Mark Frazier’s book shines for the interventions it makes across various fields. It stands out not only for its contributions to the study of contentious politics, but also for showcasing comparative urban sociology at its best. Further, it twinkles with the potential of an entire research agenda on India–China comparisons.

Anchoring Frazier’s book is the following question: How do urban political geographies—civic spaces, courtrooms, commercial districts, industrial zones, factory floors, streets, and housing types—interact with and influence urban contentious politics? Frazier takes a historical approach, focusing on the twentieth century. But his study of urban protests is entirely timely. In the past decade hundreds of thousands of people have poured out onto the streets of cities across the world to rally against problems ranging from economic inequality, sexual abuse and harassment, racial injustice, police brutality, the muzzling of the press, discrimination against ethnic and religious minorities and immigrants, and the more general subversion of democratic rights associated with the rise or establishment of right-wing regimes. Inasmuch as strikes, sit-ins, and demonstrations seek to garner public attention, they are almost always staged on major streets, in parks, and in plazas. How do these everyday city spaces influence—and how are they informed by—the grievances, claims, and tactics of these protesters and of the generations that have marched before them? How does the political geography of cities shape and how is it, in turn, shaped by the ideology, organization, and leadership of contentious politics?

In offering important insights about the mutually constituted and transformative nature of political geography and contentious politics, Frazier’s book builds on the established scholarship on the connections between spatial environments and social movements, laid out among other works in Douglas McAdam, Sidney Tarrow and Charles Tilly’s seminal volume, Dynamics of Contention (2001). But The Power of Place pushes research on contentious politics forward through its distinctive focus on cities—in particular on how urban political geographies and their alterations interact with political, social, and economic inequalities to generate new forms of disparities in and, concomitantly, claims for urban citizenship.

The empirical canvas across which Frazier reflects on these theoretical questions is as ambitious as it is elegant. A comparative historical analysis of the parallel trajectories of contentious politics in the cities of Bombay and Shanghai throughout the twentieth century. Frazier borrows from Jennifer Robinson to term his work an “encompassing comparison” in which cases studies are embedded within broader system-level processes. An important typology of subnational comparison across borders published in the pages of this journal in the same year as Frazier’s book, however, offers an alternate and even more useful classificatory prism. In Jeffrey Seller’s typology, Frazier’s Bombay and Shanghai are “Matched Subnational Cases in ‘Most Different’ National Systems.” As such, they showcase and enable inferences about subnational convergences despite and across national-level distinctions.

In his case for “transnational” comparison, Sellers acknowledges conditions, such as size and diversity, that continue to tip the scales toward more traditional within-nation subnational comparisons, explicitly naming India and China as such countries. Indeed, comparisons of subnational units within India and China have energized comparative politics theorizing on a range of outcomes (on social development, see, for example, Singh 2015). Yet Frazier’s case study of Bombay and Shanghai points precisely to the promise of, and showcases an especially fruitful method of, making comparisons across these two countries.

The impulse to draw comparisons and make connections between India and China is a long-standing one. Hegel and Weber famously juxtaposed the two civilizational cultures and their religions. The Indo-China war of 1962 prompted a distinct, enduring research agenda within international relations on the (fraught) relations between the two neighbors. Sino–Indian comparisons have figured prominently in influential studies of state–society relations from Barrington Moore to, more recently, Francis Fukuyama. The economic rise of the two countries furrowed another fertile site of comparison around processes of globalization, market reforms, and foreign direct investment. More recently, there has been a surge of studies in history and the humanities on the rich interconnections between India and China, building on the pioneering work of scholars such as Prasenjit Duara and Tansen Sen.

Frazier pushes this important legacy forward. He contributes not only the method of a paired transnational subnational comparison but also, in doing so, makes way for a fresh theoretical perspective. For all their similarities as ancient cultures, Asian giants, and of late “superpowers,” India and China have markedly different histories, social systems, and, notably, political systems. Their respective nationalist revolutions in the late 1940s ushered in a multiparty electoral system in India and one-party communist rule in China. Since then, this distinction between “democracy” and “authoritarianism” has loomed large over their comparisons. Jean Dréze and Amartya Sen famously pointed to political opposition and a free press as postcolonial India’s bulwark against famine, even as everyday hunger has persisted. They traced the devastating famines in China such as in the wake of the Great Leap Forward to the absence of these liberal democratic institutions. Frazier, in contrast, is part of a larger project, neatly summarized by the title of an important new edited volume by Elizabeth Perry and Prasenjit Duara (Frazier is also a contributor), to instead compare India and China Beyond Regimes.

Breaking away from a singular focus on political institutions, Frazier instead shines the analytical spotlight on the dynamics of cityscapes and how they generate new forms of identity and agency in contentious politics. In chapter 1, he effectively sets up the comparison of the contemporary megacities of Bombay and Shanghai through a narration of their historic commonalities—from their shared origins as global trading ports in nineteenth-century British colonial capitalism; their coterminous and related growth as textile manufacturing hubs (Shanghai’s emergence as a global textile manufacturing center owed its origins in part to the import of cotton yarn from Bombay mills in the nineteenth century) that attracted similarly large migrant flows that contributed to each city’s sociocultural diversity; their emergence as national and global centers of finance in the nineteenth century; their leading role in India and China’s respective nationalist struggles during the first half of the twentieth century; their midcentury economic stagnation; to their late twentieth-century resurgence (p. 24). Most relevant for Frazier’s purposes are how these shared histories led to comparable urban political geographies characterized by acute housing scarcities.

The rest of the book unfolds temporally. In chapters 2–5 Frazier sketches a parallel arc, through to the closing decades of the twentieth century, of lush “transgressive” contentious politics, marked by new actors and innovative mobilizational techniques in both cities. Chapters 2 and 3 show how, in the first half of the nineteenth century, factory floors across Bombay and Shanghai similarly emerged as unprecedented sites of nationalist mobilization. As nationalist fervor peaked, Bombay and Shanghai’s political leaders and activists forged analogous links between the oppression of textile workers by mill owners and the subjugation of their nations by European colonizers. Chapters 4 and 5 delineate how, despite key changes in structures of sovereignty, the two postcolonial cities retained a key feature of their spatial geography: the tight connection between workplaces and neighborhoods. This meant that workers were spatially at the center but with the failures of the “socialist-modernist” project, socioeconomically on the margins of the city. This exclusion provided the fuel for the nativist Shiv Sena in Bombay and the worker “revolutionary rebels” in Shanghai who, despite different mobilizational repertoires corresponding to their ideological positions, spearheaded similarly populist protests that brought out marginalized workers in loud, public confrontations with the established elites. Chapters 6 and 7 narrate a similar inflection point in this trajectory of urban protests—a shift away from transgressive to more contained forms of contention, paradoxically precisely at the moment when income inequalities soared across the by-now megacities. Frazier traces this shift to the dismantling of industry that in turn created a disjuncture between spaces of residence and community, on the one hand, and employment, on the other. As workers were forcibly relocated out of the center of the city, they also gave up claims to that center, instead taking up a much more circumscribed “politics of compensation.”

Throughout the book, as he delineates the theorized connection between urban geographies and patterns of protests, Frazier also engages in a powerful, if understated, attack on the influential political economy view (he calls out Daren Acemoglu and James Robinson as its most prominent proponents) of income disparities as decisively shaping interests and behavior. Instead, he makes a case for a wider, more flexible conception of inequality that breaks away from the shackles of Gini coefficients and is sensitive to popular perceptions. He shows, for example, that it was not so much economic as political inequality that fueled urban protests in Bombay and Shanghai during the 1920s and 1930s. Political and economic elites, workers, and students came together to confront colonial rulers with claims for more equal legal-political citizenship. Similarly, protests in the 1950s and 1960s were directed against inequalities in urban citizenship, represented by exclusion from jobs and public goods and services. And finally, in neither Bombay nor Shanghai did the sharp rise in income inequalities beginning in the 1990s translate into a greater frequency or intensity of protests.

In conclusion, it is worth noting that inasmuch as its empirical richness is a hallmark of Frazier’s fine book, it can also present a challenge. Frazier is clear that he does not trace variations in his primary outcome of urban social movements to quantitatively measured “causal variables” of urban geography. Yet, I wonder if this explicitly stated “purpose” might have been able to accommodate a specification - inductively derived - of what type of alteration (abundance versus scarcity, building or dismantling) in which specific dimension of the urban landscape (housing or industrial spaces) influences which particular elements of contentious politics (mobilizational strategies, nature of the claims). Such an analytical roadmap, in either narrative or graphic form, would make it easier to navigate Frazier’s wealth of archival and secondary-source material. It would also amplify the enormous potential of this superb study to illuminate the contentious politics reverberating in cities across the world today.