Mapping connections: exploring the networks of Anglophone foreign women in late Imperial China, 1860-1911

The digital mapping of correspondence and affiliations reveals clusters of emotional support, institutional embeddedness, and shifting interpersonal dynamics that illuminate how women responded to displacement, illness, marriage, and political upheaval. These patterns are interpreted through the lens of the history of emotions, particularly William Reddy’s concept of emotional regimes and Barbara Rosenwein’s emotional <br>communities, to recover how emotional expression both reflected and challenged normative structures of feeling within missionary and expatriate communities. <br><br>By foregrounding affective ties and visualising data through network analysis, this thesis contributes methodologically to the digital humanities and substantively to the emotional and gendered history of empire.

It argues that English-speaking women, despite national, denominational, and class differences, gravitated toward one another through shared language, religious ideals, and cultural frameworks, forming networks that were both pragmatic and affectively charged. In doing so, it repositions Anglophone women as central to the maintenance and negotiation of expatriate life in China, offering a new model for integrating emotional history with computational network analysis in imperial history. <br><br><i>Thesis is embargoed until 31 July 2031.</i>