Kerry Brown's "The Great Reversal"

Kerry Brown is professor of Chinese studies and director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College London. He is the author of over twenty books on modern Chinese politics, history, and society.

Brown applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Great Reversal: Britain, China and the 400-Year Contest for Power, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book The Great Reversal: Britain, China and the 400 Year Contest for Power concerns an assessment of the outcome of perhaps the most important single encounter between Britain and China since first contact around 1600 – the Lord Macartney embassy of 1793-4. It carries a quote from John Barrow, one of the participants of the tour, who spoke of his awe at seeing the Chinese landscape as the embassy travelled back from Beijing to southern China after meeting the Qianlong emperor, and then shows how, while in terms of trade very little had been achieved, vast amounts of the key export – tea – continued to be shipped to Britain. By 1808, this had reached half the total sent to the whole of the rest of Europe.

This is a pretty good indicator of the tenor of the book as a whole. At heart, Britain’s chief interest in China was always trade, and the main effort its government made was to improve the terms of business and access to China for its merchants. This group had dominated engagement with China from the establishment of the East India Company in 1600. Commerce had indeed figured as the main subject of the earliest attempt at high level contact – the letters sent by Elizabeth I between the 1580s to 1603. None of these ever actually arrived, however, showing that while the desire was there, the means to achieving it were limited.

Things did not improve dramatically over the ensuing two centuries. While foreigners were allowed limited rights to trade from the port of Canton in the southeast of the country, their sporadic attempts to venture elsewhere in the vast country were almost always frustrated. James Flint, one of the earliest recorded British to be able to speak some Chinese, was sent to Beijing in 1757 to try to get access to the emperor. He was exiled from the country for his effrontery, and the poor local who had helped him translate his plaint executed.

The rebuttal of Macartney’s delegation was not so dramatic, but equally as categorical. It came away empty handed, with no agreement on better direct access to the imperial court, nor the right to set up any other trading posts incountry. But it did create a set of new knowledge about China, and a better way to understand the country. In the delegation were botanists, artists, and scientists, and they were able to be directly exposed to Chinese ways of thinking and knowing for the first time. It was for this reason that one historian in the 20 th century said that the Macartney delegation was the greatest single example of two very different civilisations coming into touch with each other, and trying to work out a way of working together in modern history. That endeavour continued over the following decades and centuries, and, greatly expanded and much more complex, continues to this day.

Learn more about The Great Reversal at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue