Dr Gao Hao, University of Exeter. 

Title: ‘Creating the Opium War: British Imperial Attitudes towards China, 1792-1840.’ 

16 march 2022 at 4–5.30pm (by zoom, registration required) 

Abstract:

This talk examines British perceptions of and attitudes towards China during their encounters from the Macartney embassy to the outbreak of the Opium War, based on Dr Gao's recently published monograph Creating the Opium War: British Impeiral Attitudes towards China, 1792-1840. The book makes the first attempt to bring together the political history of Sino-Western relations and cultural studies of British representations of china, as a new way of connecting 'top-down' international history with 'bottom-up' global history. it adds a new dimension to explain the origins of the Opium War, which arguably reshaped Sino-Western relations in the modern age. 

Dr Hao Gao is Senior Lecturer in imperial and global history at the University of Exeter. He is a historian of British imperialism in asia, China in global history, particularly the encounters between the British and the Chinese empires in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Dr Gao is the author of Creating the Opium War (MUP, 2020) and various research articles in both English and Chinese journals, including History, Historical Research, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, and Britain and the World. He currently serves as the university's Academic Director for the UK-China Humanities Alliance (ukcha), with Exeter as the lead university on the UK side.   

First published: 16 March 2022

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