Richard Maurice Tinkler was an ordinary man in an extraordinary time and place. This riveting "biography of a nobody" offers a rare glimpse of imperialism and the making of modern China seen from the perspective of a working-class Englishman enforcing the order of everyday life on the streets of Shanghai. Culled from Tinkler's many personal letters, Empire Made Me meticulously documents his astonishingly revealing life in the service of the British Empire between 1919 and 1939, one of hundreds of young men who joined the Shanghai Municipal Police. Responsible for maintaining order in Shanghai's International Settlement, the SMP expanded and enforced British dominion in China's most important political, commercial, and cultural center.
Tinkler would have remained just another anonymous and forgotten colonial policeman were it not for his unexpected death, at the hands of Japanese marines and an incompetent local doctor, in June 1939. His suspicious death created a noisy diplomatic incident that was picked up by journalists and splashed across the front pages of Britain's newspapers. Many of Tinkler's personal letters survived, and they describe his personal life in unusually vivid detail, including his relationships, his knowing masculinity, his travels, and his bitter meditations on his lowly position in a powerful but waning empire.
Robert Bickers absorbing biography uses Tinkler's letters as well as extensive archival research to tell the story of this man's everyday life and violent decline in a colonial world-a story that offers an uncommonly candid history of twentieth-century imperialism.
Industry Reviews
Informative... energetically written. Making his way warily between the anti-imperialists and the nostalgists of empire, placing a 'marginal' man in his full context, Bickers does lift a corner of the curtain on a nearly lost world, a world as ordinary then as it may seem extraordinary to us. -- John Sperling The Guardian fascinating piece of historical detective work...it is probably the best Old Shanghai book I have read...superb -- Anton Graham China Economic Review Empire Made Me is a fascinating and intimate portrait of Shanghai at its apex. Asian Review of Books A work of dedicated and original scholarship... What emerges is the portrait of a singular and heroic man. -- John Carey Sunday Times, London Bickers' detailed recovery of an obscure and 'unimportant' policeman's life gives a valuable street-level view of a complex scene. -- Robin Blake Financial Times, London One of the most intriguing true-life books of the year. -- David Wilson South China Morning Post A superb account. -- Giles Foden Conde Nast Traveler (UK) Bickers guides us deftly through a wealth of local archives...and personal interviews to fashion a richly layered social history of Shanghai's foreign police. -- Carolyn Wakeman China Review International Bickers brings this world of Britain overseas alive in this fascinating study. This book is both a 'good read' and a solid history. -- Parks M. Coble, University of Nebraska International History Review Bickers had done a wonderful job of showing the human face of empire, and bravely, through a distinctively unattractive personality. -- Philippa Levine American Historical Review A breathtaking transportation to an utterly fascinating time, place, and individual history. -- Karen Fang Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History Robert Bickers has written a book providing a new perspective on empire. -- Marcia R. Ristaino Journal of World History
