Creating the Cantonese Pacific - Professor James Beattie

Creating the Cantonese Pacific: Resource Frontiers, Environmental Change and Chinese migration and trade, 1790s-1920s
Talk by Scholar in Residence, Professor James Beattie

In recognition of its 15th anniversary, Lan Yuan Scholar in Residence, Associate Professor James Beattie discusses resource frontiers, environmental change and Chinese migration and trade from the 1790s to 1920s.

The environmental and geopolitical impact of China in the Pacific is exercising the minds of policymakers and academics throughout the Pacific Rim and beyond. This talk will historicize China’s involvement in the Pacific, especially its ecological footprint. Over the nineteenth century, the environmental, demographic and social impact of Chinese resource demand and migration reverberated throughout the Pacific.

Beattie will first explore the environmental and demographic impacts of Chinese resource demand from the 1790s, then, dating from the late 1840s, discuss the explosive, boom-and-bust Pacific resource frontiers that developed with Chinese migration. As goldminers, plantation laborers and railway navvies, market gardeners, merchants and in myriad other occupations, several million Chinese migrants, Beattie will show, contributed to the great acceleration of environmental change in the nineteenth-century Pacific. The talk will conclude by profiling Chinese merchants whose enterprises opened up new resource frontiers in New Zealand and the South Pacific.

5.30pm, Wednesday 13 September
Lan Yuan Tower Room - please meet at Lan Yuan Dunedin Chinese Garden entrance.
Free