‘“Hostage Capitalism”: Liverpool, Shanghai and the Blue Funnel Line in the 1960s’
Posted: Tuesday 28th February 2023
Centre for Contemporary & Modern History and Centre for Port & Maritime History invite you to a free pub talk by Prof. Nick White, Liverpool John Moores University
In the late-1960s a number of Blue Funnel seafarers were interned in China. The Liverpool-based Blue Funnel Line was Britain’s premier shipping group in eastern Asia, and the talk will address this ‘hostage capitalism’ in the context of China’s Cultural Revolution and the UK’s enfeeblement ‘east of Suez’. But it will also delve deeper in discussing the shifting power balance between Liverpool and Shanghai going back to the 1860s and the origins of Blue Funnel’s trade with China in the period of so-called ‘informal empire’ period followed by the twentieth-century upheavals of the Nationalist Revolution, Japanese militarism and the ascendancy of the Chinese Communist Party.
