Inquest into colonialism : the making of Sino-British suspicious death managements in Shanghai international settlement from 1840s to 1900s

Abstract

This dissertation deals with three areas: the operation of British extraterritoriality in Late-Qing China, the Qing’s management of homicide at the local (county) level, and the governance of Shanghai International Settlement. The institutional goals of Qing managements of suspicious death at the county level were to identify and report suspicious death as well as establish the facts by the engagement of county yamen and baojia 保甲 system. The coronership and municipal police forces constituted the major actors to facilitate the inquest and criminal investigation in the 19th century England. At Shanghai settlement (1840s-1900s), there were three main categories of suspicious death concerning Qing and British authorities at Shanghai: homicide cases among Britain; homicide among Chinese in the Settlement; mixed manslaughter cases between Briton and Chinese in the Settlement. To handle these three kinds of suspicious deaths, Qing local authorities of Shanghai, British consul and judges in China, and multiple colonial agencies including the Shanghai Municipal Police and western hospitals, conflicted, negotiated with each other and formed a specific labor of division that allowed British extraterritorial judiciary and Shanghai Municipal Council and its police force to possessed more jurisdiction over managing British and Chinese suspicious death in the Settlement. Sino-British conflicts mainly surrounded the forensic evidence of Chinese deceased in Sino-British mixed homicide cases and the site for holding inquest into deceased in the Settlement. In late 19th century, medical evidence of western doctors and western-type public mortuary eventually became the infrastructure of British extraterritoriality and a colonial modernity in the Settlement while the Qing’s techniques of postmortem examination and its preference to ad hoc outdoor place for inquest, became the symbol of Chinese backwardness in suspicious death management in Late-Qing even republican China.