Standard tropes for Shanghai's modernity tend to evoke its distinctive combinatoire, as in Wakeman and Yeh's “mosaic” or Marie-Claire Bergère's “kaleidoscope.” Our understanding of this new form of urban assemblage has by now moved well beyond “China and the West” and assorted binarisms. Shanghai and the Edges of Empires, focusing almost wholly on elite cultural and intellectual production, is an important and imaginative revision of our understanding of the city, eschewing the simple depiction of juxtaposition to posit a constitutive rather than merely descriptive “unruliness” across the cultural and intellectual field of late Qing/early Republican Shanghai. Meng Yue's Shanghai is a new spatial concept, and its rise as a scholarly and cultural center is understood as a distinctive phenomenon of the post-Taiping reorganization of Jiangnan elite society. She sees in its micro- and macro-spatialities a new and capacious conception of “world.” As in many recent studies, late imperial/early Republican continuities are more important than their differences, and the word or concept of “modernity” scarcely appears in the book. And whereas many studies identify the 1930s as the high point of Shanghai's modernity, for Meng, post-1927 Shanghai is sharply constrained in its capacity for cultural, political, and intellectual imagination. Its earlier decades formed a particularly effective laboratory for quickening a range of conceptual projects. These included debates on the nature of “public” and cosmos, semiosis and interpretation, and the complex relation of “prosperity” to decadence and waste. This cultural and intellectual fecundity was not the product of “external” stimulation, but rather was a deepening and development of late imperial literati concerns in a new urban context.

The book's first part discusses new forms of knowledge in the context of cultural communities and institutions. The paradigmatic focus is on late Qing practical learning, which in nineteenth-century Yangzhou, Suzhou, and Hangzhou represented “an open spectrum of learning established through a translative relationship between different systems of knowledge,” including “philology, optics, technology, chemistry, and manufacturing” (p. 11). The scholarly community, after its relocation and reformation in Shanghai following the collapse of Yangzhou and other Jiangnan centers because of the Taiping rebellion and other factors, formed a newly expanded field of gezhi—general scientific knowledge—centered on an invigorated practice of tongfa—universal understanding. The key Shanghai institutions were the Jiangnan Arsenal and the Commercial Press, and the key practice was a fundamentally anticolonial and anti-imperialist “transcompilation,” whereby imperial forms of knowledge were not so much translated as reconfigured within new circuits of literati culture. This universalizing, translatory, and open gezhi culture later gave way to the discursive predominance of kexue (the term for science imported from Japan), resulting in a narrowed codification of both “China” and “the West.”

Just as Shanghai represented a reconfiguration of a coherent and dynamic Jiangnan literati culture, so, too, did the cultural efflorescence of late imperial urban Jiangnan—Yangzhou most importantly—produce in Shanghai a reworking of what Meng identifies as a spectacular culture's significant constitutive elements—the exemplification of the “density and variety of human cultural activity” (fanhua, or “prosperity”), as well as the “excess” (yin) of that representation/celebration that, in Shanghai's more “unruly” context, acquired an even more radical cosmopolitan potential. Part II of the book, titled “The Carnival and the Radical,” although framed by an overly decontextualized reading of Henri Lefebvre's notion of “festivity,” includes fascinating insights into the sociology of theater as well as brilliant readings of individual productions, especially Black Slaves Appeal to Heaven, a version of Uncle Tom's Cabin, which Meng sees as a paradigmatic expression of the theater's capacity for a refashioned global orientation.

Cosmopolitan spatialities are central to part III—“Interiors Projecting the Globe,” which sees reconfigurations of Yangzhou literati cosmopolitical garden design in Shanghai's Hardoon and Zhang gardens. A table listing mass meetings held at the Zhang garden suggests the ease with which the late imperial cosmopolitan vision could incorporate new social and political experimentation. This world-envisioning and world-imaginative capacity finds further transformation in the “Great World” (Da shijie) entertainment complex. Meng's discussion of the Great World is the best in any language.

Although part III contains a useful discussion of the commanding role of FIRE-O (finance, insurance, real estate, and opium) in Shanghai's economy, the book operates under a near-Oulipian constraint against discussion of capitalism, preferring the insufficiently elaborated concept of “noncapitalism.” The book's formulaic evocation of Euro-American theorists in the introduction and conclusion adds as little to this book as it does to most books in Asian studies; Meng's own conceptual formulations are far more interesting. Most unfortunate is the book's production. Poor editing makes the text hard to follow in too many parts, and the reproduction of graphics is substandard. Despite the ease with which Chinese characters can be now included in texts, there are none here, an inexcusable omission in a book as philologically focused as this. Meng is ill served by the press, for hers is an audacious, original, and highly imaginative study.