ABSTRACT
Hong Kong is unique in its deconstruction of many of the narratives of colonialism and postcolonialism. Unlike other former colonies, this region prepared relatively peacefully over a twenty-year period for its Handover. It was the last colony of the British empire given up in the twentieth century. Readings of the postcolonial range from official political narratives of Hong Kong that sometimes do not even accept that Hong Kong was ever a colony and local scholarship that argues that the postcolonial has never been able to speak convincingly for the case of Hong Kong. Hong Kong is a territory that on a number of levels helpfully uncovers oversights in postcolonial thinking. This chapter examines how the very real threat of Chinese recolonization ushered in a postcolonial nostalgia in Hong Kong whereby informal imperialist practices in administration and education have lived on long after British colonialism as Chinese recolonization settled in. However, it is by looking at the economic and institutional history of the region that the important nature of colonial history becomes clear. Recent research reveals how Hong Kong served as a testing ground for economic practices that would lead to the multinational capitalism of the late twentieth century and, in turn, its academic capitalism. The chapter concludes by looking at the economic origins of the University of Hong Kong, which British colonial authorities regarded as an “imperial asset.”
