Description
Book SynopsisThe contributors to this collection of seven essays (plus an editor's introduction and a comparative afterword) have framed debates about the construction of commercial culture in China. They all have agreed that during the early twentieth century China's commercial culture was centered in the private sector of Shanghai's economy and especially in the "concession" areas under Western or Japanese rule, but they have differed over the issue of whether foreign influence was decisive in the creation of Shanghai's commercial culture. Between 1900 and 1937, was Shanghai's commercial culture imported from the West or invented locally? And between 1937 and 1945, was the history of this commercial culture cut short by Japanese military invasions and occupations of the city or was it sustained throughout the war? The contributors have proposed various and even conflicting answers to these questions, and their interpretations bear upon wider debates in historical, cultural, and comparative studies.
Trade ReviewAdmirably compact and coherent, Inventing Nanjing Road is an excellent sampler of current research on the development of business, advertisement, entertainment, and urban life-styles in modern Shanghai. The essays in this volume, which introduce the field's intellectual issues, as well as the colorful sources available to address them, will attract new researchers to the field. For use in undergraduate and graduate classes on Chinese urban history.
* Journal of Asian Studies *
Provides a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of how commercial culture was constructed in Shanghai in the first decades of the twentieth century.
* Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies *
