| This thesis explores the relationship between colonial government and Chinese population during the troubled early decades of British rule in Hong Kong. During these years the government sought to carve a prosperous colony out of a region undergoing severe social and political crisis in conditions that contained multiple contradictions. Having acquired Hong Kong through war, the British failed initially either to find the co-operative local elites necessary to help them maintain order or to attract the wealthy Chinese merchants vital to the colony's success. Growing regional disorder in the 1850s brought to the colony substantial Chinese merchants, who established Hong Kong's viability. At the same time, rapid population increase, political tensions and rampant crime imposed severe strains on a government already notorious for incompetence and corruption. Administrators proclaimed 'equal laws' and liberal rule: yet they faced both a growing, migratory, often resistant Chinese population and a colonial community clamouring for controls on the Chinese masses. Increasingly, they transformed English methods of government into a discriminatory system of repressive controls and rough justice: prompted by successive emergencies, these measures were rationalized by what colonists explained as the dangerous, 'fluctuating', 'criminal' character of the colony's Chinese population. When, in the 1860s and 1870s, the government eventually cultivated an alliance with a settled and influential Chinese elite, it retained these measures as mechanisms for protecting the interests of both Europeans and, increasingly, the Chinese bourgeoisie.; Most recent scholarship on early Hong Kong has focused on the later nineteenth century and on the dynamics within Chinese society, a traditionally neglected field. This thesis seeks to supplement that scholarship with an intensive study of Hong Kong's early, formative decades. It stresses the importance of the colonial relationship in Hong Kong's historical experience and argues for the centrality of the criminal law within that relationship. It attempts both to disturb the assumptions of traditional histories that, after some initial difficulties, British rule developed in a benevolent, progressive manner and to challenge the prevailing paradigm that these early decades were a period in which the government intervened little in the lives of Hong Kong's Chinese population. |
