Thomas Larkin

Trump threatens 100 percent tariff on Canada over China deal Donald Trump's threat comes after Canada reached deal with China last week on trade of agriproducts, electric vehicles.

Hoping we remain consistent in our plans and don’t capitulate. At its base, such a threat vindicates Carney’s Davos speech.

Trying to get my students to read as many different news sources about current events as possible, but I have to admit that the @theguardian.com has struck just the most satisfying chord of sassy.

‘I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of peace,’ says Trump amid Greenland threats | First Thing Donald Trump links Greenland seizure threats to Nobel snub in letter to Norway’s prime minister. Plus, unseen home video of Martin Luther King Jr

I don't think I've ever heard anything more moronic and dangerous - and I used to have a day calendar of Bush-isms. Are the Americans that voted for this still proud of what they've done?

For Trump to presume that this will be remembered as anything other than deeply pathetic within the historical record is a masterclass in delusion.

Some important new government policy that Native Americans might be interested in:

Some Mapping Historical Hong Kong updates: we've been continuing to share data with the HK Spatial History team at HKBU. Good level of fidelity between the two databases, which bodes well for future data sharing. Their extensive roadmap is also going to greatly speed up our work on earlier decades.

One of my favourite outputs so far from the Hong Kong Spatial History Project. The product of a partnership between Kwong Chi Man's team at HK Baptist University and the archivists at the Hong Kong Public Records Office.

Having been reading quite a bit on the topic for an article I'm writing on amateurs in the U.S. consular and diplomatic branches... No. It's not a good thing.

Cultural tribute or Asian stereotype? Salem roiled by dispute over city seal. - The Boston Globe To one side, the seal contains an anachronistic, racial caricature of a 19th-century Asian merchant. To the other, it honors a progressive, cross-cultural commerce that benefited peoples a world apart...

Not sure which is more inconceivable: that Salem's city seal is what it is even today or that the historian defending it (or the article in fact) fails to mention the word "opium" even once, even as the family who traded it (Peabodys) commissioned the seal!
www.bostonglobe.com/2025/11/27/m...

The articles for "Who Belongs in the Empire" have now been published together as a special issue in Itinerario alongside the highly relevant special issue "Hidden Economies of Slavery." Check out both open-access collections now!

The studentship I did with the then HKHP was one of the most generous and supportive pathways through a PhD I could have imagined. Can't recommend this opportunity enough.

Legally speaking, if the US signs a treaty with another country, and then, during a conflict in which they aren’t belligerents, steals said treaty from said country. Is said country still required to honour the terms of it?

Nathan Cardon, Matthew Brown & Martin Hurcombe @fhmjh.bsky.social trace the flow of people/products/ideas concerning the bicycle's sports culture in a transatlantic triangle in the Journal of Sport History
muse.jhu.edu/pub/34/artic...

References to British opium smuggling: 5; to Western opium smuggling: 3; to American opium smuggling: 0

Americans used the war to establish themselves as active agents in the drug trade. Surely there's some connection here to Xi's ire about Trump's claims that China is flooding the US with drugs...

How the 19th-Century Opium War Shapes Xi’s Trade Clash With Trump

It's interesting that this article almost entirely elides - as was the historical tendency - American traders' explicit and significant hand in the opium trade. If we want to use the Opium War to understand this clash then we need to recognize that Americans were barely neutral and hardly blameless.

Our first video of the new series "Hong Kong History Academy" is out!

8 lectures, each comprising 3 sessions.

Lecture 1: Swire and Hong Kong
Prof. Robert Bickers
Session one: Why did the British go to China?

youtu.be/1gl_ecm9Tz0

Choosing to read the potential increase in one dollar coin circulation as a sign Trump is warming to the U.S. becoming Canada's 4th territory.

Dr Sijie Ren, who was supervised by @robertbickers and Adrian Howkins, was awarded the British Association for Chinese Studies 'Best Doctoral Thesis Prize' for their PhD “Science and Politics in Maoist China: The Synthetic Insulin Project and its Legacy."

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I've then combined the datasets so that all GPS points fall within the attributes table for the lots with which they align. The effect is that we can light up the lots that contain Carl Smith data and embed links to the archive, providing an alt. spatial/temporal means to search the index!

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Eric has also converted the dates into integer values so that we can isolate cards by date range, as many cover a few decades of history. I have then overlaid this data on the MHHK maps that fall within that date range (here's 1866).

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Exciting (for me) progress for this Friday's MHHK update. We've begun to experiment with integrating the Carl Smith Index Card collection for HK history. My colleague Eric Chow has been tokenizing the cards and appending GPS coordinates to recorded locations using the Google Maps API.

We are recruiting a Postdoc Research Associate (Oral History) at the Hong Kong History Centre at Bristol! Please feel free to circulate to any friends and colleagues, and/or get in touch if you're interested.

Wasn't totally satisfied with last week's map transformations, so I've been playing around with Thin Plate Spline transformations on the larger maps this week using the same reference points. Instantly better look, with much more accurate coastlines for Hong Kong and Kowloon.

The interns' primary role is to assist in creating a suite of georeferenced maps of Hong Kong from 1841-1997 using provided archival materials.

Their secondary role will be to enter data into selected maps from a variety of photographic and textual archival sources related to Hong Kong land use.

Candidates should have some background in late-19th/early-20th-century Chinese, British imperial, or colonial history, an interest in mapping, spatial history, and/or historical geography, and be in good academic standing. No prior experience with mapping software necessary.

"Mapping Historic Hong Kong explores how digital mapping tools and new technologies can be integrated with historical research to encourage urban heritage and an appreciation for histories of urban space and/or place, while benefiting both academic researchers and the wider public."

Embark on a Global Research Journey with Globalink Internship Join Mitacs Globalink Research Internship for Students. Expand your academic horizons with international research experiences.

Applications are open for the MITACS Globalink Research Internship, and we're looking for two undergraduate students to participate in the MHHK project next summer at UPEI. Internships are fully funded. Deadline closes 17 September.

Project ID is 49248

www.mitacs.ca/our-programs...

Kowloon also appears to have been a rush job or afterthought in many of these earlier maps. Its shoreline is highly approximate, requires a lot of manipulation, and no two maps that I've found from the era are quite the same in where they place things.

These maps have given me MHHK's first territory map. Ordnance Mapping of mid-nineteenth century HK proved really accurate to a point, but precision fell away once coastlines get involved. The result is that the maps have been easy to centre, but very difficult to precisely align along the shore.

Spent bits of the last week correcting new maps pulled from the HKPRO. Some truly interesting ones of the development of The Peak and Cheung Chau. I've pulled a series that I'm excited about as well that surveys Kowloon, NT, and Sai Wan village lots (still to be processed).