Description: Lisa Hellman offers the first study of European everyday life in Canton and Macao. How foreigners could live, communicate, move around - even whom they could interaction with - were all things strictly regulated by the Chinese authorities. The Europeans sometimes adapted to, and sometimes subverted, these rules. Focusing on this conditional domesticity shows the importance of gender relations, especially the construction of masculinity. Using the Swedish East India Company, a minor European actor in an expanding Asian empire, as a point of entry highlights the multiplicity of actors taking part in local negotiations of power. The European attempts at making a home in China contributes to a global turn in everyday history, but also to an everyday turn in global history.
Brief description: Lisa Hellman, Ph.D, . is an award-winning historian who combines global, social, gender and maritime history with Asian studies to explore Europeans' lives abroad. She has published in five languages on intercultural interactions in Asia during the early modern period.
Review Quotes: "Hellman's book provides an important basis for further research on Canton as the core of a multi-pole, multi-scale, multi-empire urban network established across the ports of the Pearl River Delta. It should be read by anyone interested in the social and urban processes of globalization of the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries".
Regina Campinho, in Connections. A Journal for Historians and Area Specialists, October 2020.
"The book provides many new insights into the daily activities of the European community in Canton and Macao. [...] Maritime historians who are theoretically oriented will likely find much of interest in this study".
Paul A. Van Dyke, in The International Journal of Maritime History, 31(4).