a thought-provoking Monday

On the way to the office on the MTR on a melancholy Monday, my languid mind was sparkled by Willem H. Boshoff and Johan Fourie's scholarly article "The significance of the Cape trade route to economic activity in the Cape Colony: a medium-term business cycle analysis" (European Review of Economic History, Vol. 14, Issue 3, Aug 2010, pp. 469-503) in which I, being completely ignorant of the economic history of the Cape Colony, learned that bread-baking was one of the lucrative industries, the other being beer brewing, given the VOC's monopoly in early seventeenth century. Bread-baking could be a lucrative industry in a colonial context.

I then thought of one of the traditional scandals against the colonial settlers in early British Hong Kong related to a bakery appealing to Europeans in which bread was poisoned by the local Chinese. The case reflects the multifaceted aspects of social history of colonial Hong Kong in particularly the conflict between the colonizers and colonized. Inspired by Boshoff and Fourie's article, I began to drive beyond the traditional perspective to the economic and cultural history of the colonial settlers in Colonial Hong Kong and Asia at large and to look at the food production (e.g. farm and raw materials), importation (e.g. wheat and meat), and consumption (e.g. bakery and restaurant) among the Europeans in the Far East, such as Japan and China.