Entangled Colonialisms

Examines the entangled relationships among multiple imperialist powers operating in Chinese treaty-port cities during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
This book centers on China’s two largest treaty ports: Tianjin and Shanghai, two cities that were divided into several colonial concessions alongside the Chinese districts from the 1850s to 1940s. While 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 concentration of multiple colonialisms in Shanghai and Tianjin that diverged from most examples where one empire dominated.
Taoyu Yang proposes “entangled colonialisms” as a new theoretical concept to illuminate broader questions about the nature of colonialism in China, imperial formation in the age of global empire, and how the study of treaty-port China can be situated in a global comparative framework. At the intersection of modern Chinese history, global imperial history, urban history, and diplomatic history, this book presents an interconnected history of multiple empires in the transformations of Shanghai and Tianjin while demonstrating how the cities made empires.
Drawing on multi-lingual and multi-archival source materials across several countries and regions, Yang foregrounds the interactions among various foreign powers in these urban settings, while revealing the varied ways in which Chinese and other colonial subjects negotiated and navigated the complex web of entangled colonialisms.