In the 18th and 19th centuries, relations between China and the West were defined by the Qing dynasty’s strict restrictions on foreign access and by the West’s imperial ambitions. Cultural, political and economic interactions were often fraught, with suspicion and misunderstanding on both sides. Yet trade flourished and there were instances of cultural exchange and friendship, running counter to the official narrative. Tribute and Trade: China and Global Modernity explores encounters between China and the West during this period and beyond, into the early 20th century, through examples drawn from art, literature, science, politics, music, cooking, clothing and more. How did China and the West see each other, how did they influence each other, and what were the lasting legacies of this contact?

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What do tales of stalking vampires, restless Egyptian mummies, foreign master criminals, barbarian Eastern hordes and stomping Prussian soldiers have in common? As Gothic Invasions explains, they may all be seen as instances of invasion fiction, a paranoid fin-de-siècle popular literary phenomenon that responded to prevalent societal fears of the invasion of Britain by an array of hostile foreign forces in the period before the First World War. Gothic Invasions traces the roots of invasion anxiety to concerns about the downside of Britain’s continuing imperial expansion: fears of growing inter-European rivalry and colonial wars and rebellion. It explores how these fears circulated across the British empire and were expressed in fictional narratives drawing strongly upon and reciprocally transforming the conventions and themes of gothic writing. Gothic Invasions enhances our understanding of the interchange between popular culture and politics at this crucial historical juncture, and demonstrates the instrumentality of the ever-versatile and politically-charged gothic mode in this process.

Following the tumultuous events in China in the first two decades of the twentieth century, there was an urgent need for a reliable reference work surveying all aspects of contemporary China, given that existing reference works and scholarly monographs became rapidly obsolete. Couling’s work, published in 1917, covered so much ground with such accuracy and consistency that it has become established as an essential tool for scholars wishing to understand how the new China was seen and interpreted at the time.