Barbarian Eye: Lord Napier in China, 1834, the Prelude to Hong Kong [Hardcover]

There are many, many histories of China in the 18th and 19th centuries, the China trade, the tea trade, the opium trade and Opium Wars. There are biographies and published journals of all the major figures. There are none quite like Barbarian Eye, in which the author attempts a sort of post-modernist, relativistic reading of the main events and conflicts. This approach is partly because her ostensible purpose in writing the book was to make use of newly available personal papers of Lord Napier himself. The simplest way to use such documents would be to present them as his point of view without immersing ones self in an analysis of them against some "true" account developed through critical historical research. With that approach taken to Napier, it would make sense to take that approach with the different Chinese sides--mandarins, emperor, common people--and that is what P. Napier does. Another review was a little snide over the long introductory chapters about Chinese history, and I was also at first skeptical about the value of going back and back and back to deep prehistory. However, if you read those chapters at face value, without a jaundiced eye, they are actually pretty helpful for understanding what P. Napier is going to go on to argue about trade in the 1830s and the causes of the events of 1834. After all, any particular historical study is really just its author's best argument for his/her take on the events and P. Napier isn't asking you to buy her history of China as THE history of China but rather to accept it as a valid perspective on the evidence which, if you accept it, will lead to a plausible explanation of the events of 1834. Yes, you can read it as a pejorative portrayal of the "exotic east" but how else was she supposed to describe 18th and 19th century China? It's bound to sound exotic. Also, she takes a pretty good whack at European culture and society, too.

P. Napier is not writing in a traditional academic historian mode, with carefully neutral language and a billion citations per page. She uses warm, terrifically textured language and inserts lots of her own personality. She uses few direct citations and that's my only big criticism, instead she gives us lists of references. Her references are good, so I don't doubt her scholarliness, but it's hard to trace her footsteps and that leaves a certain sense of unease.

A previous review raises the question of P. Napier's objectivity dealing with an ancestor. However, lack of objectivity can cut both ways and I don't think that she is very kind to Napier. Yes, she puts him back in his historical time, and some may think that was done to excuse deficiencies in his thinking and actions, especially as she deals with contemporary European attitudes to opium, but P. Napier takes pains to picture the Europeans as being just as benighted in their own ways as the Chinese and no one in the story comes off as brilliantly rising above their cultural and historical context.

I enjoyed this book a lot. Read it with Arthur Whaley's book on the Opium Wars. I think this book is a little old in its style, a little more like anthropology than history, but it is probably all the more valuable for that, regardless of what you think of it as history.

Priscilla Napier was a wonderful author, not only of the Napier family (which she married into, not descended from) but also of primate study (under the name PH Napier). She died early in 1999, and will be missed. Her books, including Barbarian Eye, were a result of her historical research into the conditions and events which take place in them. Her husband was in the Navy, so you can be assured that her use of naval history is accurate, and her descriptions of foreign places are both strange and true. Perhaps she does write with a kind eye towards her main character, but which writer does not?

This book is about Lord Napier's mission to China, its subsequent failure and the unexpected founding of Hong Kong. As he sails off on his own mission, the author interweaves in, between an edited version of Napier's letters and diaries, stories of earlier attempts by the West (mainly British) to make contact with China, and their relevance to an understanding of why Napier's mission was doomed from the start. This takes up about half of the book before Napier even lands in China. An attempt to recreate the exotic and mysterious Far East setting by invoking an impression of cadavers, unwanted babies and the mournful wailing of the dugongs (mammals) amidst the junks, warships and bustling trade activities all floating together in the bay of Hong Kong seems a little surreal. According to the author, the Chinese, bless their inscrutable little hearts, will not lift a hand to assist strangers for fear of being drawn into a perverted world of Confucian logic of somehow contributing to that person's plight in the first instance. Nor was opium such an odious commodity in the 19th Century. And even if it was, Lord Napier was an enlightened and politically-correct gentleman (who wasn't?) but was unable to right things in his time. This is pure hokum and a bit of eye-wash considering that the author is a direct descendant of Napier. There is no doubt that Napier failed in his mission to liberalise trade with China but the author's premise is that history should not pin all the blame for failure on him alone. There was also the King of England, Lord Grey, the rogue traders and of course, the inscrutable Chinese.

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