The Six Day War Of 1899

In 1899, a year after the Convention of Peking leased the New Territories to Britain, the British moved to establish control. This triggered resistance by the some of the population of the New Territories. There ensued six days of fighting with heavy Chinese casualties. This truly forgotten war has been thoroughly researched for the first time and recounted in lively style by Patrick Hase, an expert on the people and history of the New Territories.

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR An award-winning journalist and longtime Hong Konger indelibly captures the place, its people, and the untold history they are claiming, just as it is being erased. The story of Hong Kong has long been dominated by competing myths: to Britain, a “barren rock” with no appreciable history; to China, a part of Chinese soil from time immemorial, at last returned to the ancestral fold. For decades, Hong Kong’s history was simply not taught, especially to Hong Kongers, obscuring its origins as a place of refuge and rebellion. When protests erupted in 2019 and were met with escalating suppression from Beijing, Louisa Lim—raised in Hong Kong as a half-Chinese, half-English child, and now a reporter who has covered the region for nearly two decades—realized that she was uniquely positioned to unearth the city’s untold stories. Lim’s deeply researched and personal account casts startling new light on key moments: the British takeover in 1842, the negotiations over the 1997 return to China, and the future Beijing seeks to impose. Indelible City features guerrilla calligraphers, amateur historians and archaeologists, and others who, like Lim, aim to put Hong Kongers at the center of their own story. Wending through it all is the King of Kowloon, whose iconic street art both embodied and inspired the identity of Hong Kong—a site of disappearance and reappearance, power and powerlessness, loss and reclamation.

Land was always at the centre of life in Hong Kong’s rural New Territories: it sustained livelihoods and lineages and, for some, was a route to power. Villagers managed their land according to customs that were often at odds with formal Chinese law. British rule, 1898—1997, added complications by assimilating traditional practices into a Western legal system. Custom, Land and Livelihood in Rural South China explores land ownership in the New Territories, analysing over a hundred surviving land deeds from the late Ch’ing Dynasty to recent times, which are transcribed in full and translated into English. Together with other sources collected by the author during 30 years of research, these deeds yield information on all aspects of traditional village life—from raising families and making a living to coping with intruders—and evoke a view of the world which, despite decades of urbanisation, still has resonance today.

James Stewart Lockhart called it "the great difference". Returned from an inspection tour of the newly leased extension to Hong Kong territory in August 1898, Lockhart, a senior Hong Kong colonial official, had used this phrase to describe the gulf between the New Territories and its people and the existing British colony of Hong Kong and its inhabitants. In this volume, James Hayes argues that this "the great difference" led the colonial government to administer the New Territories and its people differently from the old urban area from the outset, resulting in repercussions that affect present-day Hong Kong. The study covers the whole period of the Lease, with all its crowded events and dramatic changes, as they affected the native inhabitants and their relationship with the government and, over time, the many times larger new urban population. James Hayes (PhD Lond; HonDLitt, HK) is a scholar of the Hong Kong region and its people. He worked in the New Territories for almost half his thirty-two years of government service, and was Regional Secretary in charge of district administration there in 1985-87. His publications include Friends and Teachers: Hong Kong and Its People 1953-87 (Hong Kong University Press, 1996) and South China Village Culture (2001).

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 The protests in Hong Kong were not just about the extradition law, but also about the city’s independence and its rule of law. The British had not given their subjects full citizenship or universal suffrage, but they had instilled in them civic values including respect for freedom, democracy, and human rights. #2 I was in Hong Kong during the Umbrella Movement, and I was amazed by the way the city was being transformed into an open-air gallery of populist ideas. These displays were called Lennon Walls, after a wall in Prague that had been painted with countercultural, anti-establishment graffiti beginning in the 1980s. #3 In China, the history of the written word dates back some 3,700 years. The first instances were pictographs known as jiaguwen, or oracle bone inscriptions, carved with a sharp instrument on tortoise shells or the shoulder blades of oxen, dating to the Shang dynasty. #4 Tsang Chau-sang was a Chinese man who was born in Guangdong province in Liantang village in Zhaoqing prefecture. He began writing in public around 1956, and was initially viewed as a crank and a vandal. But in his mind, he was an emperor.

A landmark history of one hundred years of war waged against the Palestinians from the foremost US historian of the Middle East, told through pivotal events and family history In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending his note, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.” Thus Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s great-great-nephew, begins this sweeping history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective. Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members—mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists—The Hundred Years' War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory. Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age. He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process. Original, authoritative, and important, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine is not a chronicle of victimization, nor does it whitewash the mistakes of Palestinian leaders or deny the emergence of national movements on both sides. In reevaluating the forces arrayed against the Palestinians, it offers an illuminating new view of a conflict that continues to this day.

This book offers a new insight into the political, social, and religious conduct of religious-Zionism, whose consequences are evident in Israeli society today. Before the Six-Day War, religious-Zionism had limited its concern to the protection of specific religious interests, with its representatives having little share in the determination of Israel’s national agenda. Fifty years after it, religious-Zionism has turned into one of Israeli society’s dominant elements. The presence of this group in all aspects of Israel’s life and its members’ determination to set Israel’s social, cultural, and international agenda is indisputable. Delving into this dramatic transformation, the book depicts the Six-Day War as a constitutive event that indelibly changed the political and religious consciousness of religious-Zionists. The perception of real history that had guided this movement from its dawn was replaced by a "sacred history" approach that became an actual program of political activity. As part of a process that has unfolded over the last thirty years, the body and sexuality have also become a central concern in the movement’s practice, reflection, and discourse. The how and why of this shift in religious-Zionism – from passivity and a consciousness of marginality to the front lines of public life – is this book’s central concern. The book will be of interest to readers and scholars concerned with changing dynamic societies and with the study of religion and particularly with the relationship between religion and politics.

This exhaustive work offers readers at multiple levels key insights into the military, political, social, cultural, and religious origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Encyclopedia of the Arab-Israeli Conflict: A Political, Social, and Military History is the first comprehensive general reference encompassing all aspects of the contentious Arab-Israeli relationship from biblical times to the present, with an emphasis on the era beginning with World War I. The Encyclopedia of the Arab-Israeli Conflict goes beyond simply recapping military engagements. In four volumes, with more than 750 alphabetically organized entries, plus a separate documents volume, it provides a wide-ranging introduction to the distinct yet inextricably linked Arab and Israeli worlds and worldviews, exploring all aspects of the conflict. The objective analysis will help readers understand the dramatic events that have impacted the entire world, from the founding of modern Israel to the building of the Suez Canal; from the Six-Day War to the Camp David Accords; from the assassinations of Anwar Sadat and Yitzhak Rabin to the rise and fall of Yasser Arafat, the 2006 Palestinian elections, and the Israeli-Hezbollah War in Lebanon.