Book review: Pacific Crossing, by Elizabeth Sinn
As the old adage maintains, a book should never be judged by its cover. And that is certainly the case with this superb new contribution to our understanding of 19th-century Hong Kong and its role in the broader regional and world history: a pedestrian image of a 19th-century steamship conceals extraordinarily rich information and many years of meticulous scholarship.
by Elizabeth Sinn
HKU Press
As the old adage maintains, a book should never be judged by its cover. And that is certainly the case with this superb new contribution to our understanding of 19th-century Hong Kong and its role in the broader regional and world history: a pedestrian image of a 19th-century steamship conceals extraordinarily rich information and many years of meticulous scholarship.
Elizabeth Sinn, the former deputy director of the now-defunct Centre of Asian Studies at the University of Hong Kong, has researched aspects of Hong Kong's history for decades. Power and Charity, her doctoral thesis on the evolution of the Tung Wah Hospital and its role in the development of early Chinese Hong Kong (which was published in 2003), remains the standard work on the subject.
Her latest work details the themes in the title in astonishing detail. Extensive gold rushes in California and Australia in the late 1840s and early 1850s, Sinn writes, occurred at one of those critical turning-point periods in history, when wide-ranging political changes, combined with rapid economic and technological development, all coalesced into a sudden forward movement that took place on several fronts at once.