Christian Henriot's Scythe and the City: A Social History of Death in Shanghai is a work of impressive scholarship that deserves a wide readership in Chinese studies. Scythe and the City explores the social, economic and political dimensions of death in Shanghai during the late Qing dynasty, the Republican period and the early People's Republic of China, focusing especially on the ways in which state and societal responses to mortality changed over the course of the 20th century. This important question has been neglected to a surprising extent in the field of modern Chinese history and Henriot's work will be an important point of reference for emerging and future research on this topic.

Henriot begins the book with a discussion of the available demographic and epidemiological data on the dynamics and scope of urban mortality in Shanghai, suggesting on this basis that the health consequences of entrenched poverty, an unending inflow of displaced persons, and an inconsistent and uncoordinated public health infrastructure contributed to making Shanghai “like a gigantic funnel that swallowed up lives by the thousands, even in times of peace” (p. 5). Henriot then surveys the native-place associations, guilds and other organizations such as the Shanghai Public Benevolent Cemetery which stored, transported and buried the remains of a large cross-section of urban society, in the process filling gaps in city authorities' management of the dead that developed under Shanghai's fractured foreign and Chinese jurisdictions. Shanghai's funeral culture underwent a new development in the 1920s and 1930s with the establishment of commercial funeral parlours; it was only during the late 1930s and early 1940s, however, that the challenges presented by wartime for transporting coffins out of the city (whether to ship them back to the native place or bury them in surrounding areas) fueled the popularity of commercial funeral establishments, especially coffin repositories. This period thus saw the emergence of a “vast necropolis” within the city itself (p. 95).

Throughout the book, Henriot charts the expansion of Chinese state interest in the dead over the 20th century, a process that unfolded unevenly and in response to contingent circumstances such as war. Henriot traces this shift through the initial attempts of the Nationalist government to redefine urban death practices during the late 1920s and 1930s, the new attention that foreign and Chinese authorities in Shanghai began to pay toward the dead amid the alarming accumulation of bodies (especially in the International Settlement) during wartime, and the communist government's takeover of the funeral industry after 1949. Ultimately, Henriot argues, death became less and less visible in Shanghai as city authorities in the 1940s and especially after the communist revolution made increasingly aggressive (and effective) moves to displace cemeteries and eliminate urban coffin repositories. The developments of the 1950s and 1960s that decisively transformed the management of death in Shanghai thus built on earlier trends, including new concerns about the hygienic consequences of keeping dead bodies in proximity to the urban population, the valorization of cremation as an alternative to earth burial, and an interest in making the land on which burial grounds were located available for urban development.

This book rewards the reader with a view of the large-scale forces – industrialization, urbanization, war and revolution – that transformed death in modern China. It also provides a sensitive account of the lived experience of those who encountered urban mortality first-hand, whether through the deaths of family members, native-place and guild acquaintances, or urban strangers. The book is based on a careful and broad reading of archival materials from the Shanghai municipal archives, supplemented with newspapers and other published sources, as well as a number of striking photographs. The book also features an inspired use of digitally produced maps that indicate the spatial distribution of cemeteries, coffin repositories, exposed bodies and other aspects of death in the city. The amount of information that Henriot has extracted from these documents is impressive. While the narrative can be very detailed and even dense at times, it provides a wealth of information that will be valuable for those who study the practices, meanings, and spaces of death in modern China as well as urban history, social history and the history of Shanghai.

One issue to which Henriot returns at several points in the book is the relationship between funerals (and death practices more generally) and early 20th-century historical actors' judgements about respectability, status and social worth. For example, Henriot writes that one's reliance on the inexpensive or cost-free funeral services of native-place or charity organizations “bore the stamp of social failure,” especially when compared to the ostentatious funeral processions of the wealthy, which constituted “a sign of high social achievement” (pp. 307–08). Likewise, in a discussion of the organizations that collected the exposed bodies of the indigent, Henriot describes those who died in such a way as having suffered “socially shameful deaths, by Chinese standards, deaths better forgotten, as if the individual had never existed” (p. 227). Henriot could have historicized these kinds of social judgements and assumptions a bit more, giving a better sense of which social and economic interests such ideas about status, respectability and social ignominy ultimately served. Were such ideas simply legacies of late imperial times or did they reflect new status anxieties that arose with the emergence of industrial capitalism and modern consumer culture (not to mention new views of urban poverty)? Given that the most prestigious funeral practices were unaffordable to the vast majority of the population, one wonders whether such social judgements were a luxury that only the wealthiest could afford. A more sustained treatment of these questions would have further clarified the social politics of death in Shanghai during this period.

In its finely grained treatment of death in the modern urban context and its attention to the importance of class in shaping both the experience of death and disposition of the dead, Scythe and the City makes significant contributions to the existing historical and anthropological scholarship on Chinese death practices. Given Henriot's treatment of the early communist state's ultimately successful attempts to transform the urban management of death, this book also has much to say to those who study state and societal responses to death in contemporary China from the perspectives of anthropology, sociology and other disciplines.