Shaping Modern Shanghai: Colonialism in China's Global City by Isabella Jackson (review)

Shaping Modern Shanghai: Colonialism in China's Global City offers a detailed study of the major colonial institution in one of the most important cities in Republican China: the Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC), which governed the International Settlement in Shanghai from the mid-1840s until the relinquishment of the settlement in May 1943. As a treaty port open to foreign residents and companies, Shanghai became not only a major industrial and financial hub in China but also a center for political and cultural life, playing a significant role in the birth of Chinese nationalism. At a time of economic development and political and social unrest (the May Thirtieth movement of 1925, recurrent strikes and boycotts, the Second Sino-Japanese War from 1937 to 1945), the SMC's primary mission was to maintain a stable environment that was conducive to business. As the population of the International Settlement grew from 100,000 in 1880 to 1,000,000 in 1930, the SMC expanded its areas of intervention and increasingly shaped everyday life in the International Settlement.

Jackson's main argument is that the SMC exemplified the specifically transnational nature of colonialism in China. It was transnational in the sense that it involved nonstate actors who cooperated on the ground beyond national interests. The SMC was a transnational institution both politically and socially. Politically, it remained distant from imperial oversight. In contrast to the French Municipal Council that ruled the French Concession, the SMC was not subject to consular authority. The SMC, financially self-sufficient and able to maintain its own defense force, was proud of its political autonomy. In sum, the SMC acted much like the government of an independent city-state through its policy of territorial expansion and its governmental powers of taxing and policing the International Settlement. Socially, the SMC was a transnational body of people, including 25 different nationalities. Transnationalism, however, did not mean equality, as the SMC maintained a strict racial hierarchy between foreigners and Chinese, and even among foreigners (Russians, Sikhs). Transnational colonialism, Jackson argues, does not bear the positive assumption of cosmopolitanism. Although Chinese representation on the SMC increased after 1927, the British continued to dominate.

Observing the peculiar neglect of the SMC in the history of colonialism in China, Jackson helps to fill this historiographical void by drawing on "the vast holdings of the Shanghai municipal archives" (and secondarily, those of the Foreign Office in Britain) and putting forward "the concept of transnational colonialism to explain the nature of colonialism in China" (2). This concept, Jackson argues, is not only more appropriate to the Shanghai case but is further applicable to other colonial contexts. Contributing to the [End Page E-25] recent scholarship on transnationalism, her argument has broad implications for the history of colonialism and nationalism in China and beyond. She offers a convincing alternative to such controversial concepts as hypo-, hyper-, semi-, and quasi-colonialism and the even more vague notion of "colonial modernity," all of which fail to capture the full complexity of colonialism in China. In contrast, she provides a more nuanced and embodied view of colonialism in Shanghai. As a social historian, her work is strongly grounded in primary materials and historical facts. She demonstrates a genuine concern for human actors, unveiling their daily work and the SMC's concrete impact on the residents' everyday lives.

The book interweaves three key themes that serve as recurrent motifs throughout the book: similarities to and differences from British formal colonies, transnational influences and limits of transnationalism due to racial tensions, the challenges facing the SMC in the form of financial (tight budget), geographical (settlement boundaries), and legal (land regulations, bylaws) limitations. The book consists of five chapters—each one dealing with a particular area of municipal intervention—arranged according to their relative importance: finances, councilors and staff, police and conflict, public health and hygiene, and industrial, welfare, and social reforms.

While the argument does not follow a chronological order, Jackson does...