Michael Pembroke is a retired Supreme Court judge who certainly surprised this reviewer with his Play by the Rules – an excoriating critique of US foreign policy since World War II that now seems strangely prescient.
There is a large literature on the Opium Wars and if you are looking for a China specialist on the subject – one who has actually read the Chinese Imperial archives – I recommend Julia Lovell’s The Opium War. William Dalrymple’s Empire podcast has also recently traversed this much-contested ground.
Pembroke is a non-specialist on China, and this is essentially a work of synthesis but what it does offer is a convenient and well-researched overview of the West’s economic connections with China from the Roman period until the fall of the Chin Dynasty in 1912.
For most of this period China was wealthier and technologically more advanced than the West and ran substantial trade surpluses. That changed in the 19th century for reasons that included the West’s temporary military advantage: an unpopular and increasingly inept foreign dynasty and massive internal rebellions (the Taiping and Boxer) aggravated by war indemnities. The outcome is known in China as the century of Humiliation.
Anyone wanting to understand the current breakdown of the so-called Rules-Based Order and the likely direction of the West’s relationship with China needs to understand this history and Silk Silver and Opium is a good place to start.
Reviewed by Grant Hansen
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Pembroke was born in Sydney and educated at the universities of Sydney and Cambridge. His first book was Trees of History & Romance (2009); his second, Arthur Phillip – Sailor, Mercenary, Governor, Spy (2013), was short-listed for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards; his third book Korea – Where the American Century Began (2018) was short-listed for the Queensland Literary Awards and the NSW Premier’s History Awards. Pembroke’s most recent book, a polemic about American leadership entitled Play By the Rules (2020), was published in the United States as America in Retreat (2021).
He has written for Time Magazine, Al Jazeera, the South China Morning Post and many Australian news publications. He studied French and Mughal history at university but succumbed to a career in the law. For 35 years, he and his wife developed a much loved garden at the cool climate hamlet of Mount Wilson in the Blue Mountains on Sydney’s western fringe.
(5/5)
An absolutely riveting book. The author’s comprehensive historical account using many sources and explanatory backgrounds, paint vivid pictures of actual events, particularly in the nineteenth century. They are particularly revelatory if one is to understand the vast impact of the West’s imperial impositions on China, and its understandable desire to rectify ‘a century of humiliation’.