HIST7008 Chap.1 Colonial and Marxist Histories of Hong Kong
Colonial and Marxist Histories of Hong Kong
Why begin a methods course with old books
The first readings on Hong Kong history are not chosen because they are right. Eitel published in 1895, while Ding You and Endacott both published in 1958, and each wrote with a clear view of what the colony meant. Reading them together shows that a history is shaped by its author's position, audience and archive long before any single fact is checked.
The skill being trained is the one the Methods Essay rewards: moving from what a book says to why it says it that way, and what that means for anyone citing it today.
It also shows that the questions historians ask change with their century: what counted as a complete history of the colony in the 1890s looked partial by the 1950s, and looks partial again now.
Eitel and the Whig habit of mind
Eitel, a German-trained missionary who later worked in the colonial education service, framed the colony as the meeting point of Europe and Asia and treated British rule as the engine of that union.
His preface speaks to two audiences at once: readers in England who thought the colony a curiosity, and European residents who wanted a reference work. Whig history, the tradition he belongs to, tells the past as a march toward liberal institutions.
Its authority weakened after the First World War, the peace settlement of 1919 and the Depression, and Herbert Butterfield later warned historians against reading the past through present values or writing for one side.
Ding You and the Marxist counter-story
Historical materialism explains change through economic life and class conflict.
Ding You's book on early Hong Kong, published in Beijing, applies that frame directly. It opens by insisting on the Chinese character of the island before 1841, using a Qing county gazetteer, archaeological finds and Song-dynasty sites, and it rejects the colonial image of an empty rock. British expansion appears as a planned venture of the bourgeoisie, and Chinese workers' strikes as a continuous line of resistance.
The book closes by calling recovery of the whole territory a just demand of the Chinese people.
Endacott and the view from the dispatches
Endacott's general history rests on Colonial Office files, council minutes, gazettes and ordinances, supplemented by newspapers and Chinese material in translation.
He is candid that this produces a governors' story, and he defends it on the ground that officials corrected one another. He also names three problems he could not fully solve: whether a real community existed on the island, how to weigh economic forces when trade figures were scarce, and how to write about recent events without enough distance.
The 1973 revision rewrote the post-war chapter to account for industrialisation, on the principle that a historian should explain how the present grew out of the past.
Turning comparison into critique
E. H. Carr's argument that historians are people of their own time supplies a portable checklist: purpose, evidence, interpretation, assumptions and present value.
Applied to these three books, it stops a critique from sliding into a verdict of bias and turns it into a claim about method. A strong paragraph places the book in its moment, names its archive, identifies its lens and ends by stating what the work can still be used for. Doing this for three readings, and then asking what the scholarship looked like when each appeared, is the broader reflection the essay asks for.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Eitel's preface and the imperial mission
- 02
Whig history and its decline after the First World War
- 03
Butterfield's warnings against present-minded history
- 04
Historical materialism and class struggle as a lens
- 05
Ding You's case for a Chinese Hong Kong before 1841
- 06
Endacott's Colonial Office archive and its admitted limits
- 07
Where each history chooses to begin
- 08
Carr's five questions as an essay method
Worked example · free
Critiquing an older history in one paragraph
- 2Place the book in its moment and state its declared purpose as an introduction built on government records.
- 2Name the archive and quote Endacott's own admission about whose eyes the story is seen through.
- 2Identify the underlying premise about where the history begins and set it against Ding You's opposite claim.
- 2Close with a verdict on present usefulness and what the book should be paired with.
Key terms
- Historiography
- The study of how history has been written: who wrote it, from what sources, for which readers and under which assumptions, treated as evidence in its own right.
- Whig Interpretation
- A way of narrating the past as steady progress toward liberal institutions such as free trade, representation and constitutional government, so that the past is used to justify the present.
- Historical Materialism
- The Marxist method that explains historical change through economic life and class relations, with societies passing through slave, feudal, capitalist and communist stages.
- Metanarrative
- An overarching story into which individual events are fitted, such as imperialist aggression answered by popular resistance, which decides in advance what each event means.
- Colonial Office Records
- The official correspondence between governors and London, with reports, statistics, council minutes and ordinances, forming the archive on which governor-centred histories rest.
- Underlying Assumption
- A premise an author does not argue for but relies on, such as where a history begins or whether officials correct one another, and which shapes the interpretation that follows.
Colonial and Marxist Histories of Hong Kong FAQ
Is Eitel's Europe in China still worth citing?
Yes, provided you cite it for the right thing. As an account of events before 1882 it reflects a missionary and colonial official convinced that British rule fulfilled a providential mission, so its judgements about Chinese residents need independent support.
As a primary document of how a well-placed colonial insider imagined empire, education and race in the 1890s, it is rich, because the preface states its assumptions openly.
What makes a history Marxist rather than just critical of colonialism?
The difference is structural rather than moral. A Marxist history treats economic relations and class conflict as the causes that organise events, so capitalists, workers and imperial expansion become the main actors. Ding You's account qualifies because he explains British occupation as a scheme of the British bourgeoisie and reads workers' strikes as stages in one struggle, citing Marx and Mao.
A study can condemn colonial rule without adopting that causal model.
How should I compare older and newer histories in a methods essay?
Compare them as answers to different questions shaped by different archives, not as a ranking of wrong and right. Note what sources each author could reach, what the scholarship looked like when each was published, and which people each story centres. Then show what the newer work adds and what the older one still records that the newer one relies on, such as dates and policy chronology.
Assessment move
Take one older history on your list and write five lines, one per Carr question: why it was written, on what evidence, through which lens, resting on what premise, and useful now for what. Under each line copy the page reference that supports it. Then fold the five lines into a single paragraph of about one hundred and forty words and check that it ends on a use, not a verdict.
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