International Politics and Everyday
Life: British Records of Shanghai’s
International Settlement, 1843-1950s
Robert Bickers

Department of History
University of Bristol, United Kingdom
Plan of Shanghai 1919, compiled from surveys made by the Municipal Council (MR 1/758).

On 19 November 1843 a motley group disembarked
from a British steamer moored in the Huangpu riverby the walled city of Shanghai. Two days earlier thenewly appointed British consul, George Balfour, aRoyal Artillery officer who had served in the China
campaign, had formally opened the port for British
trade and residence. Thus ended an era in which
European and American trade had been restricted by
the Qing to the southern port of Guangzhou, and withinthat to a small enclave of “factories,” in which they
were only permitted to reside in the trading season,
and without any family. The arrival of the passengers
on a second steamer a few days later ushered in a newera, and across the century that followed the initiallymodest “English ground” at Shanghai became theheart of the bustling, cosmopolitan city that marked
the front line of Chinese modernity.
Balfour’s efforts to locate accommodation for his
new official establishment inside the walled city werethwarted. The British were not wanted. They had, afterall, occupied the city in the spring of 1842 as theirforces had prepared for the final stage of the China
campaign, known to history as the Opium War. Instead,Balfour, aiming to combine “utility with ornament,”
had laid out a small grid of seven streets at rightangles to the river, and fashioned a riverside road andone west and parallel to it on which, in agreementwith the local Qing official, the Daotai, “the mass ofthe Chinese people are to move,” so keeping them off
the river road, and so “effectually guarding againstcrowds.”1 This tract reaching 1,200 yards northeast
along the Huangpu river banks from the walled city
was then bought up by British merchants as they
began to arrive and establish themselves, and the lots
were registered with the British Consulate.
Although segregation and exclusion were enmeshedwithin the fabric of the new settlement from the start,
profit and pragmatism overrode it. In particular, during
the Taiping Civil War of 1850–64, especially after thewalled city fell to rebels in 1853, the British settlement
became a safe haven for refugees. Providing a refugein troubled times, and then in peaceful ones, provided
huge and steady returns. Although a substantial
community of Britons came to live in the settlement,
which had increased in size several times by the end of

the nineteenth century, they were far outnumbered by
its Chinese inhabitants. In 1864, the British settlement,
administered since 1854 by a self-styled Municipal
Council, was joined with an under-developed American
concession north of the Wusong river (known toforeign residents as the Soochow Creek) to form an“International Settlement.” The French remained insplendid isolation in their concession to the southof the new combined settlement. The municipal
councilors, British and American businessmenin the main, oversaw a small administration that
undertook public works, a health department, and apolice force. It acquired all the trappings of an English
local government administration (which servedas its model), and grew substantially in size andimmeasurably in sophistication across the next nine
decades until it was merged with the Greater Shanghai
City government in 1943.

Plan of Shanghai 1919, compiled from surveys made by the Municipal Council (MR1/758)

For modern historians, the internationalized city,which became a major centre of Chinese culturalproduction and education, finance and commerce,is possibly China’s best documented. Archives inShanghai, and across the world, hold a vast corpus ofdocuments in all media. This substantial collectionof British official material from its agencies in thecity exemplifies the richness of what can be found.
There is, of course, much in these files about politics.
Controversies over its very existence, its residents,
its borders, and its jurisdiction fill the consulate files.
These grew in intensity with the onset of the twentiethcentury. The 1905 Anti-American Boycott and theMixed Court Dispute and riot in December that year

1 Robert Bickers, The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire, 1832-1914 (2011), pp. 93-96.

heralded a new era of mass nationalist activism. They
also showcased two of that movement’s different
faces – the organized and effective boycott of foreign
goods and interests, and spontaneous violent protest
against the actions by the International Settlement
authorities.2 In this new era, attempts by the Shanghai
Municipal Council to “extend” its jurisdiction - as
it coyly termed acquiring territory from its Chinese
neighbour – through working with diplomats, proved
impossible, and while it was tempted simply to occupy
the areas it wanted, this proved no longer feasible.3
It was left with a network of council-built roads in
Chinese administered territory, which it policed, andproperties adjoining those roads, which it taxed. This

was a potent recipe for incessant jurisdictional conflictwith the Chinese authorities.
The Nationalist Revolution in 1926-27 brought theGuomindang to power, and the party fashioned aregime that aimed to overthrow the treaties that
had degraded China’s sovereignty, and to secure
the retrocession of all the foreign concessions andsettlements. The Japanese assault on Shanghai in
1932, and the all-out war that surrounded the cityin 1937 inaugurated a state of crisis and of stasis.
The National Government’s drive to secure theretrocession of the International Settlement was put inabeyance as it aimed to avoid alienating the British andAmericans in the hope of engaging them to support
it in its struggle with the invader. But if Chinesecontestation of the settlement’s jurisdiction wasfrozen, the Japanese and their collaborators took up
the baton. And the business of managing a settlement
into which hundreds of thousands of refugees had
sought shelter with the financial, administrative, andsecurity challenges involved, was challenging.
But this archive is not simply a record of crisis andinternational politics. People and property generated
paper in the consulate general’s compound at thenorthern end of Shanghai’s riverfront Bund. Rulesand regulations, registers, disputes, crimes, and theother stuff of life and business in any community, wereamplified in this internationalized setting. Commercial
disputes easily became diplomatic ones. Issues ofnationality, colonialism, and imperialism threaded
through so many strands of correspondence, forBritish and other subjects of foreign powers that had
signed treaties with China enjoyed extraterritorialstatus. They lived and worked in China under thejurisdiction of their own consular authorities, enjoying
the right to be tried in their own national courts on
Chinese soil, and, if necessary, jailed or even executedby those authorities. Records of Shanghai and theInternational Settlement, 1836–1955 contains a richtrove of such materials, as well as British consularcorrespondence from Shanghai.

Dispatch from Sir E. Satow to Sir Edward Grey on the former’s correspondencewith Prince Ch’ing discussing the removal of Mr Twyman and punishment of theMunicipal Police in connection with the Mixed Court riot (FO 371/178/25)

At the heart of the British legal system in China, at
its most developed, was the “British Supreme Courtfor China and Japan.” British judges, fully wigged,

2 See for example the extensive range of files labelled “Shanghai Riots”: FO 371/178, folios 1-74; FO 371/ 383/385.
3 “Occupation of Chapei and extension of Shanghai settlement” (1913), FO 371/1628.

sat in a courtroom in the consular compound in
Shanghai. They heard civil, commercial, and criminalcases, and with consuls, oversaw the business of
Britons as they were born, married, divorced or died.
The officials in Shanghai advised consuls across thenetwork of British establishments in China and ruledon questions of nationality and jurisdiction. Shanghai’sInternational Settlement stood apart in many ways
from those other concessions and settlements, byvirtue of its size and complexities, but it was tightlyintertwined with them. It was in all but name a capital
city for the foreign presence in China, and the shipping
routes along which goods, people, and ideas flowed –and later the railway lines – were all connected into it.
The world of Harry Arnhold (1879-1950) provides one
entry point into this archive. Born in Hong Kong in 1879
(and therefore, under English law, a British subject),
his nationality was formalized when his father, PhilipArnhold, was naturalized in London in 1882. Harry
Arnhold’s father and uncle were the senior partners in
the German commission agency, Arnhold, Karberg andCo, routinely known as Arnholds. Established in 1866
in Hong Kong, by the 1890s the firm had branches in
Canton, Shanghai, and Tianjin. They were pillars ofShanghai’s German community, but the German andBritish worlds in Shanghai were intertwined. The storyof Arnholds, already a story of a German company
that took advantage of Britain’s wars in China and its
colonial bridgehead in Hong Kong and its concessions
and settlements in other Chinese cities, was mademore complicated by naturalization and then in 1914
by the onset of the First World War. Harry and hisbrother, by then the leading partners in the firm, andboth British subjects, had to navigate regulations
that underpinned Britain’s economic warfare against
German interests. Extensive records documenting thebusiness and personal trajectories of Harry Arnhold,can, like those of many thousands of other Shanghai
Britons, be traced through these digitized files.
Arnhold, having survived the war, his company now
legally British, became a leading figure in the British
establishment in Shanghai.4 He was a long-serving
councilor, and chairman of the Shanghai Municipal
Council (SMC); equally powerfully, in a sense, hewas sometime chairman of the Shanghai Race Club,

whose course dominated the heart of the International
Settlement. In 1923 the company had been taken overby E. D. Sassoon & Co., and it would become the mainvehicle through which Sir Victor Sassoon would invest
heavily in Shanghai real estate and enterprises in the1930s, relocating his firm’s base of operations fromBombay.5 This British world was at the same time, an
Anglo-German, and Anglo-Indian one.

Extract from an anonymous letter on relations between British and German
firms at Shanghai, where Arnhold, Karberg and Co was suspected of engaging in“mysterious” businesses (FO 371/ 2334/ F 97428/10/15/8-9)

This digital archive brings out material from the Crown
Advocate files that can throw new light on business,
as well as biography. An example comes from a slim
file on the liquidation of the China interests of theSingapore businessman, Tan Kah Kee (1874-1961).
Tan had been born in Fujian, migrated to Singapore towork at his father’s firm there, and then built his own
very successful company, and made a fortune during
the rubber boom of the early twentieth century. As afirm based in Singapore, it had the right to operate
in China under British protection, so when, in 1933, it
got into difficulty because of the great depression, its
liquidator in China applied to the British authorities

4 See Sara Shipway, “The Limits of Informal Empire: Britain’s economic war in Shanghai 1914-1919,” (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Bristol,2019), pp. 88-90.
5 Joseph Sassoon, The Global Merchants: The Enterprise and Extravagance of the Sassoon Dynasty (London: Allen Lane, 2022).

for support when facing difficulties with shutting
down its branch in the central China city of Nanchang.
In fact, the company had never registered any of its
branches with British officials, and they would havebeen perfectly within their rights to refuse to provide
support. Such questions of nationality, recognition,and non-recognition, and the position of British
Chinese subjects and their interests thread throughthe business of British officials in China. The casewas made more complex yet as the lead creditor wasthe Hongkong & Shanghai Bank, the liquidator wasa British businessman in Shanghai, and the agent
sent to Nanchang to close the firm was a former
International Settlement policeman, Briton Maurice
Tinkler. Tinkler’s behavior provoked controversy withthe local police and a frantic exchange of letters andtelegrams. As a British subject, Tinkler was quite
clearly subject to British protection, which complicatedthe situation. Having been detained by the authorities,
he was eventually forcibly removed from the city on aBritish gunboat.6Tinkler surfaces as a policeman giving evidence incourt, and as the subject of the inquest conductedin June 1939 after he died of wounds inflicted byJapanese marines during an industrial disputeengineered as part of the Japanese challenge tothe British position in Shanghai. The incident wasexceptional, although any fracas had the potential to
become an international dispute, as this one did. The
files record this facet of the settlement’s history, butalso the more everyday lives, and deaths, of British
subjects.7 This was not a community of rich expatriate

Extract from an inquest on the suicide of a Briton named Ernest Murray Bishop(FO 1092/281/16)

Dispatch from British Consulate-General in Shanghai to the British Legation in
Peking on the case of the liquidation of the Tan Kah Kee Ltd. (FO 656/268/326)

Britons, but a diverse and fluid set of communities of
those living under the British flag in China who camefrom the British Isles, India, the Straits Settlements,
the settler colonies, and also from Shanghai itself. It
had its wealthy and powerful elite, Sir Victor Sassoon
and the Arnholds – and it had its servants of empire,

6 FO 656/268, Crown Advocate’s papers. General correspondence. Note: Vol. No. 1947, “Re: Tan Kah Kee, Ltd in Liquidation”; Robert Bickers, Empire
Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai (London: Allen Lane, 2003), pp. 225-32.
7 For example: inquests: FO 1092/270-298; intestate estates: FO 1092/260-269; probate administration: files FO 1092/299-313; individual probates are
not included here, but can be found in series FO 917. The online platform China Families www.chinafamilies.net indexes much of this material. Consularbirth, marriage, and death registers can be found in the online genealogical platform, Ancestry.com.

such as Tinkler, and it provided a home or staging post for thousands more as well.8The Pacific War heralded the end of this multinational colonial enterprise. The International Settlement and theFrench Concession were absorbed into the collaborationist municipality; although their agencies and institutions
were so much stronger, it could in reality be seen as a reverse takeover. British and other allied nationals whostaffed the administration lost their posts. With the end of the conflict, and as the British and Americans had
signed new treaties in February 1943 that saw the end of extraterritoriality and the return of all remainingconcessions to the National Government, a new chapter opened. There was a great deal to disentangle, andultimately a great many claims for pensions, salaries, compensation and property had to lapse. But as the British
presence in Shanghai was wound up in the years after Communist Party forces seized the city in May 1949,
such records provide a detailed snapshot of the composition of that presence, almost frozen in time as it lost its
foothold in Shanghai.

8 For a survey see Robert Bickers, “Shanghailanders and Others: British Communities in China, 1843–1957,” in Robert Bickers (ed), Settlers andExpatriates: Britons over the Seas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 269-301.