Odessa, Hong Kong, Casablanca(s) and the ports of the Niger Delta: this transdisciplinary article unfolds through four distinct vignettes, exploring how global historians across the disciplines may engage anew in the storytelling of colonial ports, by attuning themselves to the minor and anecdotal. Our work of minoring draws on materials of neglect to bring to light events, practices, and actors often overlooked by grand narratives of economic and social trends that dominate many popular works of global history.Footnote 1 We take inspiration from existing philosophical ideas, amongst them Deleuze’s and Guatarri’s propositions of the ‘minor’ (in the sense of ‘minor literature’ or ‘minor scholarship’), which break open preconceived, fixed, and teleological notions of the past to reveal dynamic, shifting meanings, or ‘deterritorialization’ in their words.Footnote 2 In a similar spirit, our transdisciplinary writing embraces storytelling in fragments, crafting four vignettes across History, Musicology, and Anthropology. These vignettes may appear to be negligible ornaments on the margins of world history, yet they also go some way towards reconceptualizing colonial empires through their so-called peripheries, putting entanglements into sharp relief.
Port cities are an ideal focal point for minoring global history. They serve not only as points of departures or connecting nodes of empire, but also as key sites of political, economic, and cultural negotiation across, and sometimes at odds with, existing and emerging ideas of class, gender, race, or ethnic affiliation.Footnote 3 As the article proceeds, our vignettes delve into materials of neglect, identified and examined according to our respective disciplinary orientations. We focus on materials and sources that may not conventionally pass muster with global history writing, which are embedded here in the creative practices of opera and oratorio in Odessa and Hong Kong, in the correspondence of Chinese women stranded in African ports on their way to Asia, and in the material culture of the transatlantic trade in enslaved people in the Niger Delta. We argue that each of these vignettes provides a new vantage point for telling the complex stories of, around, and evolving from port cities: hence ‘port cities storytelling’ in our title. With shared interests in performance, temporality, and materiality, our vignettes highlight the ways in which materials of neglect may serve to articulate minor experiences and agencies and to understand port cities as vibrant and contested sites of empire. We propose a transdisciplinary mode of port cities storytelling in the plural that ventures in another direction from the sweeping coverage of global history. In this respect, our vignettes recast ‘global history’ on an always unpredictable, sliding scale—a major–minor continuum of people, things, and practices.
Echoing to a degree but also pushing beyond Dipesh Chakrabarty’s call for provincializing Europe,Footnote 4 our vignettes will show, through the mutability of colonial port cities, that empire was often re-enacted and distorted by actors and agents other than the ‘major’ recurring protagonists of global historiography. Crucially, we do not treat and conceive of the minor as synonymous with the subaltern,Footnote 5 understood to be situated at the margins of colonial societies. Rather, by weaving our vignettes together, we gain a textured sense of how the work of minoring exposes people, things, and practices, which cannot be easily placed on a clear-cut divide between hegemons and subalterns. Chinese elites studying abroad become displaced-in-transit in Africa during the Second World War. Material culture, like the Benin Bronzes, tells stories about royal African art and colonial looting as much as about the involvement of African elites in the transatlantic trade in enslaved people. Opera, generally associated with elite culture, becomes a contested site of negotiation about belonging and imperial transformation in colonial Odessa. The English oratorio, once associated with the British empire’s cultural transmission, invites pause and reflection on Hong Kong and its late-colonial condition in 1987.
We arrived at materials of neglect as co-founders of Colonial Ports and Global History (CPAGH), a network established at and previously funded by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities.Footnote 6 Our current vignettes, crafted in an extended spirit of port cities storytelling, spring from our individual areas of research, without recourse to a geographically clustered group of colonial ports. We draw on private correspondence, newspapers, artefacts, and oral histories as materials of neglect to explore. We uncover stories through their unveiling of people, things, and practices—and the very capacity of these actors and agents to navigate and disrupt colonial structures. Our vignettes show that power structures and relations in port cities should be understood in their situatedness on a sliding scale, where people, things, and practices transmute from major to minor and vice versa. In sum, we propose to rethink ‘colonial ports and global history’, not as a monolithic construct, but as assemblages of voices, contingent encounters, and interpretations along a major–minor continuum.
Odessa’s first City Theatre as a contested site of port city identity
Olivia Irena Durand
Port cities are a favoured locus for global historians, frequently depicted as hubs of exchange or nodes within transnational networks. This historiographical emphasis on flows, circulation, and connectivity, while productive, can obscure more static or locally rooted processes, particularly those anchored in urban space and embodied in intermediary sites where global and local histories intersect.Footnote 7 The global lens also risks homogenizing port city histories, foregrounding cosmopolitan shared traits at the expense of their internal tensions and divergent trajectories—a tension reflected in Helena Lopes’s take on Casablanca as a neutral foreign space.Footnote 8 Writing the minor histories of port cities, particularly those with colonial origins, requires working with materials and voices often neglected by global history. Such sources can illuminate how urban port populations lived within and responded to broader structures of colonialism and capitalism.Footnote 9 In this vignette, I turn to the City Theatre of Odesa/Odessa, a Ukrainian metropolis founded in 1794 by the Russian empire as a settler outpost, using sources associated with performances staged there in its first half-century.Footnote 10 For over two centuries, the theatre has served as a space where the port’s plural population negotiated languages, cosmopolitan identities, and cultural representations that frequently effaced the city’s colonial origins.Footnote 11
In 1948, when the Black Sea port had become a Soviet city, Ukrainian musician Michael Goldstein drew widespread attention after announcing he had discovered, in the Odessa Conservatory archives, a symphony written ‘for the dedication of the Odessa Theatre’ and performed at its grand opening in 1809.Footnote 12 The purported discovery carried symbolic weight: it seemed to contribute to the genealogy of a distinct Slavic musical tradition, an idea then actively encouraged by Soviet cultural policy seeking to distance itself from European influences, both contemporary and historical. The alleged composer, Mykola Ovsianiko-Kulikovsky, a wealthy landowner from the Kherson region of southern Ukraine, was said to have woven traditional Ukrainian folk songs such as ‘Oh, the Viburnum is Blooming’ and Cossack dance motifs into his work. Goldstein further claimed that Ovsianiko-Kulikovsky had donated his serf orchestra to the Odessa Theatre, linking the symphony to the early cultural life of the port city.
Following its supposed rediscovery, the piece was performed throughout the USSR to considerable acclaim, even recorded by the Leningrad Philharmonic under Yevgeni Mravinsky. The Soviet press hailed the symphony as a folk counterpoint to the city’s cosmopolitan—and therefore politically suspect—foreign port heritage, recasting Odessa’s musical identity within a Slavic, socialist framework. In Soviet discourse, multiculturalism beyond the socialist sphere was reframed as ideological interference, while the symphony’s elevation reinforced narratives of Slavic cultural contributions to European music and positioned Ukraine as an integral, creative component of the Soviet Union.Footnote 13 This enthusiasm also contrasted starkly with earlier moments of repression of Ukrainian language and culture—from the 1876 Ems Ukaz, which banned Ukrainian-language printing and education, to the Stalinist purges of the 1930s that targeted the country’s cultural intelligentsia.Footnote 14
The narrative unravelled within a few years. Scholars began to question the score’s authenticity, leading to Goldstein’s prosecution for forgery and his eventual exile to the Federal Republic of Germany.Footnote 15 He later admitted authorship, explaining that he had written the piece to challenge anti-Semitic prejudices which dismissed him—a ‘nationless cosmopolitan’—as incapable of understanding or engaging with Slavic and Ukrainian musical traditions and therefore denied artistic legitimacy.Footnote 16 The story of Odessa’s inaugural symphony was subsequently excised from Soviet and later Russian narratives, revealing the instability of Odessa’s historical self-representation, with layered imperial, national, and multicultural narratives colliding within the port city’s identity.Footnote 17
The episode surrounding the supposed discovery of Odessa’s inaugural symphony invites reflection on the longer processes through which the port city’s cultural and linguistic identities were negotiated, such as the significance of Ukrainian and Jewish attributes within a hegemonic Russian framework. The controversy over the history of one of the port’s key institutions—the city theatre—forms part of a wider story of transformation, from a colonial and cosmopolitan entrepôt of global significance to an imperial city symbolizing the integration of territorial peripheries. As both an architectural landmark and a locus of civic life, the first City Theatre embodied the imperial ambition to fashion Odessa as a modern, worldly metropolis. Yet, it simultaneously refracted the minor histories of empire-making along the Black Sea. The history of Odessa’s first theatre (1810–1873) overlaps with the city’s cosmopolitan ‘golden age’, a period of free-port status (1819–1859) that would later give way to a more narrowly defined Russian national imperialism.Footnote 18
The theatre formed part of the carefully curated Primorski waterfront—an urban showcase perched on limestone cliffs 200 feet above the sea and among the first sights encountered by newcomers arriving by ship. Within this symbolic cityscape, the theatre functioned as a meeting place for communities who frequently lived and spoke in languages not their own. As such, it mediated the shifting patterns of immigration, multilingualism, and cultural hegemony in a colonial port whose population was perpetually in flux. Cultural performance in this context did not merely mirror the port’s social life; it actively reshaped it, translating Odessa’s cosmopolitan aspirations into a performative negotiation between imperial circumstances and global mobility, echoing Yvonne Liao’s discussion of the oratorio musical genre as a vector of empire.Footnote 19
In 1804, an imperial decree allocated 20,000 roubles for the construction of an official theatre, recognizing the need to provide regulated entertainment for the city’s growing population. This initiative formed part of a broader strategy to stabilize imperial governance and control the heterogeneous populations settling in Russia’s newly acquired southern borderlands. These regions experienced rapid demographic transformation, with the port city drawing migrants from neighbouring Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece, as well as from further afield in Italy, France, and Germany, alongside Ukrainian migrants from the rural hinterland. For many of these internal migrants, Odessa’s urban environment was as foreign as it was for international arrivals, their own vernacular languages and cultures differing widely from those of the Russian officials and transnational commercial elites. The construction of a permanent theatre thus served not only civic and cultural functions but also the ideological project of colonizing the northern Black Sea. The very presence of a European-style institution signalled the neo-Russian domestication of a formerly Tatar and Ottoman region, inviting further settlement, capital, and trade.Footnote 20
Even before the completion of a permanent theatre building in 1809, local performances reflected this linguistic and cultural diversity. Russian, Ukrainian, German, and Polish itinerant troupes performed in makeshift spaces—barns, markets, and private houses—illustrating how theatrical culture adapted to the fluid and provisional conditions of the early port.Footnote 21 Although there is no evidence that Ovsianiko-Kulikovsky’s serf orchestra inaugurated the theatre, early ensembles led by P. V. Fortunatov (1810) and Prince Shakhovsky (1811) featured Russian and Ukrainian performers.Footnote 22 The repertoire soon adapted to Odessa’s international population: an Italian troupe led by Zamboni and Montovani soon joined the resident companies, making Odessa the first city in the Russian empire to host Italian opera.Footnote 23 Here, linguistic and cultural plurality coexisted with imperial cultural consolidation, at a moment when no single language or nationality had achieved dominance. The vehicular languages of commerce—Russian and Italian, but also French and Greek—became, in turn, the languages of representation once transposed onto the stage.Footnote 24
The theatre’s repertoire thus charted two intertwined shifts in linguistic mediation. First, the initial displacement of Russian and Ukrainian serf troupes by foreign companies performing in their native languages; and second, from the mid-1840s onwards, the gradual reassertion of Russian-language productions as the empire’s cultural nationalism intensified.Footnote 25 Alongside Italian opera, Greek troupes appeared from 1814, while itinerant French vaudeville companies were frequent guests. The Société d’Amateurs Français, composed largely of local merchants and artisans, hosted regular fundraising performances.Footnote 26 Rossini’s operas proved immensely popular, and Polish-language productions also featured prominently, supported by Polish landowners and grain traders who had relocated south after Poland’s recent partitions.Footnote 27 In the 1839–40 season alone, of 205 performances, 144 were Italian and 37 French, underscoring the predominance of foreign-language culture.Footnote 28 By Odessa’s fiftieth anniversary in 1844, the port city had become not merely a destination for foreigners but a culturally foreign city looking outward.
The Odessa Theatre thus acted as a deterritorialized space within a socially and ethnically stratified port. As historian Patricia Herlihy observes, it was ‘nearly the only arena where all national groups met’.Footnote 29 Contemporary observers noted the enthusiasm of Odessa’s rapidly growing Jewish population for the opera, describing them as ‘fanatics’ of the stage, underscoring the sizeable community of Odessa Jews and its cultural relevance from the nineteenth century to just before Goldstein’s time.Footnote 30 The Journal d’Odessa remarked that ‘the new city on the Black Sea contains many French and Italian residents, who are willing to sacrifice all but the necessities of life for the opera; the Russians themselves are passionately fond of musical and theatrical entertainments’.Footnote 31 Such accounts illustrate the theatre’s function as a shared and liminal civic space within a city that contemporaries described as ‘no longer Russian, yet not yet European’.Footnote 32
From the mid-1840s, however, the theatrical landscape began to shift. Stricter controls on immigration and the rise of imperial nationalism fostered a turn towards Russian-language stage productions. Critics began to note, with some surprise, that ‘Russian theatre has a public in Odessa’, while performances in other languages became gradually restricted to particular genres.Footnote 33 As tastes evolved, Russian productions gained ascendancy, signalling a broader transformation in cultural belonging and allegiance.Footnote 34
The linguistic stratification visible in the theatre’s programme mirrored the port city’s gradual absorption into the imperial core, marking a shift in power dynamics with long-term ramifications for the contested storytelling of this colonial port, a transition also discussed by Julia Binter in the concluding vignette. Mid-nineteenth-century writers continued to describe Odessa as ‘a city completely foreign, outside the great Russian unity’, yet such characterizations of cosmopolitanism, often cast as problematic, also contributed to erasing the port’s pre-Russian past and colonial present.Footnote 35 Another dimension of this imperial project lay in the marginalization of vernacular tongues within both commercial and cultural life. The existence of a largely Ukrainian-speaking peasantry and the memory of Tatar and Ottoman presence were downplayed in the urban space through the elevation of ‘high’ cultures—Russian and Western European—as civilizing or cosmopolitan instruments.Footnote 36 The theatre thus functioned not merely as a stage for cosmopolitan display but as a mechanism of ideological transformation, converting the ‘wild fields’ of southern Ukraine into a naturalized neo-Russian landscape.Footnote 37 The relegation of some ‘minor’ languages and cultures, such as Ukrainian and Yiddish, to dialect and jargon, further removed the histories of demographically major communities from the city’s cultural stage.
Viewed through this lens, the history of Odessa’s first City Theatre may be read as a microcosm of the broader dynamics that shaped the port city’s cultural and linguistic life: a site where imperial projects of standardization intersected with the fluid connectivity of the maritime world. The tension between cosmopolitan display and cultural containment reveals how global exchanges were translated into hierarchies of language, taste, and belonging. Yet, these same processes also gave rise to what might be called the minor histories of the port—moments of improvisation and linguistic negotiation that persisted beneath the surface of imperial culture. The later rediscovery of Goldstein’s supposed ‘Odessa Symphony’ revisited these dynamics in the Soviet-era, moving beyond the binary of cosmopolitan versus Russian culture to reveal how hegemonic narratives of the city’s past were continually refracted—and occasionally unsettled—through the enduring significance of its theatre.
Oratorio’s continuum: Genre and a late-colonial port premiere
Yvonne Liao
What kind of a story emerges when a musical genre tells not of a port city, but of a supra-port moment? And how does that story materialize, beyond familiar nodes of music, migration, transmission, and technology in the existing work of global history?Footnote 38
These questions lie at the heart of my not-quite-‘porty’ vignette, still engaging in our article’s theme of port cities storytelling, but unfolding through rearticulations rather than routes. In thinking through such ‘portiness’, I propose exploring the English oratorio as a musical genre shaped by global empire, by all outward appearances—and the oratorio’s shifting internal meanings within a late-colonial port city, Hong Kong. The year is 1987, the start of the final decade of British colonial rule in the city, set in motion by the 1984 Sino-British Declaration and the agreed transfer of sovereignty from Britain to the People’s Republic of China on 1 July 1997. Casting an even wider historical net, my discussion first considers the oratorio, its dissemination, and its tacit connections with the British empire. Drawing on Lasse Heerten’s illuminating work in port city historiography,Footnote 39 particularly the notion of ports as fragmented spaces where trajectories (may) stall, this discussion then turns to the 1987 Hong Kong premiere of The Kingdom, an oratorio work by English composer Edward Elgar (1857–1934).
From the outset, materials of material neglect come to the fore.Footnote 40 Previews-cum-reviews—extended serial pieces once common in the written concert discourse of newspapers and the like, now virtually defunct in print and social media—take centre stage. I am interested in an accompanying port pause: pausing on this ‘obsolete worded stuff’, its layered subtext, and its late-colonial supra-port moment, which is temporally distinct from, but not entirely dissimilar to the fermata of intra-port sensibilities bound up with 1940s wartime waiting, discussed by Helena Lopes. The hidden textual tension that I observe between a preview and review also bears some affinity with ‘materialized relations’ as revealed by Julia Binter through the lens of gifts and West African port cities. My focus, meanwhile, is on a genre-affirming preview and a more ambiguous review of the 1987 premiere, regarding Elgar, an Edwardian composer, and the performance by the Hong Kong Oratorio Society. The divergence of this preview and review, penned by two Hong Kong-based music writers and just thirteen days apart in their publication in the Hongkong Standard (a widely circulated English-language broadsheet), raises a pointed question as to whether the oratorio as a genre of empire still holds consistent meaning. By foregrounding the English oratorio, this vignette brings into view the changing clout of a musical genre, in parallel with Olivia Durand’s observations of stratification in the nineteenth-century port and city theatre of Odessa. I propose the idea of oratorio’s continuum, informed by Deleuze’s and Guattari’s ‘lines of flight’—pathways of escape from dominant structures that disrupt territory and majority.Footnote 41 Through the late-colonial port premiere of The Kingdom and the prism of a genre entwined with empire, I am interested in examining a minoritarian concert discourse, via its differing lines of view, namely the newspaper’s preview and review. As such, oratorio’s continuum moves between genre and premiere, opening new interpretive possibilities for port cities storytelling while deterritorializing empire’s grip on the genre.
The oratorio, by definition, is a large-scale choral work, usually religious in nature and set to biblical verses and texts, and typically with orchestral accompaniment. Prominent examples include Handel’s Messiah, J. S. Bach’s Passions, and Mendelssohn’s Elijah. Furthermore, the characterization of the oratorio as an English genre is not without validity, despite the oratorio’s popularity on the European continent. For one thing, the oratorio has become canonically synonymous with works attributed to, among other figures, George Friedrich Handel (1685–1759), a naturalized English composer, and Elgar, a late-Romantic English composer of Pomp and Circumstance fame, writing amid ‘the high imperialism of the Edwardian era’.Footnote 42 For another, ‘choral power’, to borrow Fiona M. Palmer’s words, acquires sway through large oratorio choruses in nineteenth-century England, and it is also here where Handel’s Messiah establishes the prevailing status quo in oratorio performance, or ‘the [accepted] epitome of canonised music in the repertoires of choirs nationwide [and subsequently, worldwide]’.Footnote 43 Equally significant is the role of nineteenth-century choral societies as a vehicle for spreading oratorio music worldwide; relatedly, Joep Leersen has observed ‘an informal, self-organizing, bottom-up form of sociability … [cementing] the [nineteenth-century] choral movement [culturally and globally] as a repertoire-carrier’.Footnote 44
In repertoire, canonization, and the nineteenth-century dissemination of the oratorio, the British empire (that is, from Queen Victoria’s reign) looms large domestically and globally. London’s status as a metropole, coupled with royal patronage, arguably shaped the development of the English oratorio. There is, for example, the London-based Royal Choral Society, zealously singing the Good Friday Messiah since 1878, with origins traceable to the patronage of Queen Victoria and the year 1871, following the opening of Royal Albert Hall, the prince consort’s memorial. Further afield, in nineteenth-century colonial Australia, the English oratorio served as a means of training and disciplining, in that it was ‘regarded amongst the most edifying and instructive artforms of the Victorian era’, according to Sarah Kirby in her study of English composer George Tolhurst’s Ruth (1864), an oratorio written and first performed in the British colony of Victoria.Footnote 45 Entering the twentieth century, the years after the Second World War saw the establishment of the Hong Kong Oratorio Society in 1956, within a British colony then bordering ‘Red China’.Footnote 46 Judging from archival materials donated to the Hong Kong Public Records Office, the Society attracted members of different nationalities and Christian denominations across the decades, ‘drawn from various walks of life, [who] all share the same vision that oratorio singing is a great delight’.Footnote 47 Repertoire-wise, they stick to the so-called classics. So, across land and sea, metropole and colony, oratorio’s empire has doubtless expanded over time.
But what sort of a global phenomenon of empire is the oratorio, when put through the rearticulations rather than routes of port cities storytelling? Here, I choose to cite Heerten’s reflections: ‘Ports [beyond the familiar catchwords of “flows”, “circulation” and “connectivity”] are per se also places where mobility comes to a halt. … Ports are intermediary spaces [and unpredictable spaces] … The various entanglements into which port cities were enmeshed [thus] created ruptures, friction, and fragmentation.’Footnote 48 In a similar spirit, I suggest placing the English oratorio along a continuum. Central to this continuum is a minoritarian discourse characterized by differing views, couched in the newspaper coverage of the Hong Kong premiere of an Elgar oratorio in 1987. Genre is articulated with a late-colonial moment, and with Hong Kong as a port city whose ‘portiness’ exceeds spatial bearings, not solely defined by a vocabulary of ‘flows, ‘circulation’, and ‘connectivity’ typically associated with Hong Kong as an entrepôt.Footnote 49
Moving on, I want to explain Elgar’s significance for my continuum. In contrast to the eighteenth-century Handel, the Edwardian Elgar stands as a pointed emblem of empire and Englishness, while his reputation has been complicated by the persistent association of his oeuvre with the imperial Zeitgeist. The stirring strains of his song Land of Hope and Glory, for instance, have become almost synonymous with the pageantry of the British empire at its zenith. This is echoed by Jeffrey Richards, who comments: ‘Elgar was a patriot, a monarchist, and a Conservative, and his imperialism was a logical extension of these values.’Footnote 50 Meanwhile, The Kingdom, the oratorio in question, and a large-scale work scored for a double chorus and four soloists with orchestral accompaniment, successfully received its first performance at the Birmingham Music Festival in October 1906, a forum at the time for new commissioned music.Footnote 51 With gusto, The Musical Times reported: ‘The interest of musicians and the general public alike in the festival seemed to centre in Sir Edward Elgar’s new oratorio, “The Kingdom”. … [It] attracted the largest audience of the week [with keen demand in the run-up to the performance, including for standing places].’Footnote 52 Yet, the enthusiastic crowd of 1900s Birmingham also brings into relief the oratorio’s lukewarm Hong Kong premiere just over eight decades later, which took place in October 1987 in the Hong Kong City Hall with the Hong Kong Oratorio Society. In the Hongkong Standard can be found a tepid review by Hong Kong-based music writer Charles Milner:
[Elgar’s] style is stately, has reserve and restraint and he certainly was one of the leading British composers. The chorus performed well especially for a basically amateur group. … The performance elicited a decent response from the audience [despite being a ‘disappointing attendance’] for a composition that deserves to be performed but probably will not become a popular hit in the near future.Footnote 53
A flop of a début, no doubt: The Kingdom in Hong Kong, 1987, goes down as the first and only performance of this Elgar oratorio by the Hong Kong Oratorio Society.Footnote 54 Still, there is more to local coverage at the time, notably ‘Gem for a loyal following’, published in the same newspaper just thirteen days before Milner’s review in October 1987, by which I refer to the preview by Keith Anderson, an English music critic and educator based in Hong Kong at the time:
It is unfortunate that Elgar has enjoyed a reputation for insular patriotism of a particularly imperial kind. … The sentiments of Land of Hope and Glory [as a patriotic song] sort ill with contemporary British cynicism in these matters, while the image of an Edwardian country gentleman, happier at the races than in the Concert Hall, a picture for which there is slight anecdotal support, cannot endear him to a different public.Footnote 55
Anderson could be credited for steering the reader away from crass imperialism, in the name of more nuanced publicity. He avoids the cliché of equating Elgar with ‘insular patriotism of a particularly imperial kind’, in favour of a more down-to-earth understanding of Elgar the composer as he sees it, and a more considered understanding of empire. The Kingdom may even be a ‘gem’ of a work as Anderson headlines it, affirming and celebrating the oratorio genre. It is not clear, however, whether the ‘loyal following’ that Anderson also headlines is showing incipient signs of decline in 1987, given the ‘disappointing attendance’ that Milner reports in his review, and his somewhat pessimistic prediction that the work ‘probably will not become a popular hit in the near future’. Between Anderson’s ‘gem’ and Milner’s ‘decent response from the audience’ (at best), genre in a late-colonial port city begins to deviate from its established function as a genre of empire. Meanwhile, Elgar’s style of ‘reserve and restraint’, to borrow Milner’s words, no longer guarantees audience interest, let alone Anderson’s ‘loyal following’. Writing for the same Hong Kong newspaper—but writing at the two ends of an oratorio premiere in 1987—Anderson and Milner put a minoritarian twist on concert discourse, with differing lines of view as they relate to empire, Elgar the Edwardian composer, and audience appetite for English choral music in programming and performance.
Rearticulations exceed routes, to return to my curious ‘porty’ opening. The oratorio as a global phenomenon of empire inevitably raises more questions than answers, in 1987: between a preview and review, it rewrites meaning, in part-serial and part-fragmented fashion that speaks internally to the moment and to the newspapering of a premiere. A one-off Kingdom, variously documented, casts uncertainty over genre and empire, not only within a late-colonial port city but also in the ‘last formal British colony’ facing impending political transition.Footnote 56 Granted, such tapering of influence should come as no surprise, inasmuch as the formal process of ‘decolonization’, initiated by the Hong Kong colonial government for its own legitimacy, was already well underway—for instance, in its attempted construction of a brand of ‘Chineseness’ through official support of Chinese music, performances, and festivities from the late 1960s to the early 1980s.Footnote 57 Then again, empire’s indelible mark on choral music-making yoked to the English oratorio leaves a complex legacy and print trail, touting ‘portiness’ as a ‘portiotics’ of port musical meaning, open to further interpretation. This is where, as the concluding note of my vignette, Heerten’s idea of ports as intermediary spaces meshes well with Deleuzoguattarian trajectories of flight, since both enable new forms of understanding not tied to mobilities or structures. In tandem, they help to locate the English oratorio within the stuff of mediatized dynamics in a late-colonial port premiere, courtesy of a concert discourse of material neglect. And along oratorio’s continuum, minoritarian sensibilities develop in response and in counterpoint to a genre of empire—as befits a supra-port moment.
Casablanca(s): Neutrality, wartime movement and waiting in colonial ports
Helena F. S. Lopes
With the exception of the RMS Titanic, interrupted voyages seldom make it to the major narratives of global history, even less so if the interruption was not life-threatening. What did passengers do when stranded in in-between ports during the Second World War? What if those passengers were themselves neglected by histories of port cities and of that foremost global conflict?
Studies of port cities in the age of empire and steam often focus on processes of transnational maritime exchange, urban spaces, and the technologies underpinning radical changes in transportation.Footnote 58 While this vignette intersects with some of these major aspects, its focus is on a minor case of passengers stranded halfway through: a group of Chinese citizens whose journey between France and China was interrupted in West Africa in 1940. The major–minor intersection here is not solely one of subject, but also of sources: this section draws on a neglected set of correspondence about these passengers kept among diplomatic papers on ‘bigger’ topics. The documents comprise letters from some of the Chinese women in the group and others written by French officials. They are in a folder with the generic title ‘Chinois en France’ (Chinese in France) held at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs archives in Paris.Footnote 59 Whilst concerning a minor episode, these documents illustrate a range of dynamics associated with modern global history, including migration, maritime travel, and transnational exchanges between individuals, groups, institutions, states, and empires. The papers in the folder allowed me to reimagine a voyage with many ‘hiccups’ that, albeit in a different way from the previous vignette, also shows instances when ‘mobility came to a halt’ and how those travelling responded to this.
I came across these files whilst researching a French colonial outpost in South China, Guangzhouwan, during the Second World War and the immediate post-war period. Focusing on parallels and connections between Guangzhouwan and other similar territories under European rule in the region—Macau and Hong Kong—I was particularly interested in wartime engagements between these colonial ports and the people who moved through them. With pandemic-related travel restrictions preventing research trips to Asia, I turned my attention to European archives. Some of their seemingly minor holdings held surprisingly illuminating clues on global wartime circulations.
Both Guangzhouwan and Macau have been described as Chinese versions of Casablanca,Footnote 60 the Moroccan city whose ambiguous experience of neutrality during the war inspired a famous Hollywood fiction film, Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942). Central to Casablanca is the idea of waiting in a neutral foreign place without a clear idea about if and when one could leave for somewhere safer. There are some echoes of what contemporary social anthropologists have posited regarding ‘waiting as a temporal space where emergency dissolves into the ordinary’.Footnote 61 Borrowing Elizabeth Sinn’s conceptualization of Hong Kong as an ‘in-between place’, I have analysed the experience of neutrality in South China’s colonial ports as ‘in-between time’.Footnote 62 This temporality of uncertainty and unintended immobility is also applicable to the case at the centre of this vignette that includes a passage through the real Casablanca.
This atypical Second World War story began on 7 June 1940 when a group of thirty-six Chinese citizens, both students and workers, boarded the Messageries Maritimes passenger liner Jean Laborde in Marseille en route to China. Some were heading for British-ruled Hong Kong, others for Shanghai, where the International Settlement and French Concession were, like Hong Kong, under foreign jurisdiction and technically neutral at the time. Their journey was interrupted on 27 June in Pointe-Noire, in today’s Republic of the Congo, then under French colonial rule. The fall of France in 1940 had global reverberations, and the stoppage of the Jean Laborde was one of them. Two months later, the ship moved to Dakar, in Senegal, where some of the crew (but not the commander) joined General De Gaulle’s resistance. British aerial bombings of the port city forced the ship to seek refuge in Casablanca.Footnote 63 Some of its Chinese passengers chose to disembark in the city, with twenty-five catching another boat to Dakar in October to then board another French passenger steamer, Cap Padaran to Saigon.Footnote 64 The other eleven passengers remained aboard the Jean Laborde and returned to Marseille in October. By late November 1941 they were still in France hoping to go to China.Footnote 65 This is, thus, a story about being in transit in the spaces between multiple port cities rather than how migrants transformed those locales.Footnote 66
Placing the comparatively minor history of these stranded Chinese passengers at the centre allows us to consider alternative global histories of colonial ports in the Second World War. These include seeing beyond European colonialism in maritime travel and migration, and considering links between European neutral states and other actors, global networks of Chinese wartime diplomacy, international educational exchanges, and the role of women—whose experience is often treated as of minor importance in war histories—in these. The involvement of Chinese diplomats in pleading the passengers’ case to French authorities showcases the dynamism of China’s wartime diplomacy in Europe.Footnote 67 The passengers’ own initiative in rallying attention to their situation through official channels evidences the intersection of non-Western-agency in both non-state actors and state actors (the diplomats). The stranded passengers did not easily fit categories associated with occupied France or the French empire at war. They were not European refugees nor colonial subjects and they also did not fit neatly into a position of subalternity. Indeed, the fact that many belonged to families of high social standing made French authorities particularly keen to ensure they were well treated.Footnote 68
This episode demonstrates the importance of global maritime shipping routes in the 1940s, and their intersection with European imperialism. The Jean Laborde and other ships mentioned in the files belonged to French shipping companies and linked colonial ports in Africa and Asia.Footnote 69 These routes were taken by a wide range of passengers; global travel was not merely the privilege of white European colonialists.Footnote 70 Discussions on the possibility of the stranded passengers reaching China via French-ruled Indochina also allude to the connections between East and South-East Asia, links that predated European colonialism and that remained strong even at a time of global conflict. Here we have a case of a relatively minor human scale of the individual stranded travellers intersecting with the major scales of global steamship routes, the capitalist enterprises that ran them (in this case, the Messageries Maritimes),Footnote 71 the imperial networks that underpinned them (in this case, French), and maritime flows connecting Europe and Asia—in this case, interrupted flows.
When considering how different connections disrupted by conflict can still function at a minor level, neutral states are a case in point. Indeed, they are usually treated as minor players in histories of the Second World War. This eventful, if neglected, case reveals connections between neutrals and what their status, however ambiguous, meant in practice for enabling transport and communications. Initially, correspondence between the Chinese embassy in France and the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs considered the option of getting the stranded passengers to Madeira or simply onto a Portuguese ship going to Asia.Footnote 72 Whilst that did not happen, some of the Jean Laborde passengers who returned to France did go to Portugal. Some of the correspondence concerns a woman, Madame Tsao Kuo-pin (Cao Guobin), and was conducted via the Chinese legation in Lisbon.Footnote 73 Suggesting further global connections, Madame Tsao was likely the wife of the Chinese consul in Seattle and she eventually returned to China via the United States.Footnote 74 These minor personal links, present in a disrupted travel episode, are echoes of larger histories of US–China migrations, themselves experiencing a moment in transformation during the Second World War.Footnote 75
The stranded passengers case also evidences the importance of educational networks and multilingualism. These major themes are not exclusively a story of colonial port cities but, as the following vignette will also illustrate, they do figure in surprising ways in the background of many of their global histories. Seven of the passengers that returned on the Jean Laborde to Marseille corresponded with French authorities from the Institut Franco-Chinois in Lyon. Some of the names in the existing files match those of alumni of the Institute, which was founded in 1921 and operated until 1950.Footnote 76 These include both men and women. It was precisely a woman, Tsi Lun, who wrote on behalf of the group to French authorities to negotiate their departure from France on terms acceptable to them.Footnote 77 Her actions as representative of the cohort of students bring to light the visible role played by multilingual Chinese women during the war, challenging the historiographical neglect of women in studies of Chinese in Europe.Footnote 78 Their correspondence with French authorities is a concrete record of what theorists of waiting have described as ‘waiting as an ordered activity’,Footnote 79 archival traces of ‘port pauses’ (echoing Yvonne Liao’s observations above). They are also suggestive of how peripheral subjects used languages of imperial power for their own ends, something already shown in Olivia Durand’s vignette on theatre in Odessa.
Arguably the best depictions of waiting in wartime global journeys are found in audiovisual fiction. There, the minor and the mundane are foregrounded for dramatic effect, being superimposed over a background of major structural dynamics. Visualizing that fleeting temporarily is evident in films such as the aforementioned Casablanca or more recent works such as the series Transatlantic (2023, set mostly in Marseille). These provide insight into the dangers and opportunities of temporary stays in neutral territories during the war. This vignette’s minor episode, however, demonstrates how those experiences were much more diverse and had a wider range of global connections than is visible in those Eurocentric works. The Chinese passengers forced to sojourn in the actual Casablanca in 1940 and the ‘East Asian Casablancas’ of Guangzhouwan, Hong Kong, and Macau provide glimpses of circulations written out of major histories.
West African port cities on the major–minor continuum of the Atlantic world
Julia T. S. Binter
The poles of the major–minor continuum seem particularly pronounced when looking at the transatlantic trade in enslaved people. The greed and cruelty of European enslavers stand in stark contrast to the survival and resistance of those people who were enslaved and forced to work on plantations in the Americas and the Caribbean. Looking at the coast of West Africa, the view becomes murkier.Footnote 80 In 2020, the Restitution Study Group (RSG), an NGO in New York working to ‘secure reparations and restitution from corporations complicit in the antebellum enslavement of Africans’,Footnote 81 sued the Smithsonian Institution over their decision to return the so-called Benin Bronzes from their collection to Nigeria. The artworks stemmed from the royal palace of Benin and had been looted during a colonial war that British troops waged against the kingdom in 1897. Later, the artworks were sold on the international market, dismembering the historically, culturally, and spiritually vital heritage of the kingdom.Footnote 82 Following heated debates in Europe about the need to return cultural goods from colonial contexts to their regions of origin,Footnote 83 the Smithsonian was one of the first institutions in the United States to take action and return their share of the royal arts of Benin. The RSG, however, did not see justice done on the grounds of postcolonial truth and reconciliation. On the contrary, as a descendant of enslaved people from what is Nigeria today, Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, the NGO’s founder, condemned the Kingdom of Benin’s involvement in the enslavement trade, stating that the kingdom had been instrumental in raiding neighbouring people, enslaving them and selling them to European merchants in exchange for manillas, the very same metal currency that was used to create the Benin Bronzes. The restitution of the Benin Bronzes ‘to the descendants of those who were essential in the trafficking of Plaintiff Farmer-Paellmann’s and the Class’s ancestors would cause yet another moral and economic injury’.Footnote 84
So, where to place, on the major–minor continuum, the political–economic elites of the Kingdom of Benin and other African empires in the interior of the continent and the city-states at the coast of West Africa, who participated in the trade in enslaved people from the late fifteenth to the early nineteenth century, only to be colonized by European forces at the end of the century? Looking at their histories in the longue durée, their position within the Atlantic world shifts from one of perpetrators to victims, from mighty monarchs to anti-colonial resistance fighters.
The role of West African port cities in the transatlantic trade in enslaved people from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, in the subsequent rise of the palm oil trade, and, since the 1950s, in the extraction of crude oil, has often been examined from political–economic perspectives.Footnote 85 Yet these port cities were crucial sites where local elites and European merchants negotiated and contested political, economic, and cultural relations, making them key arenas in the transformation from African sovereignty to European colonization. Written sources, such as eighteenth-century slave traders’ memoirs and, from 1841 onward, the records of Britain’s Foreign Office, when read critically against the grain, offer valuable insights into how these negotiations unfolded on site. At the same time, material culture—such as the Benin Bronzes—offers new perspectives on the complex negotiations and, ultimately, the violence that transformed trade stations and African coastal city-states into colonial port cities.
This vignette examines port cities in the Bight of Benin—today’s Niger Delta—through the lens of material culture, in order to gain new insights into how West African elites shifted along the major–minor continuum. In this respect, it resonates with Helena Lopes’s analysis of Chinese students stranded in Morocco during the Second World War, who likewise occupied a double position as both refugees abroad and members of the elite at home in China. Whereas the minor archive of overlooked records in France reveals new traces of such actors in the port city of Casablanca, for port cities in the Niger Delta it is material culture—often neglected in historical research—that opens new avenues of inquiry.Footnote 86
In 1786, Jean-Francois Landolphe (1747–1825), a French merchant in enslaved people, cemented his commercial partnership with Olu Erejuwa I (also known by his Christian name Sebastião Manuel Octobia), the king of Itsekiri, with the gift of a staff: ‘This cane … can serve to make your will known when you wish to ask something from me. You can be assured that I will give you anything at this sign.’Footnote 87 The mutually benefiting aim was to set up a trade station for the export of enslaved people in the kingdom’s territory. The Olu granted him a patch of land at the Atlantic coast, the outskirts of his kingdom in today’s Delta State, Nigeria. There, the Frenchman built a house in European style, while the Olu’s men surrounded it with eight houses built ‘according to Warri fashion’.Footnote 88 The French king’s flag was hoisted in front of the factory, with thirty-two cannons fortifying the settlement. This fortification was deemed necessary not only against potential local enemies but also against European rivals. Attacks did follow by, for example, British merchants who had formed an alliance with the ‘King of Aunis, a tributary of the King of Benin’, most probably the ruler of Isale-Eko (later known as Lagos Island), which were crushed by the Itsekiri Kingdom. For six years, the inhumane business prospered, accruing Landolphe ‘immense [profit]: more than 30,000 francs a day’.Footnote 89
In 1792, rivalling British merchants again attacked the French outpost and burned it to the ground. Landolphe was to go on fighting in the French–British wars in the Caribbean. When he returned to the Niger Delta, the kingdom’s canoes still bore the French flag as sign of their former commercial enterprise and maybe also hope for ‘future gains’.Footnote 90 The hope was not unfounded as the Olu had invested considerably in the French–Itsekiri relationship. He had helped Captain Landolphe when he was stranded with his ship, its belly full of enslaved people and ivory tusks, coming from the Kingdom of Benin in the interior to the Itsekiri Kingdom on the Atlantic coast. The gesture of goodwill eventually led to the joint commercial enterprise and the founding of a French–Itsekiri coastal settlement. Moreover, the Olu had sent his nephew, Prince Boudakan and two servants with Landolphe to Paris to ‘learn the language and customs of the French’.Footnote 91 It had been at least the second time that an Itsekiri royal made an educational trip abroad, the first one being Prince Dom Domingos who had studied at the University of Coimbra, Portugal, from 1600 to 1610 with the aim of establishing trade ties between the Itsekiri Kingdom and the Portuguese empire.Footnote 92 International education for elites can, thus, be traced from sixteenth-century Nigeria/Portugal and eighteenth-century Nigeria/France to 1940s China/France (as analysed by Helena Lopes above).Footnote 93
In 1807, the British empire outlawed the transatlantic trade in enslaved people and European as well as African merchants shifted their commercial enterprise to a new up-and-coming resource: palm oil.Footnote 94 Palm oil greased the machineries of industrializing Europe and, as the basic ingredient for soap, would also enable the hygiene craze of the late nineteenth century.Footnote 95 With Britain’s shifting commercial interests also came a steadier presence at the West African coast. In 1841, a consul was stationed at Sao Tomé, an island just off the coast of the Niger Delta, to function as an arbiter between the European merchants and the still sovereign African rulers of the coastal city-states who acted as intermediaries in the palm oil trade. When Olu Akengbuwa of the Itsekiri Kingdom and his potential heirs died in swift succession, the consul asked the Itsekiri to produce another reliable political representative to negotiate trade ties with European merchants. The decision fell on the leader of the Diare family, who, over generations, had held the post of foreign minister. To acknowledge the political appointment, the consul gifted the new gofine (governor) a ‘staff of office’,Footnote 96 echoing the gift that Captain Landolphe had presented a century earlier.
Similar to Olivia Durand’s vignette on Odessa’s theatre scene, the study of theatre in Nigeria provides new insights into how this gradual shift in power relations between European imperial actors and West African elites has been interpreted throughout the centuries. In 2015, the theatre play Olu Akengbuwa captured the audience in Warri, the port city which the British founded after the defeat of the Itsekiri Kingdom at the end of the nineteenth century. The play was meant as a lesson in good leadership in times of crises, past and present.Footnote 97 It centred on Olu Akengbuwa I (on the throne 1808–48) who had led the Itsekiri Kingdom in times of the drastic economic and political change, from enslavement to palm oil trade. A key dramatic moment was the handing-over ceremony of the staff of office to the gofine on stage. The audience gasped when the staff changed hands. It marked a severe change in the political structure of the kingdom, a first step in shifting power relations that would end in colonial war and the loss of lives, wealth, and sovereignty. Like the Kingdom of Benin, the Kingdom of Itsekiri witnessed the tightening grip of the British empire and, after decades of diplomatic skirmishes, was eventually attacked and looted by British troops in 1894, scattering parts of their material heritage across museums in the West. However, the cerebral reaction to the performance on stage was also due to the fact that the elongated wooden staff with a silver top was not just a theatre prop. It was the original staff of office, a much-esteemed heirloom which had escaped colonial ransacking and had been cared for by the Diare family in Warri, and which brought to bear the past in the present.
Much like the Benin Bronzes, the staffs of office may not only serve as mnemonic devices for competing narratives and painful or proud connections with the transatlantic past. Understanding them as materialized relations,Footnote 98 and tracing them through the shifting political economies of the transatlantic trade helps us to question preconceived notions of colonial port cities, their relationship with the continental interior, and their position within the Atlantic World.Footnote 99 It highlights the African agency involved in shaping port cities and asks us to reconsider clear-cut historical narratives of perpetrators and victims. Moreover, it helps us ponder the temporality of colonial port cities. When does a port city become colonial? Were the Portuguese–Itsekiri and French–Itsekiri trade stations already colonial ports? And when does a port city cease to be colonial? Since the 1950s, the Niger Delta has become a hub for the extraction of crude oil, perpetuating relationships of dependency and power along fault lines of the Global North and the Global South, but also of the wealthy and internationally educated and the poor within Nigeria.Footnote 100 Interrogating the many ‘lives of things’ opens up ways of rethinking agency and temporality in colonial port cities along the major–minor continuum.Footnote 101
An undisciplinable formulation
Our materials of neglect took us through nineteenth-century Odessa, late-colonial Hong Kong in 1987, Casablanca(s) during the Second World War, and a trans-historical Niger Delta across three centuries. Together, these vignettes reflect our converging disciplinary orientations toward minor episodes and overlooked actors within colonial ports, advancing, variously yet in tandem, a major–minor continuum of people, things, and practices. Telling stories along this sliding scale has had the effect of amplifying our encounters and disruptions of the so-called ‘elite’ as a locus of power. Indeed, we choose not to submit to class structures and hierarchies, as illustrated instead by our heightened engagements with theatre and language, genre and moment, mobility and isolation, and shifting political economies and an heirloom.
Our interweaving stories of a global minor, and our prongs of performance, temporality, and materiality, all signal back to a transdisciplinary mode of port cities storytelling, with its unruly tales and trajectories. Durand began by focusing on the space of an emblematic building of Odessa’s urban landscape, its nineteenth-century city theatre. A symbol of the port city’s multicultural past, it was also a space in which the Odessa myth can be examined critically through its connections with colonial origins and empire-making, existing in tension between cosmopolitan display and cultural containment. Pushing against binary oppositions between cosmopolitan and Russian culture in the history of the port city, this vignette examined how the discussion of language and performance on the stage of Odessa’s city theatre interwove the palimpsest of the colonial port’s major and minor histories.
Liao asked what kind of a story emerges when a musical genre speaks to a supra-port moment rather than a port city as such, emphasizing rearticulations rather than routes: hence, ‘oratorio’s continuum’. This vignette explored the English oratorio—a genre shaped by empire yet rearticulated in late-colonial Hong Kong through the 1987 premiere of Elgar’s The Kingdom. By examining materials of material neglect, as in the premiere’s newspaper preview and review in the Hongkong Standard and their differing lines of view, Liao highlighted shifting internal meanings of the English oratorio and opened new interpretive possibilities for port cities storytelling.
Lopes investigated forgotten traces of a global Second World War through a small folder of archival documents on a group of Chinese citizens, many of whom were women students with ties to high-ranking families in China, who sought to leave occupied France, but were left stranded in different ports of West Africa. These subjects took centre stage, arguing their case in several languages before the French colonial authorities. From a minor source base transpired major issues of education mobility, women’s position, neutrality, and maritime shipping across ‘neutral’ colonial ports, and the temporality of wartime waiting.
Speaking from a similar vantage of West Africa, but adopting a longue durée approach, Binter traced material culture like the so-called Benin Bronzes through the shifting political economies of the transatlantic trade in enslaved people, colonization, and extractivism in the twentieth century to elucidate the changing agency and power relations of West African merchant elites within the Atlantic world. Binter, in this respect, threw light on ‘major’ West African actors of the transatlantic trade in enslaved people from the sixteenth to early nineteenth century, who became victims of territorial colonization during the scramble for Africa. This vignette queried the definition of colonial port cities, in tandem with the complex interplay between major global trends and minor actors at the periphery of empire.
Power and its twists and turns thus pave the way for scattered fragments of ‘colonial ports and global history’, an undisciplinable formulation in its major–minor continuum—and continua—of people, things, and practices. Power has also dictated why some sources have been privileged in global histories while others remain neglected. If only a microcosm among many of uneven global dynamics, our vignettes function simultaneously as complementary and context-specific commentaries, arrayed along a sliding scale. The nature of our vignettes suggests that transdisciplinary writing is necessarily unsmooth and ungainly, but that this collaboration transcends our disciplinary orientations in nuancing and minoring ‘the global’ as a collective rather than a stand-alone effort. Our work of writing, producing stories in a global minor, goes towards enriching an undisciplinable formulation, variously rethinking along and against the port city’s fibrous grain.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this transdisciplinary article. We would especially like to thank our CPAGH colleagues and fellow co-founders in History and Musicology—Katharina Oke, Hatice Yıldız, and Min-Erh Wang—for our collaborations together over the course of the network’s grant period (2018–21) at TORCH | The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities. We would also like to express our gratitude to Min-Erh Wang for his participation in the early stages of this article, and to TORCH for their funding and support in developing our network and laying the foundations of our present publication.
Financial support
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG); BI 2302/1-1; Leverhulme Trust ECF-2017-409; TORCH, The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities, Networks Scheme (2018–21).
Competing interests
The authors declare none.
Yvonne Liao is a music historian and Assistant Professor in Musicology at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Julia T. S. Binter is a social anthropologist and Argelander Professor for Critical Museum and Heritage Studies at the University of Bonn. Email: julia.binter@uni-bonn.de
Olivia Irena Durand is a global historian working in the fields of comparative settler studies and a Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research in London. Email: olivia.durand@sas.ac.uk
Helena F. S. Lopes is Lecturer in Modern Asian History at Cardiff University, specializing in China and global history. Email: LopesH@cardiff.ac.uk
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