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C. R. Boxer

February 16, 2024

Sir Charles Ralph Boxer FBA GCIH (8 March 1904 – 27 April 2000) was a British historian of Dutch and Portuguese maritime and colonial history, especially in relation to South Asia and the Far East. In Hong Kong he was the chief spy for the British army intelligence in the years leading up to World War II.

Sir

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

Early life edit

Charles Ralph Boxer was born at Sandown on the Isle of Wight in 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 the French Revolution. Boxer's father Colonel Hugh Edward Richard Boxer served in the Lincolnshire Regiment and had been killed at the Second Battle of Ypres in 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 successful pastoralists in 19th century Tasmania and in Australia.

Education and military career edit

Charles Boxer was educated at Wellington College and the Royal 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 in Northern Ireland, then, following language and intelligence training, Charles Boxer was seconded to the Imperial Japanese Army in 1930 for three years as part of an exchange of Japanese and English officers. He was assigned to the 38th Infantry Regiment based at Nara, Nara Prefecture, Japan. At the same time, he was assigned to the non-commissioned officers school at Toyohashi. His housekeeper concubine was a northerner from Hakodate on the island of Hokkaido. 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 when Tokugawa closed off the country to outside influence in the 1640s. The Japanese crucified hundreds of Christian missionaries and converts and for good measure executed a delegation of anxious envoys sent out from the Portuguese enclave of Macau to make it entirely clear to the European outsiders that they meant what they said. This was the subject of Boxer's book The Christian Century of Japan. Boxer also took up the traditional Japanese sport of kendo, 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 of nidan. He would later use his skill as a method of subterfuge in his profession as a spy when he was sent to Hong Kong in 1936. On visits to the occupied territories he would often have a kendo bout, eat, drink scotch and 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 to London for a two-year posting from 1935–36 to the military intelligence section of the War 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 the Far East Combined Bureau, a British intelligence organisation that extended from Shanghai to Singapore. 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 the Japanese attack on Hong Kong on 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 British Far 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

 
Visayan kadatuan (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, when King's College London offered him its ″Camões Chair of Portuguese″, a post founded and co-funded by Lisbon, and, at the time, the only such chair in the English-speaking world. During this period, the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London also 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 at Indiana University, where he also served as an advisor to the Lilly Library located on its campus in Bloomington, Indiana. From 1969 to 1972, Boxer held a personal chair in the history of European Overseas Expansion at Yale University.

Charles R. Boxer died at St. Albans, Hertfordshire at the age of 96. Kenneth Maxwell wrote 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 of Goa, 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 the Persian 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 of Portugal's colonial wars in Africa, he took on the "Luso-tropicalist" propaganda of the Salazar dictatorship by unravelling its roots in Gilberto Freyre's assertion of Portuguese colonial non-racialism and 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 with Emily Hahn, the New 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 and Amanda 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 Guardian 13 April 2014 at the Wayback 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. JSTOR 41105171. S2CID 245845046.

Further reading edit

  • Boyd, Kelly, ed. Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writers (Rutledge, 1999) 2:110-11
  • Budden, ed. A Truly British Samurai, the Exceptional Charles Boxer (1904 -2000). Published by Bunkasha, 2015
  • Cummins, J. S. (2007). "Boxer, Charles Ralph". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/74008. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  • Lequin, Frank (2000). "In Memoriam: Charles Ralph Boxer F.B.A.: 8 March 1904 - 27 April 2000". Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde. 156 (4): 671–685. doi:10.1163/22134379-90003825. ISSN 0006-2294. JSTOR 27865661.

Obituaries edit

  • The Guardian Magisterial historian of Portugal and its dark imperial past
  • Renaissance Studies Obituary Professor C. R. Boxer
  • The Asia Society of Japan
  • Reminiscences [1]

External links edit

  • The Christian Century in Japan, by Charles Boxer

February 16, 2024
boxer, charles, ralph, boxer, gcih, march, 1904, april, 2000, british, historian, dutch, portuguese, maritime, colonial, history, especially, relation, south, asia, east, hong, kong, chief, british, army, intelligence, years, leading, world, sircharles, ralph,. Sir Charles Ralph Boxer FBA GCIH 8 March 1904 27 April 2000 was a British historian of Dutch and Portuguese maritime and colonial history especially in relation to South Asia and the Far East In Hong Kong he was the chief spy for the British army intelligence in the years leading up to World War II SirCharles Ralph BoxerBorn8 March 1904Died27 April 2000OccupationHistorianAlma materRoyal Military College Sandhurst Contents 1 Early life 2 Education and military career 3 Academic career 4 Personal life 5 Awards and honours 6 Published works 7 See also 8 References 9 Further reading 9 1 Obituaries 10 External linksEarly life editCharles Ralph Boxer was born at Sandown on the Isle of Wight in 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 the French Revolution Boxer s father Colonel Hugh Edward Richard Boxer served in the Lincolnshire Regiment and had been killed at the Second Battle of Ypres in 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 successful pastoralists in 19th century Tasmania and in Australia Education and military career editCharles Boxer was educated at Wellington College and the Royal 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 in Northern Ireland then following language and intelligence training Charles Boxer was seconded to the Imperial Japanese Army in 1930 for three years as part of an exchange of Japanese and English officers He was assigned to the 38th Infantry Regiment based at Nara Nara Prefecture Japan At the same time he was assigned to the non commissioned officers school at Toyohashi His housekeeper concubine was a northerner from Hakodate on the island of Hokkaido 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 when Tokugawa closed off the country to outside influence in the 1640s The Japanese crucified hundreds of Christian missionaries and converts and for good measure executed a delegation of anxious envoys sent out from the Portuguese enclave of Macau to make it entirely clear to the European outsiders that they meant what they said This was the subject of Boxer s book The Christian Century of Japan Boxer also took up the traditional Japanese sport of kendo 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 of nidan He would later use his skill as a method of subterfuge in his profession as a spy when he was sent to Hong Kong in 1936 On visits to the occupied territories he would often have a kendo bout eat drink scotch and 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 to London for a two year posting from 1935 36 to the military intelligence section of the War 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 the Far East Combined Bureau a British intelligence organisation that extended from Shanghai to Singapore 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 the Japanese attack on Hong Kong on 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 British Far 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 nbsp Visayan kadatuan 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 when King s College London offered him its Camoes Chair of Portuguese a post founded and co funded by Lisbon and at the time the only such chair in the English speaking world During this period the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London also 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 at Indiana University where he also served as an advisor to the Lilly Library located on its campus in Bloomington Indiana From 1969 to 1972 Boxer held a personal chair in the history of European Overseas Expansion at Yale University Charles R Boxer died at St Albans Hertfordshire at the age of 96 Kenneth Maxwell wrote 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 of Goa 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 the Persian 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 of Portugal s colonial wars in Africa he took on the Luso tropicalist propaganda of the Salazar dictatorship by unravelling its roots in Gilberto Freyre s assertion of Portuguese colonial non racialism and was thoroughly vilified for it by the regime and its apologists 2 Personal life editHe was married to Ursula Norah Anstice Tulloch a woman commonly called the most beautiful in Hong Kong when he met and had an affair with Emily Hahn the New 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 and Amanda Boxer Awards and honours editHonorary doctorate University of Utrecht 1950 Honorary doctorate University of Lisbon 1952 Fellow of the British Academy 1957 Honorary doctorate Universidade Federal da Bahia 1959 Honorary doctorate University of Liverpool 1966 Member of the China Academy Taiwan 1966 Papal Knight of the Order of St Gregory the Great 1969 Honorary doctorate University of Hong Kong 1971 Honorary doctorate University of Peradeniya 1980 Gold Medal Instituto Historico e Geografico Brasileiro 1986 Caird Medal of the National Maritime Museum 1989 Distinguished Service Award Conference on Latin American History 1987Other awards Knight of Military Order of Saint James of the Sword Portugal Grand Cross of the Order of Infante D Henrique Portugal Published works editBibliographies 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 amp 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 amp 1993 Salvador de Sa 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 editBoxer CodexReferences edit A Truly British Samurai The Exceptional Charles Boxer 1904 2000 by Paul Budden Published by Bunkasha 2015 Kenneth R Maxwell The C R Boxer Affaire Heroes Traitors and the Manchester Guardian Archived 13 April 2014 at the Wayback Machine Council on Foreign Relations 16 March 2001 The Charles Boxer Bibliography Portuguese Studies 17 247 276 2001 doi 10 1353 port 2001 0016 JSTOR 41105171 S2CID 245845046 Further reading editBoyd Kelly ed Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writers Rutledge 1999 2 110 11 Budden ed A Truly British Samurai the Exceptional Charles Boxer 1904 2000 Published by Bunkasha 2015 Cummins J S 2007 Boxer Charles Ralph Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online ed Oxford University Press doi 10 1093 ref odnb 74008 Subscription or UK public library membership required Lequin Frank 2000 In Memoriam Charles Ralph Boxer F B A 8 March 1904 27 April 2000 Bijdragen tot de Taal Land en Volkenkunde 156 4 671 685 doi 10 1163 22134379 90003825 ISSN 0006 2294 JSTOR 27865661 Obituaries edit The Guardian Magisterial historian of Portugal and its dark imperial past Renaissance Studies Obituary Professor C R Boxer The Asia Society of Japan In Memoriam Charles Ralph Boxer 1904 2000 Reminiscences 1 External links editThe Christian Century in Japan by Charles Boxer Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title C R Boxer amp oldid 1192846204, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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