Carl Ernest Kubler

Most histories have painted a bleak portrait of the 19th-century Sino-Western encounter, with legal disputes, bureaucratic restrictions, and opium taking the fore in a conflict-centered account of the pre-Opium War period. My dissertation, however, argues that everyday conflict and misunderstanding were far less typical than scholars believe. Via a bottom-up reexamination of the daily lives and incentives of people living on the global margins of the South China Coast, my dissertation shows how problem solving and cooperation, not conflict, were in fact the norm. I both reframe the story of pre-Opium War relations by telling it from the ground up, and also open up broader historiographic questions about how we understand and narrate causality in an entangled, multinational context.

Most scholars have painted a bleak portrait of the nineteenth-century encounter between “China” and “the West,” with stories of cross-cultural misunderstanding, legal disputes, and opium smuggling punctuating a conflict-centered narrative of the years before the first Opium War. This project, however, argues that everyday conflict and misunderstanding were far from representative. Through a bottom-up reexamination of daily life in the globally entangled societies of the South China Coast, this research shows that active problem solving and cooperation, not conflict, were in fact the norm: driven by shared economic incentives, most local merchants, sailors, prostitutes, interpreters, coolies, cooks, pirates, and other liminal actors worked flexibly with their foreign counterparts to resolve problems on the ground level, long before they wended their way up to the political sphere.

This project examines the history of trade and grassroots relations between Chinese, Europeans, and Americans on the South China Coast in the decades surrounding the first Opium War (1839-1842). Through a bottom-up reassessment of the daily lives and incentives of merchants, sailors, interpreters, coolies, cooks, sex workers, and other individuals, I push back against traditional narratives of Sino-Western conflict and show that active transnational problem solving and cooperation, not conflict, were in fact the norm. By highlighting these processes of negotiation and relationship building, my research revises scholarly understandings of 19th-century China and offers a more sensitive understanding of how people from different parts of the world engaged across cultural and national divides.