This volume advances the notion that China was, in part, colonized in the 19th and 20th centuries, but wants to argue that each of the multiple imperial powers involved produced different colonialisms as they interacted with the indigenous population. This seems like a reasonable claim, one that scholars who study global processes and local developments together, or who do comparative studies of colonialism, have been making for some time. Overall, however, it would have been a more convincing argument if the papers were in dialogue with each other, and if there were more than a few passing references to other colonial situations. With these caveats in mind, however, Twentieth-century Colonialism and China: Localities, the Everyday and the World has much to offer.

The chapters deal with social and cultural changes in some of the treaty ports created after 1842 and in the colonies of Hong Kong and Macau. In Shanghai, for example, Bryna Goodman shows how mushrooming Chinese stock markets in 1920s were transformed from an expression of nationalism to critiques of greed; Yiyan Wang reaffirms the triumph of realism over other forms of expression by Chinese artists; and Christian Henriot explores the racial and class divisions that parsed the city's cemeteries. These themes of hierarchical and racial social divisions and spatial segregation run through other pieces, as well. The organization of living space on Hong Kong's peak (John Carroll), the staffing of the Qing imperial maritime customs (Robert Bickers), the construction of the Italian concession in Tianjin as a kind of national theme park (Maurizio Marinelli), the racial stereotypes that appear in letters written by a German female sojourner in Tianjin (Yixu Lu and David Goodman), or the racial segregation in the name of sanitation and hygiene to be found in the German colony at Qingdao (Klaus Mühlhahn), all map the boundaries and fissures of contact zones established and maintained by extraterritorial privileges and the many efforts of Chinese subjects to manoeuvre these fraught landscapes. In contrast, Cathryn Clayton speaks of the racial muddle that was (is) Macau, where the colonial tail repeatedly wagged the “hapless” Portuguese dog. Other pieces take up the multifaceted response on the part of Chinese people to Western medicine as practised by French doctors (Florence Bretelle-Establet) and the effort by Chinese migrants to Australia to seek relief from prejudicial laws by invoking the “equality” affirmed in the treaties that followed upon the opium wars (John Fitzgerald).

With their focus squarely on the local, most of the papers avoid an “emphasis on the global over the local” (p. 7). There is, however, one exception – Prasenjit Duara's piece on change in Hong Kong in the interwar period. Situating his study within developments in late imperial capitalism, Duara argues for an emergent “new imperialism,” built around the principle of the economic integration of empire. In this order, Hong Kong, with substantial sterling reserves, found a degree of flexibility and autonomy that carried over into the Cold War era and marked it as an exceptional form of colonial development. For Duara, Hong Kong's local specificity is, in other words, heavily dependent upon forces from the outside.

Like Duara and unlike the editors of the volume, I have reservations about the adequacy of local studies for clarifying the relation between China and European colonialisms. Just as a “China-centred” social history created self-imposed limits for explaining revolutionary developments in 19th- and 20th-century Chinese history, studies of colonialism in China that fail to place metropole and colony within the same field of analysis or analytic framework do not move far beyond individual empirical studies. And, while they accept the pluralism and local agency argued for by Ann Stoler and Frederick Cooper in Tensions of Empire, most of contributors stop there. What, for example, might have been the relationship between “hygienic modernity” in China's treaty ports and other colonial “health” systems; or the regulatory regimes that emerged in Europe in the second half of the 19th century (e.g. national statistics, zoning and city planning,) and new colonial institutions such as the imperial maritime customs or the architectural structuring of treaty ports. One might ask what happens to colonialisms in China when opium (conspicuously absent in the volume) is added to the equation. The global strength of sterling in the pre-war period, as Carl Trocki has argued, was sustained by opium regimes that linked China, Southeast Asian colonies, colonial India and London. Or one might follow Duara and explore how the financial and regulatory infrastructures of empire morphed over time. Such changes at the global level opened new spaces at the local level, creating conditions where unique kinds of indigenous agency suddenly became possible in the form of new subject positions and altered strategies. In other words, it is not enough to locate indigenous agency; one also has to explain the conditions of possibility of agency in the context of changing, large-scale and asymmetrical relations of power.