Dr. William R. Kelson (Society of Fellows, The University of Hong Kong)
William R. Kelson (he/him) is a historian of modern China and its place in the world economy. He was educated at Emerson College, Boston College, the University of Georgia, the Taipei Language Institute, and IUP Tsinghua. His research has been supported by the Luce Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Fulbright-Hays Program, the John E. Rovensky Fellowships in International Business & Economic History, and the Henry Kaufman Financial History Fellowship. He is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong and a Junior Fellow at its Society of Fellows in the Humanities. There he is turning his PhD dissertation—a wide-ranging history of the Chinese financial crisis of the 1880s—into a book manuscript. That study, researched at archives in Shanghai, Taipei, and London, explores the ways in which China’s integration into global capitalism in the late-nineteenth century made the late-Qing financial system increasingly fragile, as well as the consequences of that financial fragility for Qing society writ large.

In October 1881, an overheated Hong Kong housing market collapsed. Property values fell by 50% or more, financial institutions that had lent money against real estate collateral went bankrupt, construction of tong lau and other urban structures ground to a halt, indebted compradors at foreign banks disappeared, and land speculators found themselves in bankruptcy court, as a commercial depression descended on the city. In this talk, I will delve into the causes and consequences of the bursting of this Hong Kong housing bubble, or “land mania,” from two perspectives. First, I will examine the extent to which the crisis was an endogenous, market-driven housing crash (of the sort familiar throughout the history of capitalism) or an exogenous, government-driven crash (triggered by then-Governor John Pope Hennessy’s colonial housing policy). Second, I will examine the extent to which the property crash was a localized financial crisis and/or the opening salvo of a broader deflationary banking panic and depression that spread to the Yangtze Valley and China coast.