Shanghai And the Edges of Empires

Shanghai And the Edges of Empires PDF

Author: Meng Yue

Publisher:

Published:

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 9781452906997

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Meng Yue examines the emergence of the international city of Shanghai, looking at the work of the commerical press, street theatre and literary arts and he shows that what can appear to be minor cultural changes often signal larger political and economic developments.

Shanghai and the Edges of Empires

Shanghai and the Edges of Empires PDF

Author: Meng Yue

Publisher:

Published: 2006-01-01

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 9780816644124

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Meng Yue examines the emergence of the international city of Shanghai, looking at the work of the commerical press, street theatre and literary arts and he shows that what can appear to be minor cultural changes often signal larger political and economic developments.

Edge of Empires

Edge of Empires PDF

Author: John M. Carroll

Publisher:

Published: 2005-04-30

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13:

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In an engaging, revisionist study, John M. Carroll argues that in the century after the Opium War, Hong Kong's colonial nature helped create a local Chinese business elite. By the end of the nineteenth century, the colonial government saw Chinese businessmen as allies in establishing Hong Kong as a commercial center. The idea of a commercially vibrant China united them. Chinese and British leaders cooperated on issues of mutual concern, such as the expansion of capitalism and political and economic directions for an ailing China. These Chinese also found opportunities in the colonial system to develop business and commerce. In doing so, they used Hong Kong's strategic position to underscore their own identity as a distinctive group unlike their mainland counterparts. Nationalism took on a specifically Hong Kong character. At the same time, by contributing to imperial war funds, organizing ceremonies for visiting British royalty, and attending imperial trade exhibitions, the Chinese helped make Hong Kong an active member of the global British Empire. In Edge of Empires, Carroll situates Hong Kong squarely within the framework of both Chinese and British colonial history, while exploring larger questions about the meaning and implications of colonialism in modern history.

Post-Empire Imaginaries?

Post-Empire Imaginaries? PDF

Author: Barbara Buchenau

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2015-07-28

Total Pages: 501

ISBN-13: 900430228X

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Barbara Buchenau and Virginia Richter’s Post-Empire Imaginaries? Anglophone Literature, History, and the Demise of Empires explores the legacies of different empires across various media, focusing on the spatial, temporal, and critical dimensions of what the editors term the post-empire imaginary.

In a Sea of Empires

In a Sea of Empires PDF

Author: Jeppe Mulich

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-07-09

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 1108489729

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A history of imperial competition, colonial cooperation, and revolutionary currents in the maritime borderlands of the early nineteenth-century Caribbean.

Empires of Coal

Empires of Coal PDF

Author: Shellen Xiao Wu

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2015-04-22

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0804794731

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From 1868–1872, German geologist Ferdinand von Richthofen went on an expedition to China. His reports on what he found there would transform Western interest in China from the land of porcelain and tea to a repository of immense coal reserves. By the 1890s, European and American powers and the Qing state and local elites battled for control over the rights to these valuable mineral deposits. As coal went from a useful commodity to the essential fuel of industrialization, this vast natural resource would prove integral to the struggle for political control of China. Geology served both as the handmaiden to European imperialism and the rallying point of Chinese resistance to Western encroachment. In the late nineteenth century both foreign powers and the Chinese viewed control over mineral resources as the key to modernization and industrialization. When the first China Geological Survey began work in the 1910s, conceptions of natural resources had already shifted, and the Qing state expanded its control over mining rights, setting the precedent for the subsequent Republican and People's Republic of China regimes. In Empires of Coal, Shellen Xiao Wu argues that the changes specific to the late Qing were part of global trends in the nineteenth century, when the rise of science and industrialization destabilized global systems and caused widespread unrest and the toppling of ruling regimes around the world.

The Emperor Far Away

The Emperor Far Away PDF

Author: David Eimer

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2014-08-14

Total Pages: 428

ISBN-13: 1408813904

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'Engaging ... this absorbing book is a tantalizing introduction to China's diversity and the ethnic and political dynamics at the extremes of its empire' Publishers Weekly 'Eimer has forged genuinely new ground as he recounts his travels to China's furthest corners ... A fascinating picture of a part of the country rarely examined' Daily Telegraph Far from the glittering cities of Beijing and Shanghai, China's borderlands are populated by around one hundred million people who are not Han Chinese. For many of these restive minorities, the old Chinese adage 'the mountains are high and the Emperor far away', meaning Beijing's grip on power is tenuous and its influence unwelcome, continues to resonate. Among these lands are Xinjiang and the Uyghur Muslims who have historically dwelled there, now the subject of a hugely controversial social campaign by a central Chinese government determined to impose control over every square mile of its territory. Travelling through China's most distant and unknown reaches, David Eimer explores the increasingly tense relationship between the Han Chinese and the ethnic minorities. Deconstructing the myths represented by Beijing, Eimer reveals a shocking and fascinating picture of a China that is more of an empire than a country.

Empire of Texts in Motion

Empire of Texts in Motion PDF

Author: Karen Laura Thornber

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-10-26

Total Pages: 610

ISBN-13: 1684170516

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By the turn of the twentieth century, Japan’s military and economic successes made it the dominant power in East Asia, drawing hundreds of thousands of Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese students to the metropole and sending thousands of Japanese to other parts of East Asia. The constant movement of peoples, ideas, and texts in the Japanese empire created numerous literary contact nebulae, fluid spaces of diminished hierarchies where writers grapple with and transculturate one another’s creative output. Drawing extensively on vernacular sources in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, this book analyzes the most active of these contact nebulae: semicolonial Chinese, occupied Manchurian, and colonial Korean and Taiwanese transculturations of Japanese literature. It explores how colonial and semicolonial writers discussed, adapted, translated, and recast thousands of Japanese creative works, both affirming and challenging Japan’s cultural authority. Such efforts not only blurred distinctions among resistance, acquiescence, and collaboration but also shattered cultural and national barriers central to the discourse of empire. In this context, twentieth-century East Asian literatures can no longer be understood in isolation from one another, linked only by their encounters with the West, but instead must be seen in constant interaction throughout the Japanese empire and beyond.

Urbanizing China in War and Peace

Urbanizing China in War and Peace PDF

Author: Toby Lincoln

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2015-05-31

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0824854195

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Urbanizing China in War and Peace rewrites the history of rural-urban relations in the first half of the twentieth century by arguing that urbanization is a total societal transformation and as important a factor as revolution, nationalism, or modernity in the history of modern China. Linking the global and the local in space and time, China's urbanization was not only driven by industrial capitalism and the expansion of the state, but also shaped how these forces influenced daily life in the city and the countryside. Although the conflict that beset China after the Japanese invasion in 1937 affected the development of cities, towns, and villages, it did not derail previous changes. To truly understand how China has emerged as the world's largest urban society, we must consider such continuities across the first half of the twentieth century—during periods of war as well as peace. The book focuses on Wuxi, a city that lies a hundred miles to the west of Shanghai. In the early twentieth century local industrialists were responsible for it quickly becoming the largest industrial city in China outside treaty ports. They built factories, roads, and other infrastructure outside the old city walls and in surrounding towns and villages. Chapters examine the county's transformation as recorded in guidebooks and travel magazines of the time and the role of the state in the early 1920s and into the Nanjing Decade, when new administrative laws led to the continued expansion of the city under both municipal and county officials. They explore the revival of the silk industry during the Japanese occupation and the industry's role in driving urbanization, as well as efforts by Chinese leaders to carry out prewar development plans despite lockdowns and qingxiang (clean the countryside) campaigns. In the midst of the barbed wire and watch towers, plans to shape the built environment in Wuxi County and the region as a whole persisted and were carried out. Ambitious and well researched, Urbanizing China in War and Peace will appeal to scholars and students of Chinese urban history, the Anti-Japanese War of Resistance, and the Republican period. Its engagement with issues of urbanization in general will interest urban historians of other times and places.

Mediasphere Shanghai

Mediasphere Shanghai PDF

Author: Alexander Des Forges

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2007-07-31

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0824863569

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For many in the west, "Shanghai" is the quintessence of East Asian modernity, whether imagined as glamorous and exciting, corrupt and impoverishing, or a complex synthesis of the good, the bad, and the ugly. How did "Shanghai" acquire this power? How did people across China and around the world decide that Shanghai was the place to be? Mediasphere Shanghai shows that partial answers to these questions can be found in the products of Shanghai’s media industry, particularly the Shanghai novel, a distinctive genre of installment fiction that flourished from the 1890s to the 1930s. Shanghai fiction supplies not only the imagery that we now consider typical of the city, but, more significantly, the very forms—simultaneity, interruption, mediation, and excess—through which the city could be experienced as a business and entertainment center and envisioned as the focal point of a mediasphere with a national and transnational reach. Existing paradigms of Shanghai culture tend to explain the city’s distinctive literary and visual aesthetics as merely the predictable result of economic conditions and social processes, but Alexander Des Forges maintains that literary texts and other cultural products themselves constitute a conceptual foundation for the city and construct the frame through which it is perceived. Working from a wide range of sources, including installment fiction, photographs, lithographic illustrations, maps, guidebooks, newspapers, and film, Des Forges demonstrates the significant social effects of aesthetic forms and practices. Mediasphere Shanghai offers a new perspective on the cultural history of the city and on the literature and culture of modern China in general.