Robert Hart’s Panopticon
Robert Hart’s Panopticon
This chapter examines how Robert Hart built up the Service in the decade after he became Inspector General. Hart made the Customs Service into a disciplined frontier regime, exploiting the spaces between the Qing Empire and the expanding European empires, the chaotic conditions that resulted from China's mid-nineteenth-century rebellions, and opportunities created by the introduction of new trade systems and navigational technologies. Hart turned the Service into a widely respected organization, involved in taxation as well as diplomacy, finance, scholarship, meteorology, and the management of China's maritime sphere. A good example of the Service's ability to take hold of new functions was its construction of lighthouses along the Chinese coast. Lighthouses were important to the transport revolution of the second half of the nineteenth century, but they were also symbols of modern engineering and management with complex political and cultural meanings.
Keywords: Chinese Maritime Customs Service, Robert Hart, Inspector General, China, lighthouses
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