Isabella Jackson has written an important book that should be included on reading lists on the history of China's most studied of cities. This monograph, alongside other recent publications on the treaty ports,Footnote ¹ confirms Jackson as an authority on the Western presence in Shanghai.

Shaping Modern Shanghai represents the first book-length study of the Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC)—the self-funded body that governed Shanghai's International Settlement from the 1860s until midway through World War II (indeed, it was retained by the Japanese, if only nominally, following their occupation of the International Settlement in 1941). The SMC was a product of empire. However, as Jackson shows, it was also a unique institution that administered a system of “locally directed autonomous governance by foreigners” (p. 16). The SMC is historically important not least because it played a central role in some of the key moments in modern Chinese history, especially the May Thirtieth Movement of 1925. It was SMC-employed police, after all, who on that day fatally fired on protestors who had been demonstrating for the release of student activists detained by the SMC, leading to a nationwide movement that subsequently changed the course of modern Chinese history (although, as Jackson shows, the details surrounding the event are far more complex than most standard accounts suggest).

Jackson does an admirable job of documenting the role of the SMC in fields such as policing, public health, and industrial relations, with a chapter on each of these broad areas—as well as its relationship with the treaty powers and various Chinese governments—without necessarily “sympathizing” with this most “colonial” of institutions. Indeed, in some sections of the book, such as the account of labor policy in chapter 5, the SMC is presented as an institution that introduced reforms only reluctantly.

Many earlier studies have overlooked the SMC's significance and have conflated it with the “Western powers.” In critiquing such work, Jackson presents her case for the notion of “transnational colonialism.” Indeed, this idea is central to the book, and will no doubt generate significant debate both within and beyond the field of Chinese history. Jackson defines transnational colonialism as “colonial governance by non-state actors” (p. 8), with the International Settlement being administered not from London or Washington, but rather by a group of (predominantly European and American—though also, later, Japanese) councilors elected by wealthy, Shanghai-based property owners, the majority of whom hailed from the Settlement's non-Chinese business elite. There were no Chinese members of the SMC until 1928, and the body was dominated by British councilors for much of its existence. Jackson readily admits that there were moments when the SMC called on British or American military forces to guarantee the safety of the Settlement. However, there were also many instances of the SMC openly contradicting or ignoring the wishes of European and American governments. Jackson thus uses the SMC to argue for a paradigm shift in the way we understand the nature of the Western presence in Shanghai in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was a city governed by “transnational” businessmen rather than colonial officials.

In arguing her case, however, Jackson sometimes overstates the redundancy of earlier frameworks, not all of which need necessarily contradict “transnational colonialism.” For example, some readers may query Jackson's assertion that the pendulum has “swung too far” (p. 13) in debates about the importance of imperialism in the development of modern China. The “China-centered” approach championed by an earlier generation of scholars was as much about methods and sources as it was about the adoption of a perspective that privileged Chinese agency. A monograph on the SMC naturally demands more of a focus on the influence of international developments on Shanghai. But this does not mean that more China-centered studies of the city need necessarily have run their course. As the vast number of Shanghai-themed monographs in English, Chinese, and other languages attest, this city is big enough to allow for the cohabitation of quite different frameworks.

Shaping Modern Shanghai is well researched in terms of the English-language sources, and Jackson has made excellent use of the SMC files held at the Shanghai Municipal Archives. The book is written in elegant and accessible prose and, in a fascinating epilogue detailing the fate of the SMC's former employees, Jackson displays her skills as a raconteur. This book should be read by anyone with a serious interest in the Western presence in modern China, the nature of colonialism in China, or the history of “China's global city.”