In China, as it was in many other places, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed the emergence of the city as the locus of modern social organization. While there were of course cities in earlier times—and Chinese cities were among the largest in the premodern world—the cities of the modern era were distinct in that they were cast or recast in an increasingly similar mold. The new technologies of the times allowed for new or expanded infrastructures—from roads and telegraphs to electricity and water—which, in turn, gave rise to new, standardized urban forms that seemed to capture the idea of modernity's universality. Toby Lincoln's Urbanizing China in War and Peace sets out to explore this urban transformation in China through the history of Wuxi County in the first half of the twentieth century.

Located on the northern shore of Lake Tai in the prosperous Lower Yangzi Delta, Wuxi had been an important commercial hub in the Ming and Qing periods. Following the Taiping Rebellion and the realignment of the region's economy around treaty-port Shanghai in the mid-nineteenth century, Wuxi became a major player in the export-oriented Chinese sericulture industry, first through cocoon production and later also through filature operations. This story has been masterfully told by Lynda Bell in her work on the development of Wuxi's silk industry and the resultant bifurcation of local society into wealthy urban industrialists on the one hand and poor peasant families whose women supplied most of the labor for silkworm raising on the other.Footnote ³ Lincoln adds to this narrative by looking at how local elites, enriched by their involvement in the silk and other industries, invested into infrastructural projects that altered the built environment of the county's urban core and its surrounding countryside.

The book is divided into nine chapters that follow a chronological arc. The first three chapters trace the decades before the coming to power of the Nationalist government, highlighting, in particular, the role of influential families in changing Wuxi's physical appearance through the construction of factories, schools, roads, and parks. These projects not only reshaped the contours of the county, but also reordered the lives of those who lived and worked within it. Lincoln's interest is in demonstrating how changes in the city were mirrored in the countryside, as amenities and commodities that came to symbolize modern urban life also made their way out into farm and field. The next three chapters chart the course of the Nanjing decade, tracking the expansion of the developmental state into local infrastructural projects. Through cases such as that of electricity generation at the Qishuyan Power Station, Lincoln underlines a general trend toward nationalization during the period, as crises drove industrial elites to agitate for greater central state intervention in certain sectors that had previously been handled by local governments and private companies. The last three chapters then map out the years of Japanese occupation, with a focus on how local elites attempted to revive the economy and rebuild the county under a highly militarized environment. This is perhaps the most novel part of the book. Lincoln shows how Chinese officials were able to undertake prewar plans for infrastructural projects such as water management and street lighting amidst efforts by Japanese authorities to set up military installations that served as material manifestations of their control. Together, these chapters suggest unexpected ways in which the workings of war could open up spaces for the making and unmaking of the built landscape.

This is a solid account of how Wuxi's local elites were involved in the infrastructural transformation of their county across a tumultuous half-century. Meticulously researched, it is filled with delightful detail that takes us from the corridors of the municipal planning office to the county's newly widened roads and freshly paved streets. The book would have benefited, however, from a more careful and consistent use of the term “urbanization”—a concept so central to the arguments it seeks to make. For instance, one of Lincoln's main points is that the rural-urban divide of the present is a product of an early twentieth-century shift in society's focus from countryside to city. In his analysis, he equates this shift, which one might think of as the onset of a kind of urban bias, to urbanization. Throughout most of the book, though, whenever urbanization is mentioned, it usually refers specifically to the building of infrastructure. Although these two processes are not necessarily mutually exclusive, they are also not the same thing, and the failure to disaggregate them in the text takes away from Lincoln's key contention about the continuity of urbanization in China through war and peace. This issue aside, Urbanizing China in War and Peace is a welcome addition to the field of Chinese urban history, and will appeal more broadly to those interested in the development of urban systems and the politics of the built environment.