, 11, no. 1, Jan.1842, 55; Chinese Repository, 11, no. 4, April 1842, 240.

19. Proud, Postal History of Hong Kong, 23.

20. The China Mail, 16 April 1844.

21. Chinese Repository, 14, no. 8, 1 Aug. 1845, 400; Chinese Repository, 16, no. 12, 1 Dec. 1846, 619.

22. Maclellan, The Story of Shanghai, 32.

23. Quoted in Lanning and Couling, The History of Shanghai, vol. 1, 447.

24. Harcourt, Flagships of Imperialism, 101–02.

25. North China Herald, 11 Jan. 1851, 94.

26. North China Herald, 13 May 1854, 163.

27. Haan, ‘Origin and Development’.

28. North China Herald, 28 March 1857, 138.

29. For more detail on the contract dispute, see Harcourt, Flagships of Imperialism, ch. 7.

30. North China Herald, 13 April 1861, 58; North China Herald, 20 April 1861, 62.

31. North China Herald, 3 Aug. 1861, 123.

32. North China Herald, 13 Sept. 1862, 148.

33. North China Herald, 11 April 1863, 59.

34. Ibid.

35. Municipal Council of Shanghai, Municipal Report for the Half Year Ending 30th September 1863.

36. The Minutes of the Shanghai Municipal Council, I, 487–88

37. The Minutes of the Shanghai Municipal Council, I, 504.

38. The Minutes of the Shanghai Municipal Council, I, 506.

39. North China Herald, 4 Nov. 1865, 174; Municipal Council of Shanghai, Report for the Year Ended 31st December, 1876.

40. The Minutes of the Shanghai Municipal Council, I, 511, 513–14, 518, 522.

41. North China Herald, 10 June 1865, 91.

42. The Minutes of the Shanghai Municipal Council, II, 162–63, 169, 182, 190, 206; North China Herald, 1 July 1865, 102. On the Chinese merchant-run post offices, see Harris, The Post Office, 129–58.

43. The Minutes of the Shanghai Municipal Council, II, 223.

44. North China Herald, 2 Dec. 1865, 190; The Minutes of the Shanghai Municipal Council, II, 223.

45. Minutes of Shanghai Municipal Council, III, 11.

46. The Minutes of the Shanghai Municipal Council, II, 206.

47. The Minutes of the Shanghai Municipal Council, III, 72.

48. Proud, Postal History of Hong Kong, 31, 36.

49. Ibid.,, 46.

50. Minutes of the Shanghai Municipal Council, III, 119.

51. North China Herald, 16 Oct. 1869, 245.

52. The Minutes of the Shanghai Municipal Council, III, 287–88; F. W. Mitchell, ‘Annual Report’, 198.

53. The Minutes of the Shanghai Municipal Council, III, 342. His name is seen as both McMillan and MacMillan.

54. These three foreign post offices were joined in 1875 by a Japanese post office, serviced by the Mitsubishi Mail Steamship Company, and in 1886 by a German post office serviced by the Nordeutscher Lloyd Company.

55. North China Herald, 16 Dec. 1875, 608.

56. A. Lister, ‘Annual Report of the Postmaster General’, 104.

57. North China Herald, 11 April 1863, 59.

58. Shanghai Municipal Council, Report for the Year Ended 31st March, 1872, 9.

59. North China Herald, 13 Sept. 1873, 218; Shanghai Municipal Council, Report for the Year Ended 31st March, 1874, 13.

60. North China Herald, 14 June 1873, 528; North China Herald, 8 March 1877, 240.

61. Numbers of subscribers, though not their names, were published yearly in the local post office annual reports.

62. Shanghai Municipal Council, Report for the Year Ended 31st March, 1873, 6.

63. North China Herald, 7 March 1878, 234.

64. North China Herald, 20 Feb. 1873, 161.

65. Shanghai Municipal Council, Report for the Year Ended 31st March, 1872, 9.

66. Shanghai Municipal Council, Report for the Year Ended 31st December, 1894. This report also contains the locations of all 21 boxes.

67. North China Herald, 30 April 1870, 298; The Minutes of Shanghai Municipal Council, V, 9; Shanghai Municipal Council, Report for the Year Ended 31 March, 1870, 5; Report for the Year Ended 31st March, 1873, 6; Report for the Year Ended 31st December, 1877, 11; The Minutes of Shanghai Municipal Council, VII,167.

68. Shanghai Municipal Council, Report for the Year Ended 31st March, 1874, 12; Report for the Year Ended 31st December, 1892, 120; Report for the Year Ended 31st December, 1877, 11; The Minutes of Shanghai Municipal Council, X, 68, SMCA.

69. Tsai, ‘Breaking the Ice’ Modern.

70. The Minutes of Shanghai Municipal Council, VII, 162; Shanghai Municipal Council, Report for the Year Ended 31st December, 1878, 13.

71. North China Herald, 27 Aug. 1886, 219.

72. Jones, ‘The Chinese Postal Service’, 247.

73. Li 李毅民, Zhongguo jiyou shihua 中國集郵史話, 13.

74. The Minutes of Shanghai Municipal Council, X, 359, 474.

75. The Minutes of Shanghai Municipal Council, X, 478, 484.

76. The Minutes of Shanghai Municipal Council, X, 501; North China Herald, 22 April 1892, 529.

77. Shanghai Municipal Council, Report for the Year Ended 31st December, 1892, 226.

78. North China Herald, 24 June 1892, 855.

79. North China Herald, 25 Nov. 1892, 797.

80. The Minutes of the Shanghai Municipal Council, X, 546; Shanghai Municipal Council, Report for the Year Ended 31st December, 1892, 119.

81. Shanghai Municipal Council, Report for the Year Ended 31st December, 1892, 226.

82. The Minutes of the Shanghai Municipal Council, X, 616.

83. North China Herald, 28 Oct. 1892, 633.

84. North China Herald, 4 Nov., 1892, 688.

85. Shanghai Municipal Council, Report for the Year Ended 31st December, 1892, 226; Report for the Year Ended 31st December, 1893, 145.

86. Shanghai Municipal Council, Report for the Year Ended 31st December, 1893, 146.

87. North China Herald, 24 March 1893, 431.

88. North China Herald, 23 June 1893, 925.

89. North China Herald, 23 Feb. 1894, 281. For images of all the treaty port locals, see Rosenberg, Local Post of China; Livingston, The Postal System.

90. The Minutes of the Shanghai Municipal Council, XI, 296; North China Herald, 16 March 1894, 403; 8 June, 1894, 890.

91. Anonymous, ‘The Kewkiang Post Office’, 286; North China Herald, 10 Jan. 1896, 43.

92. The Minutes of the Shanghai Municipal Council, XI, 278.

93. The Minutes of the Shanghai Municipal Council, XI, 58, 80, 101.

94. Anonymous, ‘The Chinese Treaty Port of Chefoo’.

95. The Minutes of the Shanghai Municipal Council, XI, 416.

96. Skidmore, China, 386.

97. The Minutes of the Shanghai Municipal Council, XI, 437; North China Herald, 7 Sept. 1894, 403; Shanghai Municipal Council, Report for the Year Ended 31st December, 1895, 126.

98. Nankin Community Committee on Stamps for Local Post Office, ‘To the Editor’.

99. The Minutes of the Shanghai Municipal Council, XI, 499; North China Herald, 30 Nov. 1894, 880; Howes, ‘Some Stamp Designs, Continued’, 388.

100. Eaton’s letter reprinted in Howes, ‘Some Stamp Designs, Continued’, 445.

101. The Minutes of the Shanghai Municipal Council, XI, 379.

102. North China Herald, 5 Feb. 1897, 193.

103. On Hart’s role in the establishment of the Imperial Post Office, see Harris, ‘The Post Office’.

104. Inspector General Robert Hart, 13 Feb. 1897, Postal No. 28, Circular No. 767, Inspector General’s Circulars, 137.2023-1, Second Historical Archives of China.

105. Inspector General Robert Hart, 9 Dec. 1896, Postal No. 20, Circular No. 754, Inspector General’s Circulars, SHAC137.2023-1, Second Historical Archives of China; Wright, Hart and the Chinese Customs, 676.

106. North China Herald, 15 Jan. 1897, 64, 22 Jan.1897 , 110.

107. For the full text of the final agreement, see Shanghai Municipal Council, Report for the Year Ended 31st December, 1897, 241–45.

108. North China Herald, 19 Feb. 1897, 283.

109. North China Herald, 15 April 1897, 693.

110. Isabella Jackson, ‘Who Ran the Treaty Ports?’.