This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ ‘Designs against a common foe’ the Anglo-Qing suppression of piracy in South China Kwan, Nathan Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 01. Oct. 2021 Abstract of thesis entitled ‘Designs against a Common Foe’: The Anglo-Qing Suppression of Piracy in South China Submitted by C. Nathan Kwan for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at The University of Hong Kong and King’s College London in June 2020 By the nineteenth century British and Qing authorities had developed distinct understandings of piracy and means for its suppression. The British colonisation of Hong Kong in 1842 brought these two systems into contact. After establishing sovereignty over their new colony, British officials, by headquartering the Royal Navy’s East Indies and China Station at Hong Kong and establishing a Vice-Admiralty Court there, developed the means of projecting their authority over Hong Kong's surrounding waters and exercising state power at sea. The prevalence of piracy in British and Chinese sources, however, suggests that British maritime control was limited. Piracy threatened British and Qing interests in South China and became a basis for cooperation. Though British and Qing officials were often suspicious of each other’s motives in the nineteenth century, they nonetheless cooperated against a common foe: Chinese pirates. Anglo-Qing cooperation against pirates created a nexus between British colonial and consular authorities, officers of the Royal Navy, and local and metropolitan Qing officials that challenges traditional narratives of gunboat diplomacy. The relationship between Britain and China was far more complicated than the former using the threat of naval intervention to extract concessions from the latter. British naval hegemony complemented Qing deficiencies, while Qing officials' local intelligence and criminal justice system made them more efficient at punishing pirates. These complementary aspects of the British and Qing maritime states developed into a cooperative system in which British and Qing officials engaged with each other’s understandings of piracy, maritime control, and international law. This system developed and persisted despite misunderstandings and conflicts between its participants. Using records and archival materials in English and Chinese, this thesis looks at Anglo-Qing relations through the prism of their efforts in suppressing piracy. It argues that such efforts produced a ‘collaborative imperial hydrarchy’, in which Royal Navy ships helped uphold Qing and treaty law in Chinese waters. Agents of the British and Qing empires cooperated in an attempt to establish control over the waters of South China. This thesis investigates the implications this collaboration had for imperialism and international law in nineteenth-century China. (343 words) ‘Designs against a Common Foe’: The Anglo-Qing Suppression of Piracy in South China by C. Nathan Kwan 關正衍 BA and BS, UT Austin; AM, Harvard A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy at The University of Hong Kong and King’s College London June 2020 會剿拿獲賊匪甚眾｡拴獲生供多名｡足徵志切同仇｡ The number of pirates annihilated and captured are exceedingly many and a large number have been taken alive. This is sufficient evidence of sincere designs against a common foe - Ye Mingchen to Sir John Bowring in response to an international expedition against pirates at Coulan, Xianfeng reign fourth year, tenth month, eighteenth day (7 December 1854) Declaration I declare that this thesis represents my own work, except where due acknowledgement is made, and that it has not been previously included in a thesis, dissertation, or report submitted to this University or to any other institution for a degree, diploma, or other qualifications. Signed: i Acknowledgements I received support from individuals and institutions from around the world, without which I would not have been able to complete this thesis. I am grateful in the utmost for this assistance and would like to express my gratitude. I would first and foremost like to thank my thesis supervisors, Profs. John Carroll and Ashley Jackson, for their guidance, support, and patience throughout the process of producing this thesis. Without their suggestions, reminders about progress, and keen eyes this thesis could not have materialised. Prof. David Pomfret, my secondary supervisor, was also supportive of my project. The suggestions and comments by my internal examiners, Prof. Andrew Lambert and Dr Loretta Kim, and my external examiner, Prof. Robert Bickers, were insightful and helpful. I would also like to thank the institutions of the University of Hong Kong and King’s College London for providing me with excellent workspaces as well as resources to pursue my research. The Laughton Naval Unit at King’s College London connected me with a community of scholars with interests in maritime history and gave me a forum in which to discuss my research. This research also benefitted from the Hong Kong History Project, with Dr Vivian Kong providing useful comments and helping to bring my work in dialogue with a wider network of scholars and work on Hong Kong. I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to Dr Lee Shau Kee for his generous support, through the Lee Shau Kee Postgraduate Fellowship, for my research studies at the University of Hong Kong. Friends and colleagues have also been an important source of support and sense of community during this process. I would in particular like to thank Dr Chi Chi Huang and David Saunders from the History Department at the University of Hong Kong for their friendship, suggestions, and general goodwill towards me during this journey. Dr William Fletcher, Anna Plunkett, and Onur Kara in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London have also been good companions and a source of encouragement for which I am grateful. Without such friends, the process of research and writing would have been lonely and much less enjoyable. Finally, I would like to thank my family and specifically my parents for their support and ii approval of my engaging in a daunting project which they did not necessarily understand. Their support and encouragement as well as that from the people and programmes listed above and many others were essential to making the production of this thesis possible. iii Table of Contents Declaration.................................................................................................................................i Acknowledgments....................................................................................................................ii Table of Contents.....................................................................................................................iv Introduction: Piracy and Imperial Hydrarchy ......................................................................... 1 Common Enemy, Collaborative Solution ............................................................................ 4 Understandings of Piracy and Its Suppression in the British and Qing Empires ................... 7 From Pirates of the Caribbean to Ladrones of the Canton Delta ...................................... 8 Controlling the Inner Seas ............................................................................................. 18 Anglo-Qing Collaborative Imperial Hydrarchy in the Nineteenth Century ....................... 25 Chapter 1 Island of Sovereignty: British Hong Kong in Chinese Seas .................................. 28 Britain and Piracy in China on the Eve of the Opium War ................................................ 29 The Cession of Hong Kong and Imposition of British Rule(s) ........................................... 33 British Legal Posturing in Hong Kong ........................................................................... 36 Establishing an Island of Sovereignty ............................................................................. 40 Sovereignty and Hong Kong Hydrarchy ........................................................................... 47 Hong Kong Hydrarchy .................................................................................................. 48 British Imperial Hydrarchy around Hong