TLRH | Faculty in Focus: Dr Peter Hamilton

Tuesday, 9 February 2021, 1 – 2pm An 'in conversation' with Dr
Peter Hamilton (School of Histories and Humanities) and hosted by
Dr Isabella Jackson, (Trinity Centre for Asian Studies) Dr Hamilton
will discuss his career and his latest publication, Made in Hong
Kong: Transpacific Networks and a New History of Globalization.
About Made in Hong Kong: Transpacific Networks and a New History of
Globalization Between 1949 and 1997, Hong Kong transformed from a
struggling British colonial outpost into a global financial
capital. Made in Hong Kong delivers a new narrative of this
metamorphosis, revealing Hong Kong both as a critical engine in the
expansion and remaking of postwar global capitalism and as the
linchpin of Sino-U.S. trade since the 1970s. Peter E. Hamilton
explores the role of an overlooked transnational Chinese elite who
fled to Hong Kong amid war and revolution. Despite losing material
possessions, these industrialists, bankers, academics, and other
professionals retained crucial connections to the United States.
They used these relationships to enmesh themselves and Hong Kong
with the U.S. through commercial ties and higher education. By the
1960s, Hong Kong had become a manufacturing powerhouse supplying
American consumers, and by the 1970s it was the world’s largest
sender of foreign students to American colleges and universities.
Hong Kong’s reorientation toward U.S. international leadership
enabled its transplanted Chinese elites to benefit from expanding
American influence in Asia and positioned them to act as shepherds
to China’s reengagement with global capitalism. After China’s
reforms accelerated under Deng Xiaoping, Hong Kong became a crucial
node for China’s export-driven development, connecting Chinese
labor with the U.S. market. Analyzing untapped archival sources
from around the world, this book demonstrates why we cannot
understand postwar globalization, China’s economic rise, or today’s
Sino-U.S. trade relationship without centering Hong Kong. Dr. Peter
E. Hamilton is the Assistant Professor in Modern Chinese History at
Trinity College Dublin. He is the author of Made in Hong Kong:
Transpacific Networks and a New History of Globalization (Columbia
University Press, Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute,
2021). His research has been published in Twentieth-Century China,
The Journal of Historical Sociology, and The International History
Review and has received financial support from the Fudan
Development Institute, the Schwarzman Scholars, the Weatherhead
East Asian Institute of Columbia University, the Institute for
Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and the
Hong Kong-America Centre. Learn more at:
https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/