{"id":3199,"date":"2013-05-18T10:42:53","date_gmt":"2013-05-18T15:42:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.froginawell.net\/china\/?p=3199"},"modified":"2014-08-30T13:32:13","modified_gmt":"2014-08-30T13:32:13","slug":"history-and-hats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/2013\/05\/history-and-hats\/","title":{"rendered":"History and hats"},"content":{"rendered":"

One book that I use in my classes is Bickers’ Empire Made Me<\/a>: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai. The book is the story of William Tinkler, an Englishman who served in the Shanghai Municipal Police. Students sometimes find it hard to warm up to the book because Tinkler is not easy to identify with.1<\/a><\/sup> Bickers is interested in him because he is a good example of the lower parts of Empire and how they were experienced and also, I would guess, because Tinkler manages to go down the tubes at about the same pace as the Empire.\u00a0 I like the book because it is a ripping yarn and Bickers talks a good deal about historical method and how historians go about figuring things out. One thing that struck them last time was the discussion of Tinkler’s headgear. In a chapter called “What We Can’t Know”, where Bickers discusses the ways historians deal with a lack of evidence he\u00a0 mentions that when Tinkler died2<\/a><\/sup> he was the owner of five berets. Bickers suggests that he had a taste for wearing them. This seems really hard to believe. Could you see\u00a0 Tinkler the dashing SMP detective<\/p>\n

\"Tinkler1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Or Tinkler the Empire hobo<\/p>\n

\"Tinkler2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

in a beret?\u00a0There is a really good story here, but Ranke only knows what it is.\u00a0 He was sort of out at elbow after leaving the SMC, maybe he got hold of a shipment of berets and these were the final ones he had not sold? Maybe he was an anti-Obelix<\/a>, going around beating up Frenchmen and taking their hats to keep score? Maybe my understanding of the history of treaty port fashion its too limited for me to make sense of Tinkler’s hats?\u00a0\u00a0 Anyone who has ever done historical research remembers finding facts that were amazing and obviously could be used to make some important point. Bickers describes the process of finding a lot of things like this and slowly finding a context for them. Most authors don’t clue you in to the the bits that they could never find anything to do with, but Bickers does. It’s a nice book for China, but also for historical method.<\/p>\n

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  1. And, of course, the book is soooo boooring ↩<\/a><\/p><\/li>

  2. Stabbed by a Japanese Marine in 1939 ↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><\/ol>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    One book that I use in my classes is Bickers’ Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai. The book is the story of William Tinkler, an Englishman who served in the Shanghai Municipal Police. Students sometimes find it hard to warm up to the book because Tinkler is not easy to identify with.1 Bickers…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[92,100,165,119,129,133],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anecdotes","category-books","category-china","category-english","category-historiography","category-imperialism"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9yoH3-PB","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3199"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4495,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3199\/revisions\/4495"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}