Abstract

The Business of Rebellion: Citizenship, Migration, and Profits during the 1853 Small Sword Uprising

In January of 1851, Qing officials in the southern port city of Xiamen arrested a man named Chen Qingzhen, alleged to be the leader of a secret organization called the “Small Sword Society.” Chen’s abrupt execution stirred up a diplomatic controversy when the British Consul lodged a complaint that the man in question was a British subject: he spoke the Fujianese language, wore his hair in the Manchu queue, and was by all accounts a “local” southern Fujianese, but he had been born in the Straits Settlements and was employed the British firm, Jardine Matheson & Company. Two years later an organization of the same name – the Small Sword Society – rose up and overthrew the government in districts across coastal southern Fujian province, culminating in a rebel occupation of the port city of Xiamen for over six months. Like Chen Qingzhen, the members of the uprising came from diasporic communities: some of them from small towns along the Fujian coast, and others had been born abroad and “returned” to the ancestral homeland. This paper is the first step towards a book manuscript that will use Chinese and British state records, as well as the business records of the American firm Augustine Heard & Company, to tell the story of the Small Sword Uprising as a formative moment in the evolution of the modern citizenship regime. The goal of this paper within that larger project is to isolate the impact of Augustine Heard & Company within the history of the rebellion, with two goals in mind: to understand the differences in how American and British firms approached the citizenship and “extracurricular” activities of their Chinese employees, and to think through the ways in which an event like a regional uprising can create new and lasting patterns of profit and competition.