{"product_id":"empire-made-me-an-englishman-adrift-in-shanghai-9780231131322","title":"Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai","description":"\u003cp\u003eRichard Maurice Tinkler was an ordinary man in an extraordinary time and place. This riveting \"biography of a nobody\" offers a rare glimpse of imperialism and the making of modern China seen from the perspective of a working-class Englishman enforcing the order of everyday life on the streets of Shanghai. Culled from Tinklers many personal letters  Empire Made Me meticulously documents his astonishingly revealing life in the service of the British Empire between 1919 and 1939  one of hundreds of young men who joined the Shanghai Municipal Police. Responsible for maintaining order in Shanghais International Settlement  the SMP expanded and enforced British dominion in Chinas most important political  commercial  and cultural center.  Tinkler would have remained just another anonymous and forgotten colonial policeman were it not for his unexpected death  at the hands of Japanese marines and an incompetent local doctor  in June 1939. His suspicious death created a noisy diplomatic incident that was picked up by journalists and splashed across the front pages of Britains newspapers. Many of Tinklers personal letters survived  and they describe his personal life in unusually vivid detail  including his relationships  his knowing masculinity  his travels  and his bitter meditations on his lowly position in a powerful but waning empire.  Robert Bickers absorbing biography uses Tinklers letters as well as extensive archival research to tell the story of this mans everyday life and violent decline in a colonial worlda story that offers an uncommonly candid history of twentieth-century imperialism.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45651848036405,"sku":"ByrdShop_0231131321","price":52.94,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780231131322.jpg?v=1781842181","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/empire-made-me-an-englishman-adrift-in-shanghai-9780231131322","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}