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List of contents
Contents
Table of Illustrations
Introduction
Part I: Joining the China Station
Looking Beyond the Battle-Fleet
The Royal Navy’s Role in Britain’s Interwar Foreign Policy
Britain’s China Conundrum
Part II: Between China and Japan, the China Station’s Strategic Balance
The Right Warships in the Right Places?
China: Friend or Foe?
Surplus to Requirements: The China Station Ashore
The Hong Kong Question
The Cooperation Challenge
Europe’s Retreat and an Emergent ‘Special Relationship’
Part III: Adapting to a New China in a Violent Peace
Britain’s Changing Interests in China
The Royal Navy’s Growing Piracy Challenge
An Exceptional Deployment: the Shanghai Task Force
Britain’s Global Struggle Against Communism
A Changing Role in Protecting British Civilians
Part IV: Technological development and imperial policing
Maintaining Imperial Prestige:
Hermes the Trickster
Understanding China
Responding to Crises
Naval Gunfire at Wanxian and Nanjing
Controlling the Violence
Part V: Changing Attitudes, Ideas, and Approaches
Late-Victorian Gunboat Diplomacy in East Asia
A Failed Attempt at Returning to Pre-War Ways
The Impact of the May Thirtieth Incident
A Double Crisis: Gunboat Diplomacy Living up to its Reputation
The Gunboat Retreat
Sailing to War
Conclusion
The Royal Navy’s Peacetime Frontline
Appendix: Examples of Key Warship Types
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Matthew Heaslip is Lecturer in Naval Historyat the University of Portsmouth, UK.
Summary
Examining Britain’s imperial outposts in 1920s East Asia, this book explores the changes and challenges affecting the Royal Navy’s third largest fleet, the China Station, as its crews fought to hold back the changing tides of fortune.
Bridging the gap between high level naval strategy and everyday imperial culture, Heaslip highlights the importance of the China Station to the British imperial system, foreign policy and East Asian geopolitics, while also revealing the lived experiences of these imperial outposts. Following their immersion into a new world and the challenges they encountered along the way, it considers how its naval officers were perceived by the Chinese populations of the ports they visited, how the two communities interacted and what this meant at a time of ‘peace’.
Against the changing nature of Britain’s informal empire in the 1920s, Gunboats, Empire and the China Station highlights the complex nature of naval operations in-between major conflicts, and calls into question how peaceful this peacetime truly was.
Foreword
A study of the Royal Navy’s everyday work maintaining the British Empire in 1920s East Asia at a time of transformative global geopolitics.
Additional text
Matthew Heaslip’s Gunboats, Empire and the China Station transforms our understanding of the Royal Navy in the 1920s. Rather than a sleepy backwater, the China Station was at the cutting edge of the Royal Navy’s adaptation to the challenges of policing a volatile imperial frontier in a tumultuous decade. Heaslip’s engaging study of command, operations and technological innovation is essential reading for historians of the Royal Navy, the British Empire and the international politics of East Asia in the era of imperial retreat.
