ABSTRACT
In the early 1980s, British and Chinese diplomats began secret negotiations that would lead to the signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration in 1984. This agreement set the route by which the two governments and the people of Hong Kong would travel in the thirteen-year journey to 1997. The backdrop to these negotiations, as well as this unprecedented change of sovereignty, has been Hong Kong’s status as one of the world’s premier cities in the global economy. Any understanding of Hong Kong today has to begin with the capitalist transformation that has made it the global city that it has now become. Most writers treat Hong Kong’s rise to prominence as a post-World War Two phenomenon, and explain its success as a triumph of free market capitalism. In this chapter, however, I want to argue that Hong Kong’s role in the global economy needs to be situated in history and understood as integral to Asia’s capitalist trajectories, which developed in the nineteenth century.
