Colonial legacies and internationalization : British history in contemporary Hong Kong

As earlier contributions to this roundtable series have underscored, British history enjoys a wide institutional presence outside the UK, although one facing various challenges, particularly with respect to justifying its relevance in an era of reduced budgets and, especially in North America, shifting priorities. The present essay will examine the place of British history in contemporary Hong Kong, Britain’s last major colony, 15 years after its ‘Handover’ to the People’s Republic of China. Given Hong Kong’s small size, we will take ‘modern British history’ rather than ‘twentieth-century British history’ as our remit, for reasons that should become clear. Moreover, in contrast to previous essays in this series engaging with the USA, Germany, and France, we will not be able to identify a distinct local historiography of modern Britain, except insofar as much local engagement with modern British history occurs through the prism of Hong Kong’s experience as a British colony.