The Scramble For China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire, 1832-1914. By Robert Bickers. Allen Lane; 496 pages; £30. Buy from

AS NUMEROUS museums across China testify, the country dwells on its past in order to justify the present. A common theme is that of the “national humiliation” China says it suffered from the mid-19th century until the Communist Party came to power in 1949. To help prove that the party created a “new China” and has the right to rule it, schoolchildren are made to tramp around exhibits showing how foreigners scrambled to dismember China, how they poisoned it with opium, bullied (and sometimes butchered) its people and looted its treasures.

As far as it goes, this outline of what happened is true enough, though opium was commonly used by the Chinese elite before the British started peddling their own produce from India. But the party forbids exploration of anything that might blur this picture. One taboo area is what Chinese nationalists at the time saw as the foreign nature of the last imperial dynasty, the Qing, which collapsed in 1911. Sun Yat-sen, the revolutionary who helped topple it, held the ethnic Manchus who controlled the dynasty in more contempt than the Westerners who had forcibly set up colonial enclaves, the Russians who had carved off part of Manchuria, or the Japanese who had taken Taiwan after a war in 1895. To keep the story simple, the party prefers to view the Manchus as Chinese.

In his history of the foreign scramble for China, Robert Bickers of Bristol University looks mainly at the story of west European and, to a lesser extent, American interaction with the country. The Japanese and Russian strands of this hugely complex tale of an evolving nation-state are picked out in less detail. The anglophone actors take centre stage—rightly, perhaps, at first, given the pioneering role played by the British in China's history of humiliation. Mr Bickers takes 1832 as his starting point, the year when British ships sailed north from the Canton delta, carrying pamphlets, textiles and opium.

As the 1800s unfold, the stage becomes more crowded and Mr Bickers sometimes appears to wander in the detail. His story ends well short of the communist victory that the party claims sent foreign intruders scuttling, although China's ever-pragmatic nationalism allowed Britain to rule over Hong Kong and Portugal to control Macau until the end of the 20th century.

Mr Bickers specifies 1914 as his cut-off date (three years after the Qing's demise), but he describes 1913 as the turning point when “as a multinational enterprise, the scramble for China started to unravel”. With the outbreak of the first world war, “the European concert in China was broken”, he writes. The story, however, did not reach its climax until the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, which lasted from 1931 to the end of the second world war.

“The Scramble for China” is based largely on English-language sources, which leaves the reader sometimes yearning for more insight from other actors: the Germans and Russians, for example, whose response to the anti-foreign Boxer rebellion in 1900 was particularly brutal. British accounts provide rich illustrations of the clash between two civilisations whose early interactions were dogged by their respective convictions of their own superiority and the barbarity of the other.

Described now as a humiliation, the establishment of foreign settlements was not always seen this way by the Chinese. Mr Bickers says the arrangement was “simply a variant of the long-established practice of allowing sojourning communities to organise their own affairs”. The term “unequal treaties”, now routinely used in China to describe the agreements reached between foreign powers and the Qing government after several military defeats, was unknown until 1923. Chinese nationalism, portrayed by the party in terms suggesting it had always been a force, was slow and fitful in its 19th-century awakening.

British nationalism, by contrast, was at its height. The author notes how “humiliation” narratives fortified the minds of the British as they made inroads into China in the 1840s (among them the tale of how China had curtly rejected the request for trade made by Britain's first envoy to China, Lord Macartney, at the end of the 18th century). “They often talked, wrote and taught, as the Chinese came to talk, write and teach, about the lessons of history,” he says. This might not bode well for China's future behaviour. As the West's scramble for China showed, rising nations, eager to extend their global reach and easily riled by the slights of other powers, have a habit of behaving badly.