Sir Charles Ralph Boxer | |
|---|---|
| Born | 8 March 1904 |
| Died | 27 April 2000 |
| Occupation | Historian |
| Alma mater | Royal Military College, Sandhurst |
SirCharles Ralph BoxerFBAGCIH (8 March 1904 – 27 April 2000) was a British historian ofDutch andPortuguese maritime and colonial history, especially in relation toSouth Asia and theFar East. InHong Kong he was the chief spy for theBritish army intelligence in the years leading up toWorld War II.
Charles Ralph Boxer was born atSandown on theIsle 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 theFrench Revolution. Boxer's father Colonel Hugh Edward Richard Boxer served in theLincolnshire Regiment and had been killed at theSecond 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 successfulpastoralists in 19th centuryTasmania and in Australia.
Charles Boxer was educated atWellington College and theRoyal 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 inNorthern Ireland, then, following language and intelligence training, Charles Boxer was seconded to theImperial 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 atNara,Nara Prefecture, Japan. At the same time, he was assigned to the non-commissioned officers school atToyohashi. His housekeeper concubine was a northerner fromHakodate on the island ofHokkaido. 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 whenTokugawa closed off the country to outside influence in the 1640s. The Japanesecrucified hundreds of Christian missionaries and converts and for good measure executed a delegation of anxious envoys sent out from the Portuguese enclave ofMacau to make it entirely clear to the European outsiders that they meant what they said. This was the subject of Boxer's bookThe Christian Century of Japan. Boxer also took up the traditional Japanese sport ofkendo, 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 ofnidan. He would later use his skill as a method of subterfuge in his profession as a spy when he was sent toHong Kong in 1936. On visits to the occupied territories he would often have a kendo bout, eat, drinkscotch 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 toLondon for a two-year posting from 1935–36 to the military intelligence section of theWar 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 theFar East Combined Bureau, a British intelligence organisation that extended fromShanghai toSingapore. 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 theJapanese 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 BritishFar 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.
As a major in the British Army, Boxer had resigned from the service in 1947, whenKing's College London offered him its ″Camões Chair of Portuguese″, a post founded and co-funded byLisbon, and, at the time, the only such chair in the English-speaking world. During this period, theSchool of Oriental and African Studies of theUniversity 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 atIndiana University, where he also served as an advisor to theLilly Library located on its campus inBloomington, Indiana. From 1969 to 1972, Boxer held a personal chair in the history of European Overseas Expansion atYale University.
Charles R. Boxer died atSt. 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 ofGoa, 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 thePersian 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 ofPortugal's colonial wars in Africa, he took on the "Luso-tropicalist" propaganda of theSalazar dictatorship by unravelling its roots inGilberto Freyre's assertion of Portuguese colonialnon-racialism and was thoroughly vilified for it by the regime and its apologists.″[2]
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 withEmily Hahn, theNew 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 andAmanda Boxer.
Other awards:
Bibliographies
Selected works
