20 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, JUNE 2007 physical locations, or special sorts of demographic makeups. There are urban centers where the habits and beliefs of local people the charac ter of municipal political arrangements or the roles the cities play in regional trade networks are highly distinctive. And there are metro olises where the nature of local architectural patterns, the structure of local cultural institutions, and the character of the local industrial base seem very special. Finally, there are cities such as Shanghai about which all of these things can be and have been said There is no question, for example, that there are unusual things about its location, and that its proximity to three waterways has helped ensure it a distinctive economic role in local through global systems of trade. Most important is the fact that it is perched near the eastern endpoint of the mighty yangzi river, which originates in the fertile western province of Sichuan and flows from there through var- ious agriculturally productive districts to the Pacific Ocean. In addi- tion, Shanghai originally stood on the western bank of and now strad- dles the muddy huangpu river, which empties into the Yangzi delta about thirty miles after it passes the metropolis. Then, finally, Shang nai once stoo d just south of and now sprawls across Suzhou Creel which connects the city to a very important neighboring inland urban center: suzhou Thanks to this advantageous location and its possession of a good harbor, Shanghai has long served as a natural transshipment point for goods flowing between an unusually rich hinterland and Southeast Asia, as well as between both of the ese places and nearby citles. by I832, according to British visitor H. H. Lindsay (perhaps overstating bi ings a bit ) Shanghai was already the "principal emporium of east ern Asia. " Trade with Europe and North america was, at that point confined to Canton and Macau. Lindsay thought, though, that if Shanghai were opened to Western trade this would be of an "incal- culable"advantage to all concerned and he was not the only visitor to predict that the port by the huangpu was destined someday to sur- pass Canton. 17 When Shanghai was designated an international treaty port in the aftermath of the Opium War, this prediction was put to the test hanghai began to combine its important traditional economic role as the main harbor for Suzhou(then one of China's greatest cities)and key port for trade between Southeast Asia and the Chinese hinter- 'o 17 Lindsay, quoted in Alfred Schninz, Cities in China(Berlin: Gebruder Borntraeger, 89),p.r6
Wasserstrom: Is Global Shanghai Good to Think"? land with a new function: helping goods and money circulate between China and the West. Within decades it was competing with Canton for supremacy among Chinese ports when it came to trade with the West and also with Japan, and it easily surpassed in economic impor- tance rival cities to the north such as the treaty port of Tianjin. by the 1930S, Shanghai stood alone: more than half of all Chinese imports and exports came through its port, which was by then the sixth busiest in the world. 18 Turning from unusual features associated with geography and eco- nomics to political arrangements, we find that shanghai has also been unique at times. Today, in administrative terms, Shanghai is run much like three other very large Chinese cities that are part of the people,s Republic of China(PrC) and accorded a status comparable to that of a province: Beijing, Tianjin, and Chongqing. And prior to the I840S Shanghai was also run in a fashion not unlike some other Chinese cities of comparable size. If, however, Shanghai was governed in an ordinary way before and after the treaty-port era, this was not the case during that period. Then, Shanghais political structure was not quite like that of any other Chinese metropolis--in fact, it was not quite like that of any other place period This is because it was subdivided for nearly all of the treaty-port century into three districts: an International Settle ment, a French Concession, and a Chinese municipality. And each of these was not just administered independently, which would be unusual enough but organized in a markedly different fashion than either of the other two The most unusual district in this curious amalgamation was the International Settlement, an enclave founded in the I85os via a merger of originally separate British and American concession areas The Settlement took shape at a time when many Asian cities were either fully run by foreigners or at least had within them enclaves under foreign control. Most foreign-run enclaves, including the French Con cession, which bordered the International Settlement to the south Shan is one of the earliest English-language local histories, ]. W MacLellan, The Story of Shanghai: From the Opening of the port to Foreign Trade(Shanghai: North China Herald 889), Pp. 2-3, describes the port becoming"of some importance as a place of trade near the close of the eleventh century Like many later works, in Chinese and English alike, this one stresses the advantageous nature of its location. "The position of Shanghai, "it reads(p. 3), "made it an admirable entrepot for the commerce of the northern, southern and central provinces of the Empire. It was the seaport of the rich Kiangnan [ Jiangnan Region], and the principal emporium for the trade on the Yangtze and with Eastern Asia
JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, JUNE 2007 however, were relatively straightforward colonial entities. That is, the leading officials in them were appointed by and had to answer to rule in distant metropolitan capitals such as London or Paris. The Settle ment, by contrast, was governed by a locally elected municipal coun- cil whose members answered exclusively to the rate-payers who had hosen them(in domestic matters) and to a consortium of foreign consuls(in international matters). In contrast to most purely colonial bodies. moreover, the members of this council were not all citizens or subjects of the same distant nation or empire Until I928, in fact, the Settlement's council typically included Shanghai residents with ties to Britain, the United States, and one or two other foreign countries From I928 onward, it also included several Chinese businessmen The Settlement was, for good reason, understood at the time to be a very "peculiar"administrative district, owing to its"status as a sort of imperium in imperio, as the editor of the magazine Oriental Affairs described the enclave in a 1939 public lecture. 9 An I867 account aptly described the existence of this "extraordinary community of foreign residents'"(the Settlement)as giving Shanghai a"domestic and politi- al character that exists nowhere else, and references to the enclave as an"anomalous"place abound in the contemporary literature. 20 Over and above the things that made the settlement unique, there was something completely distinctive about the particular mixture of olitical institutions that coexisted in Shanghai between the I85os and the Japanese invasions of the 1930s and I94os. No other treaty port was divided, as was Shanghai, into a colonial concession area,a multinational settlement district, and a surrounding Chinese munici ality, each of which was big enough to qualify as a city of moderate or large size in its own right. The fact that all of these three districts had their own police forces, courts, newspapers and so on added to the peculiarity of the situation Shanghai's demographic composition during the treaty-port era was yet another thing that helped inspire commentators of the day to employ adjectives such as "anomalous"to the place. This was in part Lo. 19 The lecture was published as"The Foreign Settlement of Shanghai: A Brief His tory, "Oriental Affairs (une 1939):338-341 20 Samuel Mossman, China: A Brief Account of the Country, Its Inhabitants, and Their Institutions(London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1867), p. 161. There were other treaty-port enclaves with locally elected governing bodies, some of which occa- sionally were multinational in make-up. Most of these, however, such as that in the Italian Concession of Tianjin (one of the first to have a municipal council that included Chinese representatives), still had a direct tie to a single distant country