Collaborative Colonial Governance: Cases of Sir James Stewart Lockhart and Sir Reginald Johnston

• In Event: Port-City Contacts and Diplomacy in Asia’s Modern Transformation

Abstract

In former British colonial port cities like Hong Kong and Singapore, debates over British contribution to the cities’ success have still been on agenda. This debate is somehow related to the conventional image of British imperialism—which has been regarded as to great extent exploitative and assertive. This leads to an easy and conventional dichotomy of colonialism and nationalism.
While colonial officials enjoyed a considerable level of autonomy under the policy “the man at the spot should be left with last words”, the so-called “nineteenth-century Western imperialist power model,” in British Empire’s case, could not be simply understood from London’s perspective in top-down manner.
Given that the crux of port cities, as Francois Gipouloux argues, is not on their geographical locations, or quality of their infrastructures, but the specific nature of networks, it is worth giving spotlight on how colonial officers at the spot interacted with local elites, and thus how the networks were established and mobilized, throughout the colonial port cities’ governance for our better understanding of features and nature of the “colonial presence.”
With these premises, the cases of Sir James Stewart Lockhart and Sir Reginald Johnston, who both served in British port cities as Hong Kong and Weihaiwei, made good friends with local Chinese and left remarkable imprints during their service through nurturing and utilizing local networks between late nineteenth and early twentieth century, are good points of observation.

Author

• Kin Ming Osmond Kwong, Chinese University of Hong Kong