Peter E. Hamilton is the 2016-2018 Dorothy Borg Postdoctoral Scholar in the Making of the Modern Pacific World at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. He received his doctorate in History from the University of Texas at Austin in 2015. Dr. Hamilton is a historian of China and the World and the modern Pacific. His research explores transpacific networks of migration and business, Sino-US relations, and new histories of East Asian capitalism. He is currently preparing a book manuscript, “The Networked Colony: Hong Kong, American Social Capital, and China’s Globalization.” Based on his dissertation’s extensive archival research from across Hong Kong, Britain, and the United States, this work argues that Hong Kong’s rapid economic development between 1949 and 1978 provides essential context to understand China’s post-1978 export-driven development and today’s Sino-US trading relationship. In particular, Dr. Hamilton argues that Hong Kong transformed during the first decades of the Cold War, not as a “tiger” economy or as a British colony, but because its elite Chinese capitalists developed instrumental commercial and educational relationships with the United States. When mainland China initiated reforms in the late 1970s, Hong Kong’s transpacific networks midwifed its reintegration into global capitalism as a major US trading partner.
Read below for a Q&A about Dr. Hamilton’s research and teaching interests:
1. How did your interest in contemporary Chinese history—and specifically the history of Hong Kong—develop?
Chinese history and culture have excited me ever since I was little—I think the interest developed through the Chinese art I saw at my grandparents’ house. I even tried to teach myself characters, which didn’t go well! In college, I was finally able to pursue these interests. I was lucky to attend Yale as its commitment to Sino-U.S. relations and Chinese studies runs very deep. I took Chinese and Japanese history classes and studied Mandarin, including summers in Beijing and Shanghai. After graduation, I immersed myself further by spending two years teaching at The Chinese University of Hong Kong with the Yale-China Association. Hong Kong was a turning point. I really enjoyed the teaching and studying both Cantonese and Mandarin, but I fell in love with Hong Kong itself. Its pace made everywhere else in the world seem sleepy and I’ve never tired of exploring its cavernous neighborhoods, sampling its diverse cuisines, or learning about its tumultuous past. Today’s Hong Kong is a place that seems so new—so fast-paced and commercial—that it’s easy to forget the territory’s seismic transformations and enormous impact on the world. While still teaching at CUHK, I began interning for two historians, Christopher Munn and May Holdsworth, who were completing an enormous project on the major figures from across Hong Kong history, published in 2013 as The Dictionary of Hong Kong Biography. My research on that project convinced me that the history of Hong Kong was not just the history of a minor British colony but instead the history of a key node in globalization that interweaves modern China with Southeast Asia, the British Empire, and the wider Pacific.
2. As a historian of China, which has such a rich and extensive history, was it challenging to narrow your scope of research to a particular era or facet of Chinese history?
Like many scholars, the path to narrow my interests and my research has been long, but ultimately very rewarding! I consider myself not only a historian of China and the World, but also a historian of both capitalism and the Pacific World. I took a lot of different histories as an undergraduate at Yale—in addition to Chinese and Japanese history, I took US international history, British imperial history, even Iranian history. It gave me a broad perspective that resists the confines of nation-states and instead favors transnational systems. During my doctoral coursework at UT Austin, I actually pursued training in both modern Chinese and US histories. I was stupendously lucky to find in Madeline Hsu an adviser whose own expertise understood a transpacific approach and saw it as critically important. The intellectual breadth of UT’s History department allowed us to assemble a team of mentors who could guide my research at the intersection of China and Hong Kong, British imperial history, transpacific migration, the history of capitalism, and the global Cold War. As you might imagine, my comps lists were enormous and encompassed everything from the Ming-Qing transition to decolonization! But reading too much is never a bad thing. This training gave me the range to pursue an exciting project and to conceive my second project—the first history of the MBA degree’s expansion across the Sinophone world since the 1950s.
3. What kinds of questions drive your work as a scholar?
Both my manuscript-in-progress and my next project examine how people, capital, and ideas have circulated in the Pacific between Asia and the Americas. Multiple and overlapping histories have erected an artificial and highly politicized boundary down the middle of the Pacific—from Orientalist imaginings of “East” and “West” and Sinocentrism to Chinese Exclusion and even the international dateline. Until recently, historians largely repeated and reinforced these divisions by breaking the Pacific into more manageable yet bounded geographies and histories: East Asia, Southeast Asia, North America, Latin America, while Polynesia and Oceania routinely disappeared entirely. These silos of historical enquiry marginalized transpacific movement and state systems from an important place in global history. As a wave of new scholars including Elizabeth Sinn and Emma Teng and Gregory Cushman are examining the Pacific more holistically, however, we’re recovering startling aspects of globalization and gaining new insights into the many empires and nation-states that have transected this basin. More broadly, I’m always excited by scholarship that deconstructs current nation-states and explains current distributions of power and wealth. Chinese history has long distinguished itself in this regard, but I try to read and listen widely. If you look at my nightstand, you’ll see everything from Edward Baptist’s stunning The Half Has Never Been Told to S. Frederick Starr’s Lost Enlightenment.
4. What aspects of being at Columbia this year particularly excite you?
It’s hard to know where to start! I’m tremendously grateful to be immersed in a center of scholarship on East Asia like the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. This community of scholars is unparalleled and the daily conversations and lectures are really helping to fine tune my revisions on the manuscript. I’m particularly looking forward to the upcoming workshop on Labor Migrations in the Pacific World organized by Mae Ngai, one of my mentors here. On top of that, this fellowship’s gift of time is enabling rapid progress on the manuscript and for me to polish and submit several journal articles. It’s a tremendous privilege at the outset of an academic career. Then there are my students! My seminar this term is a genuine highlight of my week because of the enthusiasm and the intellect that they bring to each meeting. And the icing on the whole cake is New York City itself. It almost rivals Hong Kong!
5. What classes have you been teaching at Columbia?
Last year I taught two seminars of my own design, “Global Hong Kong” in the fall (offered again in Fall 2017) and “Empires and Migrations in the Pacific World” in the spring. The first examined modern Chinese and world histories through the lens of Hong Kong. I designed and taught Global Hong Kong as a writing-intensive lecture at UT Austin for three years. It was a highlight of my graduate education to translate my research directly into teaching. Here at Columbia, I’ve rethought the course into a seminar open to both undergraduate and graduate students. I’m told that it’s the university’s first ever course on Hong Kong—which is an exciting distinction! My spring course was a research seminar that examined how Asian, European, and American empires have channeled, categorized, and regulated human movement in the Pacific since the 1500s. As a result, we read from traditionally disconnected historiographies in order to think holistically about how different imperial and national formations have molded human geographies. It was an ambitious but genuinely exciting undertaking.
