A New Documentary History of Hong Kong, 1945–1997 is a handy and useful sourcebook for scholars and students of Hong Kong and British imperial history. Compiled and interpreted by a team of early career Hong Kong historians, it explores not only conventional topics like politics, economy and culture, but also relatively neglected ones such as transport, environment and medicine. Most of the documents in this volume were sourced from the UK National Archives and the Hong Kong Public Records Office, but there are also materials obtained from the University of Hong Kong Libraries Special Collection, Oxford University Bodleian Libraries and other sources. Above all, the editors and contributors aim to provide a “revisionist” account of Hong Kong history through their fresh approaches and rich sources.

Several themes run through the history of Hong Kong between 1945 and 1997. First and foremost is the salience of politics. Nevertheless, what is unique about the Hong Kong case is that politics was embedded in the economic, social and other spheres: it often played out in a subtle rather than confrontational manner. As Florence Mok notes in her chapters on governance and political culture, the political apathy of Hong Kong people was more myth than reality, and the colonial state was not always benevolent and non-interventionist. Throughout the postwar period, especially after the late 1960s, many Hong Kong Chinese were actively involved in “informal” political activities such as protests, petitions and signature campaigns, while stopping short of directly challenging the colonial status quo (except for the leftists during the 1967 riots) due to the “culture of de-politicisation” (a concept borrowed from Lam Wai-man). On the other hand, the colonial state employed covert mechanisms, notably the Town Talk and the Movement of Opinion Direction, to gather intelligence on local opinions and then incorporate them into policymaking processes, thereby avoiding the introduction of democratic reforms and adverse reactions from China. As a result, the political system of Hong Kong, as Matthew Hurst’s chapter on constitutional change shows, remained almost unchanged for much of the colonial period. Not until the 1980s and especially after Chris Patten had become Hong Kong governor in 1992 did Britain make serious efforts to introduce democratic reforms in Hong Kong (which were deemed by its critics to be too little, too late).

Political embeddedness influenced economic and fiscal policies. According to James Fellows, the “success story” of Hong Kong’s economy was not merely the outcome of the government’s commitment to laissez-faire or “positive non-interventionism” and Hong Kong people’s industriousness; rather, it could be attributed to competition and bargaining among various interest groups, including traditional British hongs, Shanghai émigrés and local industrialists. Likewise, the making of fiscal and budgetary policies, as Fung Chi Keung Charles reveals in his chapter, was the outcome of behind-the-scenes negotiations between colonial bureaucrats and business elites on the one hand, and the colonial state and London on the other. Concerning educational policy, the focus of Allan T. F. Pang’s chapter, the colonial government “politicised” and “depoliticised” education in different historical periods. At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s, the government was eager to ensure that only locally published textbooks focusing on social and cultural (not political) issues were being used in schools. But in the 1980s, when Britain and China negotiated and eventually reached an agreement on Hong Kong’s future, the colonial government introduced civic education in schools in order to prepare Hong Kong people for administering the city under China’s sovereignty – but also to leave a British legacy after 1997. In the field of the arts, which is addressed in Reynold K. W. Tsang’s chapter, negotiation, collaboration and contestation between arts communities, the municipal councils and the colonial government were a common feature. Especially after the 1967 riots, the British hoped to foster a sense of Hong Kong identity through cultural programmes.

Another main theme of the book is the transregional and transnational nature of Hong Kong history. Pang’s chapter on education features documents about the transregional flows of teachers, students and textbooks between Hong Kong and Chinese communities in East and South-East Asia. Fellows’s chapter highlights Hong Kong’s financial and monetary links with the United Kingdom until the early 1970s, and its continuing connections with Communist China especially after Deng Xiaoping’s adoption of economic reform in 1979. In her chapter on migration, Doris Y. S. Chan explores the cross-border population movements to and from Hong Kong, including not only the influx of refugees from China and Vietnam but also the overseas employment of Hong Kong Chinese in North Borneo and Britain. Focusing on medicine and healthcare, Kelvin Chan has unearthed documents to illuminate how Hong Kong served as an “in-between place” for circulating Chinese medical materials, personnel and technology to South-East Asia and North America. While focusing on Hong Kong’s intra-city mobility, Adonis M. Y. Li also covers the difficult trajectory of the Kowloon–Canton Railway, which linked Hong Kong with the mainland. In his chapter on environment and natural disasters, Jack Greatrex begins by stating that “[e]nvironments cannot be fitted easily within political borders,” with Hong Kong being “part of a region spanning southern China and Southeast Asia” (p. 320), and he then provides us with a rich array of sources on this little-known topic.

Last but not least, the contributors to this volume all highlight the agency of ordinary people in Hong Kong’s history. Carol C. L. Tsang looks at how women negotiated gender roles and family relations in the light of population growth, the changing economy and new medical technologies. Using autobiographies and non-official sources, Vivian Kong shines a light on how ethnic Chinese and diasporic Eurasians contested systemic racism, which died hard after 1945, while promoting cross-cultural interactions in Hong Kong.

In a book with fourteen chapters spanning over 400 pages, the editors and contributors have addressed a wide range of topics that enrich our understanding of Hong Kong history. Still, there are missing dimensions – Hong Kong’s external relations and its military history, for instance. Whereas politics and culture/education each occupy three chapters, Hong Kong’s links with the outside world, especially with China, deserve a dedicated chapter that goes beyond the discussions of the transnational theme in some of existing chapters. That said, this is a valuable collection of documents and commentaries produced by a new generation of Hong Kong historians.