The story of globalization in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as experienced by ordinary people in the Chinese river town of Zhenjiang. Fear swept Zhenjiang as British soldiers gathered outside the city walls in the summer of 1842. Already suspicious of foreigners, locals had also heard of the suffering the British inflicted two months earlier, in Zhapu. A wave of suicides and mercy killings ensued: rather than leave their families to the invaders, hundreds of women killed themselves and their children or died at the hands of male family members. British observers decried an “Asian culture” of ritual suicide. In reality, the event was sui generis—a tragic result of colliding local and global forces in nineteenth-century China. Xin Zhang’s groundbreaking history examines the intense negotiations between local societies and global changes that created modern China. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, world-historic political, economic, and technological developments transformed the textures of everyday life in places like Zhenjiang, a midsize river town in China’s prosperous Lower Yangzi region. Drawing on rare primary sources, including handwritten diaries and other personal writings, Zhang offers a ground-level view of globalization in the city. We see civilians coping with the traumatic international encounters of the Opium War; Zhenjiang brokers bankrolling Shanghai’s ascendance as a cosmopolitan commercial hub; and merchants shipping goods to market, for the first time, on steamships. Far from passive recipients, the Chinese leveraged, resisted, and made change for themselves. Indeed, The Global in the Local argues that globalization is inevitably refracted through local particularities.

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A Christian Science Monitor Best Fiction Book of the Year A Guardian Best Book of the Year A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year The stunningly vibrant final novel in the bestselling Ibis Trilogy from Amitav Ghosh, Flood of Fire. It is 1839 and China has embargoed the trade of opium, yet too much is at stake in the lucrative business and the British Foreign Secretary has ordered the colonial government in India to assemble an expeditionary force for an attack to reinstate the trade. Among those consigned is Kesri Singh, a soldier in the army of the East India Company. He makes his way eastward on the Hind, a transport ship that will carry him from Bengal to Hong Kong. Along the way, many characters from the Ibis Trilogy come aboard, including Zachary Reid, a young American speculator in opium futures, and Shireen, the widow of an opium merchant whose mysterious death in China has compelled her to seek out his lost son. The Hind docks in Hong Kong just as war breaks out and opium is “pouring into the market like monsoon flood.” From Bombay to Calcutta, from naval engagements to the decks of a hospital ship, among embezzlement, profiteering, and espionage, Amitav Ghosh’s Flood of Fire charts a breathless course through the culminating moment of the British opium trade and vexed colonial history.

Ancient China collides with newfangled America in this epic tale of opium smugglers, sea pirates, and dueling clipper ships. Brilliantly illuminating one of the least-understood areas of American history, best-selling author Eric Jay Dolin now traces our fraught relationship with China back to its roots: the unforgiving nineteenth-century seas that separated a brash, rising naval power from a battered ancient empire. It is a prescient fable for our time, one that surprisingly continues to shed light on our modern relationship with China. Indeed, the furious trade in furs, opium, and bêche-de-mer—a rare sea cucumber delicacy—might have catalyzed America’s emerging economy, but it also sparked an ecological and human rights catastrophe of such epic proportions that the reverberations can still be felt today. Peopled with fascinating characters—from the “Financier of the Revolution” Robert Morris to the Chinese emperor Qianlong, who considered foreigners inferior beings—this page-turning saga of pirates and politicians, coolies and concubines becomes a must-read for any fan of Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower or Mark Kurlansky’s Cod.

Early encounters between Britain and China are best known for igniting the First Opium War. Yet they also produced an enormous archive of writings by Britons who spent time in China. Frustrated with the restrictions imposed by the Manchu rulers of the Qing Empire, and unable to live or travel elsewhere apart from Canton and Macao, these diplomats, traders, missionaries, travelers, and military officers devoted thousands of pages to understanding China, its people, and their civilization. In China Hands and Old Cantons, John M. Carroll draws on this wealth of memoirs, ethnographic studies, travel accounts, narratives of military action, translations, and newspaper articles to trace Britons’ wide-ranging, often thoughtful perspectives on China, long before anyone considered going to war. They discussed almost everything they saw and speculated about much of what they could not see—including the size of China’s massive population, the extent of infanticide, the origins and practice of foot binding, and the legality and morality of the opium trade. They claimed that only those who had been there could truly understand the Middle Kingdom and that their firsthand experience gave them and their publications an advantage over those in Britain and elsewhere. Carroll brings a seminal period in the Anglo-Chinese relationship, which revolved around tea and opium, to life through the words of those who experienced it intimately.