ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book argues that neither imperial metropoles nor their peripheries can be discounted as sites of agency. It seeks to revisit the historic tendency to identify a unidirectional process by which the Europeans sought to impose their “civilisation” on a passive and culturally static China. The book looks at sites of encounter outside the imperial metropoles of Beijing, London, Paris and Berlin, and finds them in locations as diverse as Malaya, Melbourne and the Dutch East Indies. It explores how local contacts between Europeans and the Chinese engendered both good and bad faith efforts to achieve or at least present an understanding of the “other.” The book describes the Chinese diaspora communities which had long existed and continued to expand into parts of the world profoundly shaped by colonialism.
