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by Robert J. Antony. China Research Monograph, Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 2003. xiii + 198 pp. US$16.00 (Paperback). ISBN: 1-55729-178-4
Robert Antony's self-proclaimed goal in writing this book was to produce a "bottom up" history of Chinese pirates and seafarers that examined their daily lives and aspirations in their own terms. In this endeavour he succeeds admirably well, for in addition to the palace memorials, imperial edicts, and local gazetteers, which have become standard fare in archival investigations of this sort, Antony has ferreted out colourful details from the hitherto untapped "routine memorials" or tiben, and from them compiled a data base on 9,600 individuals, who were arrested in connection with piracy between 1795 and 1810 in Fujian and Guangdong Provinces. These data have been used to supply information on the pirates' backgrounds, methods of operation, supply networks, and cultural world that appears at the heart of the book in Chapters 4 to 7. They have also allowed Antony to conclude that no wealthy merchants or degree-holding gentry appeared among the ranks of these pirates (although several pages later, he does mention the case of Li Chongyu, who escaped from custody, joined a pirate gang, and subsequently attained gentry status through the purchase of a jiansheng degree, p. 136); that aboard ship, captives forced into service often outnumbered the actual pirates; and that in terms of their sexual relations, it was not uncommon for older men to maintain heterosexual as well as homosexual relationships as "homosexual activities aboard ship did not preclude heterosexual activities both on and off ship." (p. 150).
Elsewhere, however, the book suffers from disjunctions between the claims it makes and the evidence brought to bear in their support. First, in endeavouring to employ his study of bottom up history "to further our...