MEDIATING EMPIRE

ON 12 MAY 1846, Eliza Medhurst set off by boat from her family home in Shanghai, accompanied by her father, the missionary, Dr Walter Medhurst. She was on her way to Hong Kong to meet her fiancé, Charles Batten Hillier, soon-to-be appointed the colony's Chief Magistrate. Aged seventeen, she was, as she wrote to her younger sister, Toddles, ‘miserable as a salt herring’. Married two weeks later, she and Charles would spend the next ten years in Hong Kong, before moving to Bangkok, where he took up his appointment as Britain's first consul to Siam. Within months, he was dead and Eliza was making her melancholy way back to England. That same year, her parents also left China, after spending just under forty years in East and Southeast Asia. Of her immediate family, only her brother, Walter Medhurst (junior), remained, having been recently appointed consul in Foochow (Fuzhou). Three of Charles and Eliza Hillier's five children – Walter, Harry and Guy – would later make their lives in China, serving respectively in the China Consular Service, the Imperial Maritime Customs (later the Chinese Maritime Customs, ‘the CMC’) and the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank.

Drawing on that history, archival material and a wealth of private papers, this case-study explores the relationship between family and empire in the context of Britain's presence in China in the long nineteenth century. It argues that family developed an agency that went beyond that of its individual members and provided a social and cultural mechanism for mediating Britain's imperial power and authority. It did so by forging a collective mind that informed its approach to China, facilitating that presence and building connections and networks that gave substance and identity to the expanding British World.

Family, both in its nuclear form and as a social structure, has long been recognised as a fertile area for inter-disciplinary examination, with Katherine A. Lynch arguing that ‘the family as a group and as a set of discrete individuals has both a private (or intimate) and a public face’ and that ‘understanding the family as a mediator between the lives of individuals and larger communities’ can help us explore the social history of the Western world in richer detail.