Relations between Britain and China have, for over 150 years, been inextricably bound up with the taking of Hong Kong Island on 26 January 1841. The man responsible, Britain's plenipotentiary Captain Charles Elliot, was recalled by his government in disgrace and has been vilified ever since by China. This book describes the taking of Hong Kong from Elliot's point of view for the first time '- through the personal letters of himself and his wife Clara '- and shows a man of intelligence, conscience and humanitarian instincts. The book gives new insights into Sino-British relations of the period. Because these are now being re-assessed both historically and for the future, revelations about Elliot's role, intentions and analysis are significant and could make an important difference to our understanding of the dynamics of these relations. On a different level, the book explores how Charles the private man, with his wife by his side, experienced events, rather than how Elliot the public figure reported them to the British government. The work is therefore of great historiographical interest.

From Homer to Jane Austen, storytellers have entertained their audiences with tales of women in disputes, as parties and peacemakers. This is our attempt to write their history, relying as far as possible on primary sources, documents which have survived by chance, never intended for our eyes by those who created and preserved them. In 534AD, the Roman emperor Justinian expressly forbade women to act as arbitrators. In the thirteenth century Saint Thomas Aquinas stated that 'woman is naturally subject to man, because in man the discretion of reason predominates'. Many have assumed that what was laid down as law or proclaimed as authority represented the reality. But women do not always do what men tell them they should. We have set out to find what has happened in practice over four thousand years, at least in Europe, beginning in the Bible and Ancient Greece and Rome, but thereafter concentrating on England, with regular references to the Continent. A chapter on Anglo-Saxon England shows the inextricable ties with the Continent among women of the highest rank, as do two of the four chapters that follow on the Middle Ages. Those women often mediated and arbitrated, but they also resolved disputes by a number of other ways. Then we show how common it was for titled women in England to resolve disputes. A chapter on 'untitled women' provides plenty of evidence of the regular resolution of their disputes. There is a digression then to Malta, to the records of a fifteenth-century notary, which tell the stories of women of every station and their disputes. England's greatest monarch, Elizabeth I supported women with free legal aid and her own personal intervention, in ways never since matched. The practice of submitting women's disputes to mediation and arbitration survived through the seventeenth century, dispite revolution, regicide, fire and plague. A tailpiece tells how a dispute concerning the will of Temperance Flowerdew, one of the earliest European settlers in the 'New World', was resolved by the English Privy Council. A chapter on the eighteenth century emphasises the English government's encouragement of mediation and arbitration. ending with how Mary Musgrove's mediation helped to establish the colony of Georgia, and two sections on France, one Pre-Revolutionary, one Revolutionary. They challenge others to explore developments in the North American colonies and France. The Conclusion widens that challenge. Lady Anne Clifford, a woman of infinite strength of will, has demanded the last word. She simply refused a royal command to submit to an arbitration which would have robbed her of the vast landholdings she held in her own right.

At midnight on 30 June 1997, Hong Kong reverted to Chinese sovereignty after 150 years of British rule. The moment when the British flag came down was dramatic enough but the ten years leading up to it were full of surprising incident and change. These 'Letters from Hong Kong', written by an Englishwoman who was involved in those events from 1987, are both an unusual historical record and a heartwarming account of women's domestic, intellectual and political activity. This epilogue brings Hong Kong up to date ten years after the Handover.

A crater on the planet Mercury is named Maria de Dominici. Born in 1645, she was the first established Maltese woman artist. She, and other women in Maltese history, are little known about. But Malta is much more than Knights of St John and Second World War courage. This book tells their story through the waves of women who arrived in the archipelago of Malta and Gozo, starting with Sicilian farmers 7,000 years ago, and ranging through Phoenician, Roman, and Arab times, until women of European extraction, but speaking an Arabic-influenced language, established a Maltese identity. Best known of those who have made their mark are, perhaps, Mabel Strickland, newspaper proprietor, and Agatha Barbara, in 1982 first woman president of the independent Republic of Malta. But the lives of less-known women of all classes who flourished in the islands over the centuries have also been reconstructed here, from Betta Caloiro, accused of witchcraft, who died aged 89 in the Inquisitor's prison, to the Marchesa Bettina Dorell, with her grand palazzo at Gudja. Itineraries take the reader to those places. British women, such as Emma Hamilton, Hester Stanhope, Florence Nightingale and Vera Brittain, began arriving in Malta in 1800, during and after French Revolutionary occupation; and many settled there temporarily or permanently, from governors' wives dispensing charity to shopkeepers, hoteliers and teachers. As often as possible, the history of women in Malta and the places in which they had their being are told and described through the writing of women: archaeologists, historians, travellers, novelists and poets.

'The book grew out of a habit, early adopted when on her travels...of writing...an unpretending narrative of the previous day's proceedings to be sent home to her father.' Thus wrote Thomas Brassey of his wife Annie. As for his own account of their travels, Susanna Hoe describes it as 'full of reports of experts...and often about exports.' And she explores the question, are women travel companions' accounts more generally 'unpretending narratives', and men's the opposite? The theme expanded when the author was asked, 'Do women write with more immediacy, with more colour, more empathy and more attention to detail?' Using extensive quotations, the author pursues those and other questions through the relations and accounts of couples visiting or living in foreign places, from Liberia to Siberia, from Vanuatu to Chinese Turkestan, between 1664 and 1973.

Marianna Bussalai, the poet and anti-Fascist activist of the Barbagia region, wrote that she felt humiliated at school 'wondering why, in the history of Italy, Sardinia was never mentioned. I deduced that Sardinia was not Italty and had to have a separate history'. It is not surprising that islands tend to be different from the country to which they are in some way attached. But Sardinia's personality differs even more from that of Italy than one might expect. This book explores that difference through the island's women. Sardinia has been inhabited for longer than many European countries; of its earlier peoples, the best-known are the pre-historic Nuraghic. The hundreds of tall and mysterious megalithic towers which still grace the landscape are the most outward distinctive remnants of their civilisation. But it is from the myriad and tantalising clay statuettes found in ritual wells that it is possible to suggest aspects of women's lives. These are now in archaeological museums, such as that of Cagliari; many of the wells still exist. There followed invasions, colonisations and settlements - often bringing women exiles or landowners - by phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Muslims, Catalans, Genoese, Pisans, Spaniards and Savoyards, until finally the island became part of a united Italy, But, as the Swede Amelie Posse-Brazdova, sentenced to exile in Alghero during the First World War, was to write, 'For many centuries the Sardinians had been so fooled and exploited by the Italians, especially the Genoese merchants, that in the end they began to look upon them as their worst enemies.' However much that enmity is now little evident, Sardinia is still very much its own place, with its own languages. This is true of Alghero with its distinctive aura of Catalan occupation, of Marianna Bussalai's always intransigent Barbagia, and of Oristano where perhaps Sardinia's only well-known historical woman, Eleanora d'Arborea, ruled as Giudicessa in the fourteenth century. Although still particularly revered, she epitomised the strong and advanced women, from peasants to poitical activists, who emerge here from those often turbulent centuries.

The writing of history used to concentrate on narrative, analysis or theory. The historian stayed out of sight. This book is part of a more recent trend. Here, Susanna Hoe discusses her relationship to her material, the processes of research and writing, and her characters. She does so by exploring and sometimes comparing, the lives of Chinese and western women who have lived in China, Hong Kong and Macau, and links them not only to herself but also to contemporary women's issues, human rights and colonialism. "Chinese Footprints" is about the practice of history. The approach and style make it both accessible and teachable. The characters include 1930's civil and women rights campaigners Shi Liang, China's Minister of Justice 1949 to 1959, Agnes Smedley and Stella Benson, autobiographical writer Xiao Hong, revolutionary Soong Ching Ling, traveller Ella Maillart, philanthropist Clara Ho Tung, and Clara Elliot, who was part of the story of Hong Kong's cession to Britain in 1841.

On 20 June 1900, Baron von Ketteler, the German Minister, was assassinated in a Peking street. By 4pm the first shots were fired into the legation quarter and the siege of foreigners by Boxers and imperial troops had begun. Among the besieged were 148 women from America, Europe, Russia and Japan and Maud, the Baron's American widow. What were their experiences? How did they cope with their 79 children for two months, without enough to eat, often under fire? This book tells their story - of courage, grief, humour, friendship, ill-health, and hard work - mostly through their own accounts. It identifies the women for the first time as individuals: missionary teachers and doctors, "globe trotters", and the wives of diplomats, officials, railway engineers, merchants, bankers and the owner of the Peking Hotel.

In 1792 Louise Girardin - disguised as a French sailor - was the first white woman to visit Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania). She was followed by Martha Hayes who stepped ashore in 1803 among the first women settlers and convicts; she was the pregnant 16 year-old mistress of their leader. But Aboriginal women had already lived on the island for perhaps 40,000 years. The first to be named in exploration literature is Ouray-Ouray; the best known is Trukanini, erroneously called the last Tasmanian when she died in 1876. In the 1970s, Aboriginal rights became a live issue, often with women in the forefront, as they were, too, in environmentalism. This book gathers together these strands, and that of a vibrant women's literature, linking them to place - an island of still unspoilt beauty and unique flora and fauna.

A diary of a stay in Papua New Guinea. The author introduces the reader to the family cleaner - Margaret - her extended family, her unreliable husbands and her independent spirit. Then there is Kaman, the gardener, who has to be prised away from his creation so that his employers can enjoy it.