JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, JUNE 2007 tural and economic capital of its respective national community, because of which they were in continual contact and conflict in a manner that often muddied the nationalistically determined boundaries between them. I explore how, beginning with Tel Aviv s establishment in Igog, Zionist leaders deployed a narrative of progress and modernity versus tradition and stagnation to effect a discursive, and ultimately a phys- ical, erasure of the Palestinian Arab population of the region surrounding both towns I argue that such paradigms, and the ideologies that support them, are fundamental components of globalization, whether in the era of"high imperialism"when Jaffa and Tel Aviv's conflict began, or today. Next I move to the contemporary period and explore the intersection of globalization, tourism, and the liberalized market. I con- clude by discussing how a"spatialization"of the contemporary Jaffa is crucial to understanding the continuing conflict between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs both within the borders of 1967 Israel and across the Green Line as well Comparative History and Post-Socialist Citie ts on Is Global Shanghai“ Good to Think”? Though 199 EFFREY N. WASSERSTROM Shanghai is routinely described as"unique "yet also routinely likened to other places It thus alternately invites and defies categorization. After introducing general method- ological concerns and providing basic information about the main historical stages through which Shanghai has passed, this article focuses on the period of rapid devel opment and re-engagement with the world that began in the early igOs, arguing that a particularly productive way to think about today's Shanghai is as a "reglobali associ cialis st "urban center-a category that also, for example, includes Budape zing BOOK REVIEWS William H. McNeill et al., eds. Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History REVIEWED BY HERBERT F. ZIEGLER 235 Peter A. Coclanis, ed. The Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Organization, Operation Practice, and personnel REVIEWED BY ELIZABETH MANCKE 237 Robert Olwell and Alan Tully, eds Cultures and Identities in Colonial British America REVIEWED BY MARCIA SCHMIDT BLAINE 24 David M. Deal and Laura Hostetler, trans. The Art of Ethnography: A Chinese"Miao Album REVIEWED BY SHANA J BROWN 243 Paul Spickard, ed. Race and Nation: Ethnic Systems in the Modern world REVIE WED BY TONY BALLANTYNE 247
and Post-Socialist Cities xk"2 Is global Shanghai"Good to Thir Thoughts on Comparative Hi JEFFREY N. WASSERSTROM University of California, Irvine Shanghai is many-sided. unique among the cities of the rld .. almost indescribable -Thomas F Millard, China: Where It Is Today and Why(1928) and Beijing. It is not uncommon to hear visitors to China ai No two cites in China could be more unalike than Shanghai sing praises about Shanghai and speak grimly of Beijing For all its congestion, shabbiness, and pollution, Shanghai remains China s most interesting and vibrant city Jack F. Williams,“ Cities of East Asia,”in Cities of the World(1993) sk I am grateful to Zhang Xudong and elizabeth Perry for inviting me to take part in the NYU conference for which a very preliminary draft of this essay was written, to merle Goldman for giving me the opportunity to present a later version at Harvard's New En land China Seminar, to Geremie Barme for serving as a discussant for that session, and to the History Department of the University of California, Irvine, for inviting me to present a dramatically reworked version of the essay as part of its 2005"History and Theory Con ference, "the focus of which was global cities. I am also appreciative of the conducive work environment I was afforded at Indiana University's Institute for Advanced Study, where was an internal fellow while early work on this paper was done, and of the willingness of the following non-China specialists to listen to my ideas about comparative issues and tell Maria Bucur, Judit Bodnar, and, above all, Tom Gieryl nadi Larry Wolff, Sven Beckert me what they thought of them: David Harvey, Maria Cs Joumal of World History, Vol. I8, No. 2 C 200 by University of Hawai'i Press I99
20 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, JUNE 2007 Quantitative factors [such as number of major corporate head quarters and percentage of local people working in high-level service fields like finance] are generally used in defining world city status... Beaverstock et al. (Iggo) have prepared a "roster of world cities"in terms of level of advanced producer services, namely, accountancy, advertising, banking/finance and law. They combine their data into scoring systems in which London, Paris, New York and Tokyo score twelve, ith Chicago, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Los angeles, Milan and Singapore scoring ten. These are Alpha world cities Beta world cities scoring more than six but less than ten Include san francisco Sydney,.. and Moscow. Gammas scoring less than seven but more than three include amster- dam, Melbourne, Boston, Warsaw, Atlanta, Kuala Lumpur and shanghai David byrne, Understanding the Urban (2001) he title of this essay alludes to a famous discussion of animal sym- bolism by Claude Levi- Strauss in his oft-cited book Totemism Whereas some earlier theorists had argued in a functionalist vein that types of animals are often used to stand for human groups because these beasts are"good to eat, " Levi-Strauss insisted that it is the fact that species are " good to think"that matters more 2 Drawing on Rousseau's earlier claim that rational thought depends on the ability to establish contrasts and homologies(to find various ways that enti- ties are different from and similar to one another ), levi- Strauss argued that totemic systems should not be seen as curious manifestations of the workings of the savage mind. Instead they were symbolic con structs that followed the same principles as modern categorization schemas What makes animals "good to think "in this view is that people can do more than simply describe them and revel in their unique qual- ities. We can also single out features that make them similar and dis I Thomas F Millard, China: Where It Is Today and Why(New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1928), pp. 249-250; Jack F. Williams, " Cities of East Asia, "in Cities of the World: World Regional Urban Development, 2nd ed, ed. Stanley D. Brunn and Jack E. Wil liams(New York: Harper Collins, I993), pp. 454, 458; and David Byrne, Understanding the Urban(New York: Palgrave, 2001), p.92 2 Claude Levi-Strauss, Totemism, trans. rodney Needham( Boston: Beacon, 1963) especially p 8 3 Levi-Strauss, Totemism, pp. 85-88, for comparative method in general, and pp 99-102, for Rousseau
Wasserstrom: Is Global Shanghai Good to Think"? 201 similar to one another and group them together in various ways While remaining aware(at one level) of the things that make each species unique and individual members of species different from one another, we can integrate them into or use them as the basis for sys tems of correspondence, then carry these correspondences over into the human world Building on Levi-Strauss, we can think of three different stances that might be taken toward any city's value as something to think with. A metropolis that is bad for thinking would be e one that cou only be describe ed; it might be good for writing(e. g, useful as a setting for a novel)or for representing visually(e. g, used as the backdrop for a film) but not for theorizing. The first epigraph to this essay draws attention to the tendency of many to claim that this is or at least has been the case with Shanghai A metropolis that is a bit better to think with would be one that could be compared to and contrasted with nearby or obviously linked urban centers, such as those located in the same country or region. The second epigraph to this essay is relevant here. It draws attention to Shanghai's differences from Beijing, a common theme in the liter ature on the city. It is worth noting, though, that this quotation comes from a chapter on"East Asian"cities in a general textbook on urban geography. Including Shanghai in such a chapter assumes that, for all its unique qualities, it belongs in a regionally defined category 4 A metropolis that is best of all to think with would be one that like an animal in a totemic system, can be used to create categories of sameness and difference that bring together more disparate entities The third epigraph to this essay is an example of a work that accepts the e idea that shanghai and many other cities are thinkable in thi robust sense. The category "gamma-class world cities, "in which Bea- verstock et al. place not only Shanghai and Amsterdam but several other urban centers(including Budapest and Houston), is based seemingly far-fetched but in the minds of the authors meaningful jux- tapositions of metropolises located far t tr her. 5 W now Amsterdam is part of a small country located in western Europe Budapest is part of a small country in central Europe, and Houston and Shanghai are in large countries on opposite sides of the Pacific. Still 4 The other major sections in Brunn and Williams, Cities of the World, include"Citi of Europe”( which is subdivided into“ Western Europe”and“ Eastern Europe"),“ Cities Latin America. ""Cites of Southeast Asia, etc 5 For a full list of gamma-class cities, defined in this way, seeJ. V Beaverstock, P J. Tay- lor, and R. G. Smith, "A Roster of World Cities, "Cities 16, no 6(1999):445-458
202 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, JUNE 2007 a vision of them all as gamma-class world cities encourages us to over- look obvious dissimilarities, just as occurs in a totemic system when members of a human lineage known for their speedy runners are likened to hawks My goal in this essay will be to assess the strengths and limitations of these different sorts of visions of Shanghai's thinkability. are we est off considering Shanghai completely sui generis, or can we view it as part of a class of cities? And if it belongs in a genus, must that genus be defined in geographically limited terms? Or might it instead be one to which far-flung urban centers belong? What is the payo off of placing Shanghai into a comparative frame, or perhaps a series of comparative frames? Is this great enough to justify the distortion that comes with squeezing a distinctive metropolis into a category These questions intrigue me in part because Shanghai has long proved a wonderful place to write(as the outpouring of academic stud- ies, novels, and popular histories attests)and to show(the numerous pictorial histories and plethora of films made in China and Hollywood demonstrate this), but not necessarily to think. 6 Influential scholarly works focusing on the city have, with a few important exceptions (those by wu fulong, for instance), been most concerned with high- lighting Shanghai,s distinctive features. And the exceptions, such as Marie-Claire Bergere's powerful evocation of Old Shanghai as the heart of"l'autre Chine"(a Chinese coastal zone of entrepreneurial outward-looking port cities), have generally limited discussion to a 6 For an introduction to the voluminous English language literature on Shanghai (with some comments on works in other languages), see Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, "New Approaches to Old Shanghai: A Review Essay, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 32, no 2(Autumn 2001 ): 263-279. Two of the most comprehensive multilingual bibliographies on Shanghai can be found in Christian Henriot and Zheng Zu'an, altas de shanghai Espaces et representations de 1849 a nos jours(Paris, Iggo), and Takahashi Kosuke and Furuye Tadao, eds, Shanhai shi (Tokyo, 1995). And one of the best overviews of Chinese language scholarship on Shanghai is Tan Chenchang, "Shanghai shi yanjiu sishinian (1949-198g"I Forty years of historical research on Shanghai (1949-1989), in idem, Jindai Shanghai tansuo lu Ia record of explorations of modern Shanghai( Shanghai, I994) pp. I80-197 7 Urbanist Wu Fulong has been the most prolific and in many ways most interes Shanghai specialist working on the city s recent past to try to place the metropolis into comparative perspective. Though my approach diverges from his at various points and I eschew the main definitional category that of contemporary Shanghai as a"transitional city, " that he employs, I have found and continue to find his work both useful and stimu- lating. See, for example, Fulong Wu, "Transitional Cities, "Environment and Planning 35 no8(2003):1331-1338; and idem, "Globalization, Place Promotion, and Urban Devel opment in Shanghai, Joumal of Urban Affairs 25, no. I(2003):55-78