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Staff profile

Overview

Dr Nick McGee

Assistant Professor

Affiliations
Affiliation
Assistant Professor in the Department of History

Biography

Nicholas McGee is an historian of Late-Imperial and Modern China, whose work explores migration, imperialism, and nationality in China from the 18th through 20th centuries. His research places China in global history, using diaspora as a method for turning the study of Chinese history outward and bringing world history into China.

To this end, Nicholas is currently developing his first book project, entitled States of Freedom: Diaspora and the Birth of Global China. This project of how the relationship between the Chinese state and diaspora evolved across the 19th century. This was a period of dramatic change, in which Chinese state elites came to agree that only way to uphold the humanity of Chinese migrants was the unprecedented extension of the hithertoo territorially bound Chinese state out around the globe in the form of commissioners, diplomats, consuls, and gunboats. The uniqueness of this Chinese case throws into relief an crucial part of the modern state system: the ways in which the globalized state must act as a guarantor of freedom for its subjects abroad. In this way, the project tells the story of the origins of the modern relationship between the Chinese state and the Chinese diaspora, and more broadly China and the world.

Growing out of his first project, Nicholas' new research explores the ways in which diaspora served to connect modern China to modern Africa at the turn of the 20th century. This came following Britain’s 1902 annexation of the Transvaal in South Africa after the Boer war, when more than 64,000 indentured Chinese workers were brought to the South Africa to labour gold mines between 1904-1910. How, I ask, did this hotly contested venture function to introduce conceptions of Africa and its peoples in China, and inform Chinese thought on both regions’ place in the world at the dawn of the modern age? I hope to this research will become the basis for a larger project, historicizing the relationship between China and Africa that is so critical to our collective future.

Nicholas received his PhD from the University of Toronto, and held fixed-term lectureships at the University of Manchester and Durham University, before returning to Durham as a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow.

Research interests

  • Migration
  • Qing Empire
  • Nationality
  • Imperialism
  • China and Africa

Publications

Journal Article