Position:

Departmental Lecturer in Modern Chinese Politics and Society

Faculty / College Address:

Institute for Chinese Studies

Email:

isabella.jackson@chinese.ox.ac.uk

Research Interests:

I research the modern history of China and the global and regional networks that shaped the treaty ports, which were opened to foreign traders by force, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I have focused in particular on the International Settlement at the heart of Shanghai, looking at the nature of semi-colonialism as it functioned on the ground in the form of the Shanghai Municipal Council; the interconnections between China and the British World, especially India, through my work on the Sikh policemen who worked in the Settlement; the evolving Chinese perspectives on and representations of the foreign presence in Shanghai, demonstrating the ways in which political authorities appropriate the past to serve conflicting aims; and social reform in late Qing and early Republican China.

Current Projects:

• Managing Shanghai: The International Settlement administration and the development of the city, 1900-1943
• Child Slavery in the Twentieth Century: Mui Tsai and the significance of a humanitarian controversy in and beyond China

Courses Taught:

MPhil Modern Chinese Studies:

• The Study of Modern China
• Research Methods of Area Studies
• History and Historiography of Modern China

BA Chinese Studies:

• Society and Politics of Modern China

Recent Publications:

• ‘The Raj on Nanjing Road: Sikh Policemen in Treaty-Port Shanghai’, Modern Asian Studies (forthcoming 2012).
  http://journals.cambridge.org/repo_A859fVVo