A field of study evolves into maturity through the seminal works it produces. In that sense, Mark Frazier's new book is a milestone addition to China–India studies that elevates the growing field to a new level of maturity. The Power of Place traces the parallel pathways of contentious politics and urban transformations in Shanghai and Bombay since the early 20th century. In this urban comparative history, he reconstructs how political geographies constituted by residence and workplace created conditions that gave expression to collective resentments. For Frazier, Shanghai and Bombay make compelling cases for historical comparison as both were induced by foreign capital to grow as entry ports, experienced early industrialization and the advent of cotton mills, and hence became home to a sizable working class. From the 1920s, labour protests, strikes, riots and collective violence erupted in Shanghai at regular intervals, unsettling the successive ruling elites and preventing them from consolidating for too long. Be it during the international settlement era, nationalist period or under socialism, social unrest from below continues to shape public life in the city. These contentious politics, as he defines them, culminated during the Cultural Revolution with the entry of new social actors “who had been victims of the CCP's recent urban policies” (p. 189). These comprised temporary and contract workers, the laid-off industrial workers whose Shanghai hukou transferred to rural areas and those technical personnel sent to interior parts to build factories. Deprived of urban benefits and status as they were now classified as “peasants,” these groups now demanded the restoration of Shanghai hukou and urban citizenship. But as the last century drew to a close, a new set of economic rationalities arrived, wherein urban land became an object of developmentalist takeover. In the ensuing process that aimed at making Shanghai China's dragon head, there were large-scale dispossessions of former mill workers from their residences and their relocation to the city outskirts. Once uprooted and dispersed, the urban residents and former working class found themselves devoid of the conditions for collective solidarities, which led to the eventual ebbing of urban social movements in Shanghai. The city of Bombay had a parallel trajectory of labour protests and urban social movements. But Frazier captures the clinching difference. The waning of early class-based labour protests in Bombay, in particular after the 1982 mill strike, gave way to the rise of identity-based ethno-linguistic assertions.
Frazier offers an illuminating analysis of these urban politics by tracing their early origins, their high tides during the 1920s and 1930s and how they receded in the 1990s. The theoretical perspectives of “contentious politics” take the book well beyond narrative history and provide remarkable coherence. His accounts include richly detailed portraits of the mill workers who participated in the protests, the labour leaders who sprang up in contentious contexts, and their modes and repertoires of protests. Readers are richly rewarded with fascinating details about Li Lisan, Wang Hongwen, Datta Samant and Bal Thackeray. He anchors the analysis around two key domains of urban life: the workplace and neighbourhood, which, for him, define conceptions of urban citizenship as well as modes of popular protest. Frazier argues that urban social movements and the large-scale working-class mobilization in Shanghai and Bombay converge along the levels of interlinkages between workplace and residence. Structured by earlier labour migration and the growth of factory districts, workplaces and neighbourhoods developed into densely cohesive social universes. The lilong neighbourhood in Shanghai and the Chawls in Bombay were integrated social worlds of working-class life that energized work, social reproduction and leisure. Therefore, Frazier argues that the high-tide of the urban social movements in these two cities during the 1920s and 1930s arose when the connections between workplace and residence were tighter. Much later in the 1990s and in the new century, with mill closures and the relocation of former workers to the outskirts, urban social movements in general experienced corrosion.
The Power of Place is a majestic venture in urban historical comparisons. Frazier has designed it as an “encompassing comparison” where “units of analysis are assumed to be part of a broader system-level process” (p. 21). Far from treating Shanghai and Bombay as embedded places in fixed political geographies, this methodological perspective allows Frazier to identify the common origins of collective resentments in both cases in large-scale processes such as colonialism, socialist modernity and neoliberalism. Shanghai was under “fragmented sovereignty” during the international settlement era, but the way colonial capital assembled factory districts and adjacent tenement housing and shack settlements for the migrant workers has closer parallels with the patterning of mills districts and chawls in Bombay. How the question of housing and claims for urban citizenship continue to be radicalizing concerns for the urban poor is explored, not in the local particularities, but with reference to the large-scale processes. Assigning centrality to large-scale processes and structures has given greater explanatory power to Frazier's analysis.
To Frazier's advantage, the urban histories of Shanghai and Bombay are rather well documented, with a rich body of scholarship in the form of urban studies, labour histories, chronicles and sociological accounts. While he makes meticulous use of these writings in his narrative, for corroborative evidence he uses primary materials collected from archives, contemporary reports and fieldwork interviews. The Power of Place is a major contribution to China and India studies, as well as to comparative urban studies. Besides, the book will attract attention well beyond the immediate discipline and area studies, as anyone interested in the urban transformations of Shanghai or Bombay will find it fascinating. It was some years ago that Prasenjit Duara initiated new scholarship in conceptually reflective historical comparisons between China and India. Mark Frazier's book comes as a defining way forward.
