This book is a two-part discussion about mid-late nineteenth-century traditional Cantonese society and the material conditions that fostered large-scale Cantonese overseas emigration.

Part I: discusses the Peasant-farmer, merchant, and Gentry (scholar-official-landed Gentry) social classes. An additional chapter focuses on Cantonese “special interests’ groups,” which embraced those people with shared group needs, identities, and interests, which cut across social class lines.

Part II: analyzes four adverse material conditions, which motivated and contextualized large-scale Cantonese overseas emigration. This includes: 1) high-density population concentration and over-population; 2) economic immiseration of the Cantonese peasant-farmer class; 3) Cantonese communal conflict and social chaos; and 4) local Cantonese/fan-kwai (“foreign devils”) conflicts in the Cantonese heartland. This book is the product of over forty-five years of research and writing, it is the third volume of a new series entitled The Gum-Shaan Chronicles: The Early History of Cantonese-Chinese America, 1850-1900.

About the Author

Douglas W. Lee, PhD is a second-generation Cantonese-Chinese American, trained as a historian of Modern China, with a special research interest in early Chinese American History. He earned a BA at Lewis and Clark College, Portland, Oregon (1967); an MA at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1969); a PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara (1979); and JD from Lewis and Clark Law School, Portland, Oregon (1988). In 1979-1980, Lee was the cofounder and first national President of the National Association for Asian American Studies. In 1981, he was cofounder of the Chinese Historical Society of the Pacific Northwest, and the first editor of its journal, The Annals of the Chinese Historical Society of the Pacific Northwest (Seattle, Washington).