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Hosea Ballou Morse (1855-1934) sailed to China in 1874, and for the next thirty-five years he labored loyally in the Imperial Chinese Maritime Customs Service, becoming one of its most able commissioners and acquiring a deep knowledge of China's economy and foreign relations. After his retirement in 1909, Morse devoted himself to scholarship. He pioneered in the Western study of China's foreign relations, weaving from the tangled threads of the Ch'ing dynasty's foreign affairs several seminal interpretive histories, most notably his three-volume magnum opus, The International Relations of the Chinese Empire (1910-18).

At the time of his death, Morse was considered the major historian of modern China in the English-speaking world, and his works played a profound role in shaping the contours of Western scholarship on China.

Begun as a labor of love by his protégé, John King Fairbank, this lively biography based primarily on Morse's vast collection of personal papers sheds light on many crucial events in modern Chinese history, as well as on the multifaceted Western role in late imperial China, and provides new insights into the beginnings of modern China studies in this country. Half-finished when Fairbank died, the project was completed by his colleagues, Martha Henderson Coolidge and Richard J. Smith.

John King Fairbank (1907-1991) was Francis Lee Higginson Professor of History at Harvard University and founder/director of Harvard's East Asian Research Center, now the John King Fairbank Center for East Asian Research.

Martha Henderson Coolidge is associate in research at the Fairbank Center at Harvard University.

Richard J. Smith is professor of history and director of Asian Studies at Rice University.

"A useful survey of the workings of the late nineteenth-century Maritime Customs service."—Bibliographie

"With this biography coming as a labor of love and his last work, the reader can almost feel Fairbank closing the circle by once again entering into a dialogue with his old mentor."—Journal of Asian Studies

"Surprisingly pleasant to read."—Royal Asiatic Society

"The last fresh work we will have of John King Fairbank (1907-1991), and it is a fascinating coda to his remarkable career."—American Historical Review

Publication Date

10-12-1995

Publisher

The University Press of Kentucky

Place of Publication

Lexington, KY

ISBN

9780813160023

eISBN

9780813161808

Keywords

H. B. Morse, Hosea Ballou Morse, Customs administration, China

Disciplines

Asian Studies

H.B. Morse, Customs Commissioner and Historian of China
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