Designed to appeal to the book lover, the Macmillan Collector’s Library is a series of beautiful gift editions of much-loved classic titles. Macmillan Collector’s Library are books to love and treasur
In the first part of this famous work De Quincey vividly describes a number of experiences during his boyhood which he implies laid the foundations for his later life of helpless drug addiction.The se
The crisis of masculinity surfaced and converged with the crisis of the nation in the late Qing, after the doors of China were forced open by Opium Wars. The power of physical aggression increasingly overshadowed literary attainments and became a new imperative of male honor in the late Qing and early Republican China. Afflicted with anxiety and indignation about their increasingly effeminate image as perceived by Western colonial powers, Chinese intellectuals strategically distanced themselves from the old literati and reassessed their positions vis-à-vis violence. In Mastery of Words and Swords: Negotiating Intellectual Masculinities in Modern China, 1890s–1930s, Jun Lei explores the formation and evolution of modern Chinese intellectual masculinities as constituted in racial, gender, and class discourses mediated by the West and Japan. This book brings to light a new area of interest in the “Man Question” within gender studies in which women have typically been the focus. To fully r
'Mind you, it was a pukka, respectable opium-house, and not one of those stifling, sweltering chandoo-khanas that you can find all over the City.'Kipling first became famous for his pungent, harsh and
As the Opium War unfold in Guangdong Province, the painter Su Renshan (1814—c.1850) exploded onto the art scene with a bold, paradigm-turning new voice. A Defiant Brush takes a fresh look at this unde
'An acerbic, compelling and always accessible account of how opium corrupted the world' TLS'The writing is sublime, the research thorough, the eye for story superb' Sunday TelegraphWhen Amitav Ghosh began the research for his monumental cycle of novels the Ibis Trilogy, he was startled to find how the lives of the 19th century sailors and soldiers he wrote of were dictated not only by the currents of the Indian Ocean, but also by the precious commodity carried in enormous quantities on those currents: opium. Most surprising of all, however, was the discovery that his own identity and family history was swept up in the story.Smoke and Ashes is at once a travelogue, memoir and a history, drawing on decades of archival research. In it, Ghosh traces the transformative effect the opium trade had on Britain, India, and China, as well as the world at large.The trade was engineered by the British Empire, which exported Indian opium to sell to China and redress their great trade imbalance, and
When the British occupied the tiny island of Hong Kong during the First Opium War, the Chinese empire was well into its decline, while Great Britain was already in the second decade of its legendary "
Following the ending of the First Opium War and the signing of the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842, Britain opened five treaty ports on the Chinese mainland in the cities now known as Fuzhou, Guangzhou, Ningbo, Shanghai, and Xiamen. Foreigners were allowed for the first time to live and work normally in these cities under the eyes of their state’s consul. In establishing this presence, consular staff and their families faced numerous challenges, including unsuitable accommodation, illness, hostile local authorities, attacks from militias and pirates, while at the same time adjusting to an unfamiliar language and culture.Henrietta Alcock (1812–1853), the first wife of the British Consul, Rutherford Alcock, was little-known until an album of sketches and watercolours depicting her life in China came to light. Acquired by the Martyn Gregory Gallery, London in the early 1990s, the works in the Alcock Album feature picturesque natural landscapes, traditional Chinese architecture, and scenes of co
Napoleon warned 'Let China sleep; when she wakes, she will shake the world'. Lawrence James's magisterial history analyses the relationship between Britain and China between the beginning of the Opium Wars in 1839 and the transfer of power in Hong Kong in 1997. THE LION AND THE DRAGON reveals the part that Britain played in the awakening of China, then covers relations between the two countries during the period when an aroused China did indeed shake the world.Lawrence James also follows the parallel trajectories of four competitive empires - the British, the Chinese, the Russian and the Japanese - during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and then the fortunes of a fifth imperial power, the United States. Successive British governments saw China as a source of wealth which needed to be protected. Local objections were seen off by force (the 'Opium' wars of 1839-42, 1856-7 and 1859-60) whose results proved that the Qing emperors could not protect their country.Indian troops were d
Form Follows Fever is the first in-depth account of the turbulent early years of settlement and growth of colonial Hong Kong across the 1840s. During this period, the island gained a terrible reputation as a diseased and deadly location. Malaria, then perceived as a mysterious vapour or miasma, intermittently carried off settlers by the hundreds. Various attempts to arrest its effects acted as a catalyst, reconfiguring both the city’s physical and political landscape, though not necessarily for the better. Caught in a frenzy to rebuild the city in the devastating aftermath, this book charts the complex interplay between a cast of figures, from military surveyors, naval doctors, Indian sepoys, and corrupt and paranoid officials to opium traders, arsonists, Chinese contractors, and sojourner architects and artists. However, Hong Kong’s ‘construction’ was not just physical but also imagined. Architecture, cartography, epidemiology, and urban infrastructure offer a critical forensic l
Opium and its derivatives morphine and heroin have destroyed, corrupted, and killed individuals, families, communities, and even whole nations. And yet, for most of its long history, opium has also be
Known to the Greeks as opos or opion, as afiun in Persian and Arabic, and fuyung in Chinese, opium is at once a palliative and a poison. Its exotic origins, its literary associations, and the properti
Opium is more than just a drug extracted from poppies. Over the past two centuries it has been a palliative medicine, an addictive substance, a powerful mechanism for concentrating and transferring we
A renowned authority on the secret world of opium recounts his descent into ruinous obsession with one of the world’s oldest and most seductive drugs, in this harrowing memoir of addiction and recover
