Jump to content

C. R. Boxer

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected fromC.R. Boxer)

Sir

Charles Ralph Boxer
Born8 March 1904
Died27 April 2000
OccupationHistorian
Alma materRoyal Military College, Sandhurst

SirCharles Ralph BoxerFBAGCIH(8 March 1904 – 27 April 2000) was a British historian ofDutchandPortuguesemaritime and colonial history, especially in relation toSouth Asiaand theFar East.InHong Konghe was the chief spy for theBritish army intelligencein the years leading up toWorld War II.

Early life

[edit]

Charles Ralph Boxer was born atSandownon theIsle of Wightin 1904. On his father's side, he was a descendant of an illustrious British family that had served in command positions in every British war since theFrench Revolution.Boxer's father Colonel Hugh Edward Richard Boxer served in theLincolnshire Regimentand had been killed at theSecond Battle of Ypresin 1915. While his father's family may have been of Huguenot origin, the family of his mother, Jane Patterson, hailed from Scotland. Her forebears became successfulpastoralistsin 19th centuryTasmaniaand in Australia.

Education and military career

[edit]

Charles Boxer was educated atWellington Collegeand theRoyal Military College, Sandhurst,Boxer was gazetted a second lieutenant in the Lincolnshire Regiment in 1923 and served in that regiment for twenty-four years until 1947. He served inNorthern Ireland,then, following language and intelligence training, Charles Boxer was seconded to theImperial Japanese Armyin 1930 for three years as part of an exchange of Japanese and English officers. He was assigned to the 38th Infantry Regiment based atNara,Nara Prefecture,Japan. At the same time, he was assigned to the non-commissioned officers school atToyohashi.His housekeeper concubine was a northerner fromHakodateon the island ofHokkaido.In 1933, he qualified as an official interpreter in the Japanese language. It was in Japan that he expanded his interest in Portuguese imperial history, concentrating his attention on the first disastrous experiment of European incursion into Japan and its catastrophic ending whenTokugawaclosed off the country to outside influence in the 1640s. The Japanesecrucifiedhundreds of Christian missionaries and converts and for good measure executed a delegation of anxious envoys sent out from the Portuguese enclave ofMacauto make it entirely clear to the European outsiders that they meant what they said. This was the subject of Boxer's bookThe Christian Century of Japan.Boxer also took up the traditional Japanese sport ofkendo,becoming one of only four British nationals recorded to have done this up until that time. Joining the regimental team he became proficient in the art to the level of being awarded the rank ofnidan.He would later use his skill as a method of subterfuge in his profession as a spy when he was sent toHong Kongin 1936. On visits to the occupied territories he would often have a kendo bout, eat, drinkscotchand then pump the various Japanese officers and officials that he was socialising with for information in the true nature of a secret service agent.[1]

Boxer returned toLondonfor a two-year posting from 1935–36 to the military intelligence section of theWar Office.Posted to Hong Kong in 1936, he served as a General Staff Officer 3rd grade (GSO3) with British troops in China at Hong Kong, doing intelligence work. Between 1937 and 1941, Boxer, promoted from captain to major, became one of the key members of theFar East Combined Bureau,a British intelligence organisation that extended fromShanghaitoSingapore.By 1940, most of its Hong Kong office had been transferred to Singapore, leaving Boxer as the army's chief intelligence officer in the colony. In 1940, he was advanced to General Staff Officer 2nd grade (GSO2). Wounded in action during theJapanese attack on Hong Kongon 8 December 1941, he was taken by the Japanese as a prisoner of war and remained in captivity until 1945. After his release, Boxer returned to Japan in February 1946 as a member of the BritishFar Eastern Commission,a post that he served until the next year. During his military career, Boxer published 86 publications on Far Eastern history with a particular focus on the 16th and 17th centuries.

Academic career

[edit]
Visayankadatuan (royal) and his wife, wearing the distinctive color of his class (red),Boxer Codex.

As a major in the British Army, Boxer had resigned from the service in 1947, whenKing's College Londonoffered him its ″CamõesChair of Portuguese″, a post founded and co-funded byLisbon,and, at the time, the only such chair in the English-speaking world. During this period, theSchool of Oriental and African Studiesof theUniversity of Londonalso appointed him as its first Professor of the History of the Far East, serving in that post for two years from 1951 to 1953.

On retiring from the University of London in 1967, Boxer took up a visiting professorship atIndiana University,where he also served as an advisor to theLilly Librarylocated on its campus inBloomington, Indiana.From 1969 to 1972, Boxer held a personal chair in the history of European Overseas Expansion atYale University.

Charles R. Boxer died atSt. Albans,Hertfordshireat the age of 96.Kenneth Maxwellwrote after his death: ″To generations of historians of the Portuguese-speaking world C.R. Boxer was a true colossus. His highly original, pithy, and path-breaking books, monographs, and articles flowed forth with seeming effortlessness. Boxer's works covered the history of early European intrusions into Japan and China during the sixteenth century, and splendid accounts of the opulence and decline ofGoa,seat of Portugal's empire in Asia. In over 350 publications, all of the highest order of scholarship, Boxer wrote on sixteenth-century naval warfare in thePersian Gulf,the tribulations of the maritime trading route between Europe and Asia, a sparkling overview of Brazil during the eighteenth century in the age of gold strikes and frontier expansion, magnificent syntheses of both Dutch and Portuguese colonial history, as well as many pioneering comparative studies of local municipal institutions in Asia, Africa, and South America, race relations, and social mores. Famously in the 1960s at the height ofPortugal's colonial warsin Africa, he took on the "Luso-tropicalist"propaganda of theSalazar dictatorshipby unravelling its roots inGilberto Freyre's assertion of Portuguese colonialnon-racialismand was thoroughly vilified for it by the regime and its apologists.″ [2]

Personal life

[edit]

He was married to Ursula Norah Anstice Tulloch, a woman commonly called the most beautiful in Hong Kong, when he met and had an affair withEmily Hahn,theNew Yorker's China correspondent, who herself was involved with one of China's leading intellectuals,Zau Sinmay.In 1945, he married Hahn, with whom he had two daughters, Carola andAmanda Boxer.

Awards and honours

[edit]

Other awards:

Published works

[edit]

Bibliographies

  • S. George West,A List of the Writings of Charles Ralph Boxer Published Between 1926 and 1984, Compiled for his Eightieth Birthday(London: Tamesis Books Ltd, 1984).
  • “The Charles Boxer Bibliography,”Portuguese Studies,vol. 17, 2001, pp. 247–276.[3]

Selected works

  • A Portuguese Embassy to Japan (1644-1647). Translated from an Unpublished Portuguese Ms. etc.(Kegan Paul, 1928); republished 1979
  • Jan Compagnie in Japan, 1660-1817. An Essay(Martinus Nijhoff, 1936); republished 1950 & 1968
  • Fidalgos in the Far East, 1550-1770. Fact and Fancy in the History of Macao(Martinus Nijhoff, 1948); republished 1968
  • The Christian Century in Japan, 1549-1650(University of California, 1951); republished 1967, 1974 & 1993
  • Salvador de Sá and the Struggle for Brazil and Angola, 1602-1686(Athlone Press, 1952)
  • South China in the Sixteenth Century (1550-1575)(Hakluyt Society, 1953); editor
  • The Dutch in Brazil, 1624-1654(Clarendon Press, 1957)
  • The Great Ship from Amacon: Annals of Macao and the Old Japan Trade, 1555-1640(Centro de Estudos Historicos Ultramarinos, 1959)
  • The Tragic History of the Sea, 1589-1622(Hakluyt Society, 1959); editor
  • The Colour Question in the Portuguese Empire, 1415-1825(OUP, 1961)
  • The Golden Age of Brazil, 1695-1750: Growing Pains of a Colonial Society(University of California, 1962)
  • The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 1600-1800(Hutchinson, 1965); The "History of Human Society" series
  • Portuguese Society in the Tropics: Municipal Councils of Goa, Macao, Bahia and Luanda, 1510-1800(University of Wisconsin, 1965)
  • Francisco Vieira de Figueiredo: A Portuguese Merchant-Adventurer in South-East Asia, 1624-1667(Martinus Nijhoff, 1967)
  • Some Literary Sources for the History of Brazil in the Eighteenth Century. The Taylorian Lecture delivered 9 May 1967(Clarendon Press, 1967)
  • Further Selections from The Tragic History of the Sea, 1559-1565(Hakluyt Society, 1968); editor
  • The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415-1825(Hutchinson, 1969); The "History of Human Society" series
  • Mary and Misogyny: Women in Iberian Expansion Overseas 1415-1815. Some Facts, Fancies and Personalities(Duckworth, 1975)
  • The Church Militant and Iberian Expansion, 1440-1770(Johns Hopkins University, 1978)
  • Portuguese India in the Mid-Seventeenth Century(OUP, 1980)
  • From Lisbon to Goa, 1500-1750: Studies in Portuguese Maritime Enterprise(Routledge, 1984)
  • Portuguese Merchants and Missionaries in Feudal Japan, 1543-1640(Routledge, 1986)
  • Dutch Merchants and Mariners in Asia, 1602-1795(Routledge, 1988)

See also

[edit]

References

[edit]
  1. ^'A Truly British Samurai - The Exceptional Charles Boxer (1904-2000)' by Paul Budden. Published by Bunkasha 2015
  2. ^Kenneth R. Maxwell:The C.R. Boxer Affaire: Heroes, Traitors, and the Manchester GuardianArchived13 April 2014 at theWayback Machine,Council on Foreign Relations, 16 March 2001
  3. ^"The Charles Boxer Bibliography".Portuguese Studies.17:247–276. 2001.doi:10.1353/port.2001.0016.JSTOR41105171.S2CID245845046.

Further reading

[edit]

Obituaries

[edit]
[edit]
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=C._R._Boxer&oldid=1220529778"