English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China. By James L. Hevia. [Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003. xviii+387 pp. £18.50. ISBN: 0-8223-3188-8.]

Extract

Cloaking its bullying of China in high morality, Britain in the 19th century and the first part of the 20th aimed to teach China how to become more tractable, and more English. In describing this project, James L. Hevia follows Deleuze and Guattari by identifying capitalist power in China as “a kind of productive apparatus that oscillates between deterritorializing and reterritorializing new zones of contact” (p. 21). In other words, Britain enforced such wide-ranging and radical changes in the meaning and value of Qing authority and power that its actions in China effectively amounted to the “violent placement of China within a colonial world” (p. 281), creating a form of colonization even without formal institutional takeover.