Launched in early June 2006, and endowed with millions of pounds, the British Inter-University China Center has greatly advanced the capacity of research into the modern history of China at the universities of Oxford, Bristol, and Manchester. Much of that funding had been set aside for the digitization of the extensive collection of Chinese Maritime Customs (CMC) archival materials held at Nanjing. Eminent China historian Hans van de Ven has been intimately associated with the Center's CMC archival project and is otherwise a leading expert on Hart, the Ulsterman who served from 1863 to 1911 as Inspector-General of the CMC. Breaking with the Past is very much the fruit of that association and intimate familiarity with the records: it is based on countless CMC documents that have scarcely been used thus far and are particularly valuable in reconstructing the relations CMC senior foreign staff had with the Kuomintang (KMT) in the 1930s, as well as with the Japanese occupation authorities in the 1940s. Clearly, the book is also one of the most comprehensive and ambitious historical studies of the CMC to have been written in English to date.

Founded in 1854, the CMC was a predominantly British-staffed bureaucracy nominally under the control of successive Chinese central governments. It was effectively disbanded in January 1950 when Lester Little, a US national and the last foreign Inspector-General, resigned against the backdrop of the Communist victory over the KMT. For almost a century, therefore, the CMC could play a critical role in modernizing China's economy and its foreign relations. Yet, the CMC has also been widely portrayed in the Chinese and postcolonial historical literature as a vile tentacle of British “gentlemanly” imperialism: after all, it delivered at times up to half of all Chinese government revenue; that customs revenue was, in turn, pledged against foreign loans the Chinese had to raise overseas, mainly so as to defray the indemnities China was forced to pay to foreigners, having lost the Opium Wars and subsequent confrontations such as the Boxer Rebellion.

Van de Ven's book is in some ways a defense of the CMC's contribution to China in the face of critiques like the one famously leveled by Paul Cohen at John K. Fairbank's “impact-response” paradigm. The arguments here are at times similar to the ones made in John K. Fairbank's work on Sir Robert Hart. Van de Ven impressively builds on, and extends, Fairbank's work on Hart. At the same time, he maintains that Fairbank “ignored Hart's Irishness, his intense religiosity, and his sexuality” (p. 8).

Van de Ven states right at the outset that his purpose “is to write the [CMC], and by extension the foreign, back into China's history” (p. 5). He further observes that the CMC “consciously declined to align itself with British imperialism” (p. 7). A wealth of data has been mined to support the claim, but some data might perhaps be interpreted a little differently: for example, the fact that as late as 1925, out of seventy-four CMS senior commissioners, none was actually Chinese (p. 194, table 5.1).

To be sure, the book very persuasively demonstrates that the CMC had always been much more than just a tax collection agency. It was well informed about local conditions and deeply involved in local, provincial, and national politics, as well as international affairs. Originally set up in order to tax maritime trade when Chinese officials were unable to do so during the Taiping Rebellion, CMC functions quickly expanded. The CMC became responsible for domestic customs administration, postal administration, harbor and waterway management, weather reporting, and anti-smuggling operations. It mapped, lit, and policed the China coast and the Yangzi River. It trained many Chinese would-be diplomats and funded the translation of many Chinese classics into English. It was involved in loan negotiations, currency reform, and financial and economic management. Our understanding of China's prewar economy, for example, would have been much poorer had scholars not had access to the highly detailed statistical data published by the CMC at the time.

Divided into an introduction, seven loosely chronological chapters, and an epilogue, the narrative revolves around the contrasting personalities of the CMC's Inspectors-General. The first Inspector-General, Horatio Lay, who served until 1863, refused to see himself as working for a “barbarian” Asian government (p. 42). By contrast, the longer-serving Hart was willing ” to subordinate himself to Chinese authority” (p. 62). While revolutionizing China's bureaucracy and macroeconomic data collections, Hart curiously stated that Chinese imperial memoranda were so self-contained and elegant that they were actually “superior” to Western memoranda (p. 78). Francis Aglen, who succeeded Hart in 1910, was much less deferential, embodying the “high noon of British imperialism in China” (p. 195). Partly for these reasons, he was eventually dismissed by the Chinese. Between 1929 and 1943, the top job was held by Frederick Maze who, upon his inauguration, bowed three times in front of Sun Yat-sen's portrait (p. 218).

In between, very intriguing parallels emerge between the CMC, HSBC, and the Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC) as outwardly cosmopolitan but effectively British-run organizations. The means and style of documentary communication within and between these organizations appear similar, at least to this reviewer. The CMC entrusted tax receipts to HSBC, which in turn helped raise money for the Chinese in London. The SMC and CMC appear to have partaken in improving navigation and port facilities around Shanghai (pp. 83–90), but more work would need to be done so as to explain the precise means of this collaboration.

Throughout, Van de Ven does a wonderful job of placing the CMC in a global context. He shows, for example, that the downfall of the Qing in 1912 resulted in greater CMC powers, but is careful to elucidate China's predicament with analogies to Egypt and the Ottoman Empire at the time (pp. 134, 162). Moreover, Van de Ven perceptively frames the CMC story around imperial China's unwillingness at first, and inability later, to embrace a national-debt economy (pp. 179–86, 257–58).

Chapter 6 argues that, apart from merely securing foreign loans and war indemnities, the CMC also helped the KMT raise considerable funds from Chinese bondholders. By contrast, much of the scholarly literature on the Nanjing decade (1929–37) stresses the KMT's rejection of foreign loans and its preference to raise funds through banknote issuance. The book opens, therefore, an avenue for further archival research into this important topic. A closely related topic ably covered in the book is the increase in CMC receipts during the 1930s (pp. 235–54), which spurred smuggling and, in turn, CMC revenue from confiscated goods. This, too, is written through the prism of global fiscal comparisons. For all these reasons, students of Chinese modern history cannot afford to overlook Breaking with the Past.