‘The Best Welshman is a Welshman Abroad’: Wales, China, and the Globalized Nation in the Age of Empire Open Access

Levine, Alex (Spring 2022)

Permanent URL: https://etd.library.emory.edu/concern/etds/9019s381f?locale=en
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Abstract

This thesis considers and seeks to expand the way historians of Wales and of the British

Empire have written late nineteenth and early twentieth century Welsh history, by

examining Wales’ connections to China and the Far East. I illustrate how media reports

at home in ‘gallant little Wales’ concerning the Boxer Rebellion and the activities of

Welshmen in China during the late-1890s and 1900s helped write Wales into the British

Empire and the wider world and played into conceptions of national identity, shaping

major anti-Chinese rioting in Cardiff in 1911. The connection between religion and

national identity, which was particularly strong in the Welsh case and has been seen as

intimately connected to a national struggle for church disestablishment within the United

Kingdom, was also necessarily shaped by a globalized system of information, not least

involving Welsh missionaries, and by imperial expansion and spectacle. Small but

influential Welsh communities also emerged in the Europeanized metropolises of

Shanghai, Singapore, and Hong Kong and – alongside Welsh individuals in the Chinese

interior – were tuned into political and cultural debates occurring in Wales. Their

approach to national identity was shaped by their tentative positions in the Far East,

engendered by the British Empire’s power and endangered by the rise of nationalism in

China. They proved remarkably supportive of British imperial expansion and the

exertion of imperial power in China – in contradiction to Welsh nationalists at home – yet

they prioritized the Welsh language in their cultural celebrations, justifying Welsh

nationalism as an expression of support for the empire. These individuals and

communities looked back to Wales, working to recreate the national homeland in China

at the same time that they sought to involve themselves in cultural developments in the

metropole. Throughout all these interactions, Welsh individuals understood their position

within Wales and the wider world as being shaped by their distinct national background.

Thus, I make the case that in order to fully understand British activity overseas,

distinctive national backgrounds have to be taken into account; and in order to understand

a seemingly national Welsh history it is essential to consider the global and imperial. 

Table of Contents

Introduction..........................................................................................................................1

Global Wales: National and Religious Identity and the Media....................................................9

St. David’s Day and Welsh Society in the Far East....................................................................37

Recreating Wales: Welsh Cultural and Linguistic Traditions in the Far East...............................61

Conclusion...........................................................................................................................86

Bibliography.........................................................................................................................90 

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