HIST4500GL Topic Studies in Hong Kong History:
Global Historical Perspectives on Modern Hong Kong

This course explores Hong Kong from the mid-nineteenth to the early twenty-first century from global historical perspectives. To contextualize modern Hong Kong within the history of the world, the course will first introduce some of the key concepts, frameworks, and issues in the rapidly emerging field of global history, and then examine the ways in which Hong Kong’s politics, economy, society, and culture have been connected and integrated to Asian regions, Euro-America, and many other parts of the world for the past 180 years. Chronologically and thematically organized, the lectures revolve around the theme that Hong Kong history is important, if not essential, for us to understand and rethink various aspects of global developments within different temporal-spatial frameworks such as merchant capitalism, transpacific Chinese passages, the Cold War, and postwar Sino-US relations. The course is multidisciplinary; students will read readings on Hong Kong and global history in the fields of history, international relations, politics, economics, anthropology, literature, and cultural studies.

1. Global History: Key Concepts, Frameworks, and Issues
2. Hong Kong in the British Imperial Networks
3. Western Capital and Capitalists in Early Colonial Hong Kong
4. Hong Kong as a Hub of the Chinese Trade in Asia and the Pacific before WWII
5. Hong Kong: An “In-between Place” of Chinese Migration, 1849-1939
6. Hong Kong in the Second World War
7. The Global Cold War in Hong Kong
8. British Culture and Decolonization, 1945-1997
9. Linchpin of Postwar Sino-US Relations
10. Industrial Metropolis and Global Financial Center in the Twentieth Century
11. Non-Western, Non-Chinese Communities
12. Global Hong Kong Cinema
13. Postwar Hong Kong Communities Overseas: Past and Present

Take-home exam (35%)

Tutorials (40%)

Article review (15%)

Class participation (10%)

See Blackboard

See the course outline

Attention is drawn to University policy and regulations on honesty in academic work, and to the disciplinary guidelines and procedures applicable to breaches of such policy and regulations. Details may be found at http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/policy/academichonesty/.

With each assignment, students will be required to submit a signed declaration that they are aware of these policies, regulations, guidelines and procedures.

• In the case of group projects, all members of the group should be asked to sign the declaration, each of whom is responsible and liable to disciplinary actions, irrespective of whether he/she has signed the declaration and whether he/she has contributed, directly or indirectly, to the problematic contents.
• For assignments in the form of a computer-generated document that is principally text-based and submitted via VeriGuide, the statement, in the form of a receipt, will be issued by the system upon students’ uploading of the soft copy of the assignment.

Assignments without the properly signed declaration will not be graded by teachers.

Only the final version of the assignment should be submitted via VeriGuide.

The submission of a piece of work, or a part of a piece of work, for more than one purpose (e.g. to satisfy the requirements in two different courses) without declaration to this effect shall be regarded as having committed undeclared multiple submissions. It is common and acceptable to reuse a turn of phrase or a sentence or two from one’s own work; but wholesale reuse is problematic. In any case, agreement from the course teacher(s) concerned should be obtained prior to the submission of the piece of work.