Paul A. Van Dyke’s new book, Whampoa and the Canton Trade: Life and Death in a Chinese Port, 1700–1842, authoritatively corrects misconceptions about how the Qing government treated foreigners when it controlled all trade in the Guangzhou port. Van Dyke reappraises the role of Whampoa in the system—a port twenty kilometres away from Guangzhou—and reassesses the government’s attitude towards foreigners, which was much more accommodating than previous research suggested. In fact, Van Dyke shows that foreigners were not bound by local laws and were given freedom of movement around Whampoa and Canton to the extent that they were treated with leniency even when found in off-limit places.

Whampoa and the Canton Trade recounts the lives of seamen who travelled half-way around the globe at great risk and lived through a historic period that would become the framework for subsequent encounters between China and the rest of the world. Were it not for the exchanges between the major powers and the Qing empire, the world—as we know it—would be a rather different place. Hence, Van Dyke’s command of data mining shows that Whampoa was a key pillar in the Canton System and, thus, in the making of the modern world economy.

作者簡介：

Paul A. Van Dyke is professor of history at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China, and author of Merchants of Canton and Macao: Success and Failure in Eighteenth-Century Chinese Trade (Hong Kong University Press, 2015).

退換貨說明：

會員均享有10天的商品猶豫期（含例假日）。若您欲辦理退換貨，請於取得該商品10日內寄回。

辦理退換貨時，請保持商品全新狀態與完整包裝（商品本身、贈品、贈票、附件、內外包裝、保證書、隨貨文件等）一併寄回。若退回商品無法回復原狀者，可能影響退換貨權利之行使或須負擔部分費用。