A New Documentary History of Hong Kong, 1945–1997, edited by Florence Mok and Fung Chi Keung Charles (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2025)

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Through analysing newly released archival records and underexplored published sources from London, Hong Kong and other parts of the world, this documentary history fills the long-standing void in the existing scholarship by providing a thorough understanding of the history of colonial Hong Kong in the post-war period. The organisation of new primary sources will benefit researchers, teachers and students who research on, teach and study Hong Kong history as it provides an updated and improved understanding of various aspects of Hong Kong in a pivotal period. The book does not only address and revise familiar topics, such as governance, constitutional changes, political culture, economy and trade, fiscal and budgetary policy, education, cultural policies and migration, using new sources from a revisionist perspective, but it also aims at investigating topics that are underexploited in previous sourcebooks, such as transport and communication, the arts, medicine and healthcare, the environment and natural disasters, gender and family and race and diasporas. This documentary history therefore offers an innovative and comprehensive long-term perspective of colonial history in Hong Kong, providing useful insights into political developments in Hong Kong and the political transformation of China before and after 1997.

Dr. Florence MOK is a Nanyang Assistant Professor of History at Nanyang Technological University. She is a historian of colonial Hong Kong, modern China and British colonialism. She is the founder of the Hong Kong Research Hub and a committee member of the Society for Hong Kong Studies.  

Dr. Jack GREATREX is a Research Fellow in the History Department at Nanyang Technological University. He completed a PhD on the bodily, discursive, economic, and infrastructural histories of ‘pests’ in colonial Hong Kong and Malaya, undertaken at the University of Hong Kong. His research is located at the conjunctions of colonial, environmental, medical, and multi-species histories in Asia and the Pacific.

Miss Doris CHAN is a PhD student in the History Department at Nanyang technological University, Singapore.  She is interested in the transnational history of Hong Kong, the history of the British Empire in East and Southeast Asia, overseas Chinese, migration and colonial connections.