Dr Maurizio Marinelli, Senior Lecturer in the Centre for East Asian Studies,  Professor Robert Bickers from the Department of Historical Studies, and Professor Nikki Cooper at Swansea University, have been awarded a grant of £662,487 from the Economic and Social Research Council for a three-year research project, ‘Colonialism in comparative perspective: Tianjin under nine flags, 1860-1949’.

The project, which started on 1 September and is co-ordinated by Dr Marinelli, comprises a team of eight researchers. Through a series of interdisciplinary workshops, conferences and collaborative and individual research projects, the team will develop new understandings of colonial and modern Chinese history, though a focus on the northern Chinese port city of Tianjin. It develops work initiated by the Centre for East Asian Studies and the University’s Centre for the Study of Colonial and Postcolonial Societies.

Between 1860 and 1945 Tianjin was the site of up to nine foreign-controlled concessions, as well as, temporarily, a multinational military government (1900-02), and a series of evolving municipal administrations. The research aims to produce a comparative and transnational analysis of the identities, practices and rivalries of five of the major powers established in Tianjin, and more widely in China -- Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Russia.