Global Shanghai, 1850-2010: A History in Fragments (Asia’s Transformations/Asia’s Great Cities) 1st Edition by Jeffrey N Wasserstrom (PDF)

Description

This book explores the play of international forces and international ideas about Shanghai, looking backward as far as its transformation into a subdivided treaty port in the 1840s, and looking forward to its upcoming hosting of China’s first World’s Fair, the 2010 Expo. As such, Global Shanghai is a lively and informative read for students and scholars of Chinese studies and urban studies and anyone interested in the history of Shanghai.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Professor Wasserstrom employs the historical perspective to trace the 150 years development of Shanghai as a global city since 1850. This book is, on the one hand, a collection of history of urban legends and myths as well as fairy tales narrated by people in and out of Shanghai with regard to this city and its political and economic connections with the outside world as a global city. Such legends and myths could encompass ill-digested statements, amusing twaddle, and malignant inventions of the celebrity and notoriety of the global process of this city. On the other hand, this book is a study of this Chinese city with historical events and personal experience about its political, social, and economic evolution in different eras in order to distinguish between Shanghai as it was and Shanghai as boosters had imaginatively portrayed it.In this book, Professor Wasserstrom picks seven snapshot years to characterize salient features of when and how Shanghai globalized, de-globalized, and re-globalized itself both culturally and economically. The seven snapshot years were fraught with myths, legends, tales, celebrities, and critical events. For example, the visit of Shanghai by the son of Queen Victoria and his wife in 1890, the influence of western political thinkers, intellectuals, philosophers, and novelists in the 1920s, the Janus-face of lifestyles in the so-called ‘New Shanghai’ due primarily to the ruling of the Communist Party in 1950 and 1975, and the protean transformations of the metropolis as the Chinese government undertook massive infrastructural projects and the inflows of foreign direct investment in 2000 have demonstrated the changing facets of Shanghai in the globalization process.This is a must book for readers who are interested in Chinese modern and contemporary history and urban study. Professor Wasserstrom collects and analyses abundant primary and secondary evidences that the history ‘Old Shanghai’ (before 1949) and ‘New Shanghai’ (after 1949) cannot be separately completely as the modernization of the city in the twentieth first century is virtually a reflection of the 1890s and 1920s when Shanghai was in the rapid pace of globalization. Professor Wasserstorm distinguishes Shanghai from other worldwide cities such as New York, London, and Paris in which the history of globalization in Shanghai was not linear. The concluding chapter maintains that Shanghai would be more globalized in the twentieth first century. The process of globalization in Shanghai since the nineteenth century is not merely a process of ‘East meets West’ in which ideas, goods, and people from countries in Asia had also influenced Shanghai (‘East meets East’).

⭐A nicely written book. I was looking for a first introduction to Shanghai history and I was quite satisfied by this reading (and by the bibliographical suggestions at the end of the book). Satisfied maybe is not the right word, since Wasserstrom’s book should be considered an “appetizer”: once you read this book, you’ll be surely willing to read more about such a fascinating city.

⭐

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