Decolonising Imperial Heroes

Cultural legacies of the British and French Empires

Max Jones, Berny Sèbe, Bertrand Taithe, Peter Yeandle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138309098
• eBook ISBN: 9781317270119
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The heroes of the British and French empires stood at the vanguard of the vibrant cultures of imperialism that emerged in Europe in the second-half of the nineteenth century. Their stories are well known. Scholars have tended to assume that figures such as Livingstone and Gordon, or Marchand and Brazza, vanished rapidly at the end of empire.

Yet imperial heroes did not disappear after 1945, as British and French flags were lowered around the world. On the contrary, their reputations underwent a variety of metamorphoses in both the former metropoles and the former colonies. This book develops a framework to understand the complex legacies of decolonisation, both political and cultural, through the case study of imperial heroes. We demonstrate that the 'decolonisation' of imperial heroes was a much more complex and protracted process than the political retreat from empire, and that it is still an ongoing phenomenon, even half a century after the world has ceased to be 'painted in red'.

Whilst Decolonising Imperial Heroes explores the appeal of the explorers, humanitarians and missionaries whose stories could be told without reference to violence against colonized peoples, it also analyses the persistence of imperial heroes as sites of political dispute in the former metropoles. Demonstrating that the work of remembrance was increasingly carried out by diverse, fragmented groups of non-state actors, in a process we call 'the privatisation of heroes', the book reveals the surprising rejuvenation of imperial heroes in former colonies, both in nation-building narratives and as heritage sites. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History.

Moving Stories: Memorialisation and its Legacies in Treaty Port China

Robert Bickers

Between 1862 and 1949, foreign communities in Shanghai memorialised in stone and bronze a pantheon of local imperial heroes, as part of a strategy to insert themselves into orthodox circuits of formal empire. The article explores this story, the history of these monuments and their contemporary legacy

In Shanghai it is the statues that no longer exist that need thinking about. The late-socialist city does not lack public memorials and statues. In particular, its iconic Bund—the riverside embankment on the west bank of the Huangpu river – hosts three memorials. One of these, the ‘Monument to the People’s Heroes’ (

Renmin yingxiong jinian ta) is the site of an annual commemorative ceremony on China’s 1 October National Day, which marks the anniversary of the formal establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949. Since its inception this state has invested energy and resource in commemorating its own three decades of revolutionary struggle after the formation of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921 as well as an earlier co-opted history of anti-imperialist resistance, or of ‘National Humiliation’ (

guochi). After 1991 an ongoing ‘patriotic education’ campaign (

Aiguo zhuyi jiaoyu huodong) led to a vigorous programme of renovation of sites of memory and the construction of new museums, historic sites and memorials.¹ This is in service of the Communist Party’s aim to raise and shape understandings of what it portrays as its leading role in rescuing China from ‘feudalism’ and imperialism. The result it intends is increased loyalty to the party as the body that led China along the ‘road to rejuvenation’. The irony that drives this article is that it has done so in Shanghai by co-opting the memorialisation practices of its historic enemies and, in fact, their specific sites of memory. As with many facets of post-colonial state practices, the colonial form survives in new nationalist guise.

This article explores what turns out to be a small gallery of monuments in Shanghai, monuments most of which moved, in fact, at least once in their lifetime, with meanings that also moved, and which remain in a dialogue with the present. They are omnipresent in photographs of the pre-1943 Shanghai Bund, and they are prominent in discussions about it, in memoir, travelogue and guidebook. It does so to see what these monuments to the foreign resident’s heroes can tell us about Shanghai’s history in that period, in particular the history of the foreign presence and foreign power in China, its identities, certainties, complexities and ambiguities. The article argues that the memorialisation practices of the foreign communities in Shanghai displayed over an 80-year period a consistent pattern of attempts to integrate themselves into wider circuits of memorialisation, mostly imperial circuits. They did this precisely because this city was not in fact a colony. It lay within no empire. The more fundamentally insecure the position of the foreign communities who ran the heart of this city, the more confidently did they mark out their membership of a global community of power through bronze and stone. They competed too in what they commemorated, or how, and in what they pulled down. This Shanghai case study tells us something about the strategies for incorporation, imagined and concrete, into the imagined community of empires of those outside its formal boundaries. It is inflected by issues of finance, urban planning, practical politics and so on, and it is but one arena in which this incorporation was attempted, but it was a visibly tangible one that grew in importance as the power of the foreign presence in China declined.

This article will first briefly outline the historical background to the development of the two foreign zones in the city, before moving on to discuss the memorials themselves, and then the men they represent. The third section will explore the fate of the monuments after the full onset of the Pacific war in December 1941, and into the era of Communist control after 1949. The resurgence of these memorial practices in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century is then considered.

Internationalised Shanghai, 1843–1943

In November 1843 the newly appointed British consul, George Balfour, arrived in the city on board a British naval vessel. Balfour had been before. British troops had taken and occupied the city in the spring of 1842 as part of the final campaign along the Yangzi which brought to a close the First Anglo-Chinese or Opium War.² The experience of occupation had been bitter, and, although the Treaty of Nanjing, which terminated hostilities, opened Shanghai and five other ports to British residence, there was little local enthusiasm in Shanghai and the other ports for leasing property to the foreigners. Balfour eventually secured a local agreement alienating a plot of land north of the walled city of Shanghai along the river bank as an ‘English ground’. Laid out along three parallel north–south roads, and six cutting across them east to west, this formed the core of what grew into the International Settlement. Balfour marked out a large British consulate lot at the north end of the zone, and British traders then vied with each other to secure waterfront lots. Provision of public goods—roads, jetties, etc.—became the responsibility of the land renters, who elected a committee, later re-established as a municipal council to oversee this. Over time the council acquired new responsibilities and powers—policing and public health in particular. It was doubled in size in 1848, and amalgamated with the American concession north of the British ground in 1863. This became the International Settlement, and by 1900 it had grown in size from its original 138 acres to 5,583, and from a small population of some 200 Britons and others in 1850 to 6,700 foreigners and 350,000 Chinese by 1900. Trade grew steadily. Foreign Shanghai also outflanked colonial Hong Kong, designed as the headquarters of the British China trade, home to a governor who was initially concurrently chief superintendent of trade, and thereby in overall charge of the British China enterprise along the coast. But the centre of gravity of British trade swung north to Shanghai, and Hong Kong, although it remained important, lost out to Shanghai as the economic heart of the British presence.

The key driver of the development of Shanghai was not so much trade, however, but the fact that in 1853, as a result of the anti-Dynastic Taiping rebellion, tens of thousands of refugees fled east from the rebels who seized control of all the great cities of the region, lodging their capital at Nanjing. The foreign traders in Shanghai found that their lots were no longer valuable simply as an infrastructure for Sino-foreign trade—the export of silks and tea, the import of cloths and (although it did not come into the port itself until after 1858) opium—but were an asset in and of themselves. The business of foreign Shanghai became for many the business of real estate. Thousands of homes were thrown up for Chinese residence. The real estate lobby became an insistent one, helping to reshape the city’s demographic and spatial growth. Many Chinese residents stayed on in the International Settlement after the Taiping were finally defeated in 1864, and they helped shape the ways in which the city grew. Fuzhou Road, south of and parallel to the Nanjing Road, became the great cultural street—home to theatres, teahouses and bookshops. Shanghai was the prime site of the Chinese modern, a window on a world of change. The settlements came to replace the walled city as the heart of Shanghai.

The city in the 1930s was arguably a real capital city for China. It was the financial and cultural capital of the country. It housed the great newspapers and the great publishing companies. It housed the film and recording industry. Politics happened here—the Communist Party was formed here, great mass political movements such as the 1925 May Thirtieth Movement broke out here. The first great battle of the Sino-Japanese war took place here in the autumn of 1937. And all the time this great city was formally mostly subordinated to foreign power, for the heart of the city at the heart of China’s twentieth century was run by foreign nationals who sat on the Municipal Council and by the French authorities. British policemen patrolled settlement streets, overseeing Sikh, Russian, Chinese and Japanese subordinates. Foreign architects designed the buildings that came to dominate the Bund. Thousands of foreign nationals filled the cemeteries. By 1935 the International Settlement covered 5,500 acres, the French concession 4,000. There were about 10,000 Britons in the settlements, 4,000 Americans, 20,000 Japanese, 15,000 Russians, 2,500 French—42,000 foreign nationals in all.³

The great asymmetry at the heart of the Sino-foreign relationship remained, however, and foreign residents in Shanghai and other treaty ports were alive to it. The British dominated China’s foreign trade. But, although China and the Chinese occasionally dominated British politics—in 1857 as controversy raged about the onset of what became the Second Opium or ‘Arrow’ War and in 1906 with the recruitment of Chinese labour to work in the South African minefields—China was not generally a significant field of British imperial interest. China formed a very small part of Britain’s pattern of overseas trade and investment. Opium certainly dominated the finances of the British Indian state, but by the later nineteenth century that trade did not dominate British trade with China. The role of China in the frenetic world of the ‘new imperialism’ of the latter nineteenth century has received recent attention, not least in the high politics of realignment in Europe in the 1890s and early 1900s, but the foreign presence in China itself, although spatially greatly extended in the decade after Japan’s victory over China in the 1894–95 conflict, was not in and of itself important in those debates.⁴ The China trader faced a continual problem of recognition. He was a big fish in his Chinese pond, in Shanghai, Tianjin, Fuzhou or Canton, but he was small fry in the bigger sea of British empire. He even seemed a little exotic. He governed himself at Shanghai, having no governor with colonial state apparatus to hand. Consuls were prominent and important figures, but the Shanghai grandee felt he could ignore them, and up to a point he was right.

Still, the China trader lobbied for recognition. He had to, for he was out of sight, over the boundaries of formal empire. He used a wide repertoire of tactics: orthodox pressure group lobbying, more personal ties, pamphleteering.⁵ China coast activists largely controlled the flow of news about and from China, for most newspapers overseas relied on local foreign journalists—usually editors or reporters from the English-language press there—to act as their correspondents. And the foreign community in Shanghai attempted to effect recognition by normalising its built environment in foreign terms, by populating its Bund with the types of memorial that peppered the colonial world, its metropolitan centres and its colonial sites.⁶ This was a two-fold process too, for at one and the same time Shanghai’s foreign communities, mostly but not only its British community, aimed to fix themselves securely within the global circuits of the British Empire. They also attempted to fix themselves securely at the heart of the British China enterprise. After 1860 that was headquartered at Peking, in the grand British legation there, but the Shanghailander (as he fashioned himself) was not content with subordination to diplomats at Peking, for he felt that he was not a ward of those diplomats, but made his own hist...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction – Decolonising Imperial Heroes: Britain and France
• 1. Moving Stories: Memorialisation and its Legacies in Treaty Port China
• 2. ‘The Truth about Captain Scott’: The Last Place on Earth, Debunking, Sexuality and Decline in the 1980s
• 3. ‘Heroes into Zeroes’? The Politics of (Not) Teaching England’s Imperial Past
• 4. ‘Heroes of Charity?’ Between Memory and Hagiography: Colonial Medical Heroes in the Era of Decolonisation
• 5. From Post-Colonialism to Cosmopolitan Nation-Building? British and French Imperial Heroes in Twenty-First-Century Africa
• Afterword
• Index