Death and Emotions in Anglo-China: Negotiating Grief Across Cultures in the Nineteenth Century

This book uncovers the history of emotions surrounding death in colonial and semi-colonial Anglo-China during the 19th century. Engaging with both English and Chinese sources, including obituaries, memoirs, personal correspondence, missionary publications, mourning poetry and travel accounts, Death and Emotions in Anglo-China explores how this common human experience was understood, expressed, and felt across different cultures, where it became not merely a personal matter but a hotly contested issue.

Illustrating how emotions of death solidified communities, buttressed regimes and galvanised political movements, the book pays attention to the dilemma between personal grief and communal commemoration, arguing that the chaotic process of grieving was often pushed aside by collective narratives, which stressed the emotional norm of solemnity. Such collective emotions provided the Western powers, namely the British, a sentimental rhetoric of sacrifice for their imperial cause, and for the Chinese, a powerful impetus to rising Chinese nationalism by the turn of the century.

Focusing on a culturally dynamic context previously overlooked in the field of emotional history, this book contributes to the global dimension of growing interests in historicizing the universal human conditions of emotions and death.