[3] Bickers argues in this "biography of a nobody" that though Tinkler himself was an unimportant man who achieved a brief moment of fame after his murder in June 1939 when he was bayoneted to death by Japanese Marines, his life as a policeman in Shanghai revealed much about how the British Empire worked in practice.
[4] The British historian Robert Brown wrote that in "...the 1920s and 1930s the city [Shanghai] was a raucous patchwork of vice, glitz, hedonism and modernity, a thriving transnational metropolis marked by peaks of fortune and gaping chasms of inequality.
"[8] Brown noted that the Shangahilanders as the white community of Shanghai were known expected men such as Tinkler to be at their service endlessly while looking down upon him as a man from the lower orders of British society, which deeply hurt his ego.
But this doesn’t reduce to mere racism, as the races he despised included the Scots, former members of the Royal Navy, and the British public (in his words “the most prejudiced, uneducated, ignorant people in the world”).
"[9]The American historian Carolyn Wakeman praised Bickers for his colorful and evocative portrayal of Shanghai as experienced by Tinkler, a dedicated policeman who walked the beat in one of the world's most violent and dangerous cities.
[10] Wakeman noted that Tinker was an unlikeable man, an intensely racist policeman with anger issues and a violent streak, and felt it was a tribute to Bicker's work as an historian that he was able to craft a fascinating story out of Tinkler's life.
[11] Wakeman praised the way that Bickers was able to "deftly" recreate the life of Tinker via his letters, PRO records, newspaper accounts, guidebooks, family histories, local archives and interviews.
[13] Marcia R. Ristaino in her review of Empire Made Me described Tinkler as "a rather dashing young man who is intelligent and ambitious" who after his honorable discharge from the British Army in 1919 decided almost upon a whim to join the Shanghai Municipal Police out of a sense of adventure.
[14] Ristaino felt the story told in Empire Made Me was a tragedy as an intelligent man whose personality was well suited to police work fell into a self-destructive spiral of heavy drinking, broken relationships with every women who ever loved him, resentment at the Shanghailanders and rage issues.
[15] Ristanio wrote that: "This view of empire, as seen from the bottom rung, shows the clear divisions between those who are recognized as pukka, enjoying enormous privileges, many at the expense of the Chinese, and those other whites who must struggle interminably against their countrymen's class discrimination, snobbery, and their own false illusions.
[17] Schoolmaker concluded: "Beyond ruminating on the ‘silence’ left by the absence of source materials so familiar to social historians, Bickers explores the humanity behind the functionary and so goes some way towards giving historical life to someone who would have otherwise remained a narrative function – simply an ‘imperialist’ or a ‘policeman’.
The American historian Karen Fang praised Bickers for his treatment of gender, writing:"Gender is a recurring aspect of Bickers’ narrative, which thoughtfully illustrates how the strong masculinity essential to British imperial ideology required constant performance and self-indoctrination—a telling instability in Tinkler’s history that suggests how empire was already breaking down...A sympathetic but still critical text, Empire Made Me refuses to romanticize either the cosmopolitan exoticism of contemporary Shanghai or the quotidian violence of colonial policing.
As Bickers puts it, in another comparison to a pathbreaking historigraphical work that clearly influenced him, Tinkler resembles the “ordinary men” Christopher Browning has described in the Polish police reserves during the German occupation, for whom Jewish extermination was part of their daily commission."
Then there’s the inconvenient fact that the great majority of the population in the small International Settlement was Chinese – and that they had moved there of their own free will...Many books on the old Shanghai describe the decadence and glamour, the shocking contrasts of wealth and poverty, the whores, gangsters, and foreign elites.