Taoyu Yang: Entangled Colonialisms, Gebunden

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Drawing on archival sources, this book unpacks histories of modern China and global empires by delving into the multi-imperial dimensions and actions of foreign empires in Shanghai and Tianjin during the treaty-port era.
It presents an interconnected history of multiple empires in the transformations of Shanghai and Tianjin while demonstrating how the cities made empires. It foregrounds the interactions among various imperial powers in the production and sharing of knowledge and practices related to urban planning and governance, in a sequence of political activities and reterritorializing maneuvers, as well as in their attempts to transform the urban built environment.
This book argues that the spatial configuration of treaty-port cities was not merely a backdrop for imperial activity but was actively shaped by, and in turn helped shape, the presence and operations of foreign powers. The organization of urban space not only reflected and reinforced the asymmetrical power relations of the colonial order, but also served as a strategic instrument in redefining the nexus between sovereignty, population, and territory among competing imperial regimes.
Taoyu Yang examines how Chinese actors inserted themselves into the multi-pronged interactions among various empires to gain more autonomy, power, or advantages for themselves. Whereas much scholarship on modern global imperial history and colonial urbanism has focused on the bilateral relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, this book underscores the density and concentration of multiple colonialisms in Shanghai and Tianjin that diverged from most examples in global imperial history in which one single empire dominated.