The Global in the Local: A Century of War, Commerce, and Technology in China

Xin Zhang's The Global in the Local examines familiar themes in Chinese and global history—war, commerce, and technology—from the perspective of Zhenjiang, a prefectural seat and commercial entrepôt in Jiangsu Province, located at the juncture of the Yangtze River and the Grand Canal. In focusing on a city that is much less well known than places like Shanghai and Beijing, Zhang's goal is not only to produce a narrative that gives due attention to Zhenjiang's local history but also to contribute to conceptual discussions of the relationship between local and global processes. The book substantiates both Zhang's claim that Zhenjiang and places like it are viable and interesting focuses for research and his overarching argument that the agency of local actors was ultimately constitutive of global forces. A mix of weaknesses in the conceptual framework, narrative, and source base of the book do affect its quality, but sympathetic readers will still find it thought-provoking.The Global in the Local comprises three parts, each dedicated to one of the book's core themes. The first three chapters provide background on Zhenjiang prior to 1840 and narrate the city's experience during the First Opium War, with particular attention to the largely ineffective (even counterproductive) efforts of Qing officials to defend the city from British invasion and the violent aftermath of its fall in terms of both the destruction wrought by British forces and the mass suicides and “mercy killings”1 committed by Zhenjiang's inhabitants. Zhang describes Zhenjiang's experience of war as a “negative” form of encounter with global forces but one in which it is still possible to observe local specificity and a negotiated, if limited, understanding between Zhenjiang's people and the British occupiers.Chapters 4 through 6 examine the commercial aftermath of the Opium War and Zhenjiang's changing place in regional, interregional, and international trade routes. Effectively, these chapters show that Zhenjiang does not exactly fit the stereotype of either the boom town or the emergent hinterland/periphery. On the one hand, the growing importance of coastal shipping and decline of the Grand Canal elevated Shanghai at the expense of Zhenjiang, which lost its prominence as a hub for interregional north-south trade. On the other hand, as the total volume of trade on the Yangtze River increased, thanks in part to growing international trade, Zhenjiang pivoted to serving as a “subdistribution center” (94) for goods like kerosene passing through Shanghai. This period saw both the growth of individual financial institutions in Zhenjiang and their increasing coordination, embodied by the foundation of a “bankers’ association” (qianye gongsuo) that helped merchants in Zhenjiang and other places secure access to the Shanghai credit market.Chapters 7 through 9 focus on local engagement with steamship technology through the early twentieth century. Chapters 7 and 8 review the diplomatic developments that opened the Yangtze River to foreign commerce and the emergence of and competition between a mix of Chinese (state-backed and private) and foreign steamship companies. Again we see Zhenjiang's position in riverine trade routes coming under threat—this time from railroads establishing faster and more direct links between other cities and Shanghai and also the siltation of Zhenjiang's coastline along the Yangtze. A shift to shorter routes on smaller waterways sustained the steamship industry somewhat, at least until the development of a comprehensive “inter-modal” transportation network (including roadways) under the Nationalist government. Chapter 9 offers an interesting discussion of signs of growing state oversight of the steamship business with reference to the handling of accidents. The book closes on an ambivalent note. On the one hand, it emphasizes the resilience and adaptivity of Zhenjiang's local population. On the other hand, the narrative arc of parts 2 and 3 suggests that Zhenjiang experienced a fairly steady economic decline over the first decades of the twentieth century, belying Zhang's emphasis on the efficacy of local agency.The Global in the Local speaks to ongoing efforts to conceptualize the relationship between localities and global processes while offering an example of how to write local history through a global lens. The primary conceptual agenda of the book is to shift from a binary framing of the local and the global toward understanding the implantation of the global in the local. The introduction clearly lays out the implications of this shift with regard to the local, explaining that the book approaches localities more as “lived spaces” (à la Lefebvre) than “bounded territories” (9). This approach effectively reflects how translocal entanglements shaped localities in China, even well before the nineteenth century, and is generally sustained throughout the book.However, corresponding clarity about the meaning of the “global” is lacking. Readers will likely benefit from consulting Zhang's 2022 article “What Is the Global?” for a fuller explanation of this side of the conceptual framework. In the article, Zhang explains that he understands the global and local to exist in a “symbiotic relationship.”2 This view, he explains there, bears some similarity to the idea of glocalization, with which the book itself does not engage. The key difference is that whereas glocalization describes the local adaptation of (already-)global processes, Zhang maintains in the article that processes only become global through their incorporation within localities. This is a compelling perspective, although one suspects that readers will differ in how innovative they find it. Closer engagement with secondary scholarship dealing with both similar conceptual issues and historical themes, like books by Ruth Rogaski on urban history and Elisabeth Köll on technology (both of which receive only passing mention in notes), might help sharpen the book's interventions.3As much as the book demonstrates the potential value of such a framework it also evidences the difficulty of operationalizing it. To a large extent, the “global” (and, less prominently, the state) appears in the book not as something constituted by local actors but as an outside (Euro-American) force with which local actors contend and sometimes adapt to their own interests. Especially without reading the aforementioned essay, readers are liable to perceive the local-global dynamic in the binary terms that Zhang is minded to eschew. One reason for this is that the two-way nature of the conversation (“continuum”) between local and global Zhang posits does not fully come into view. While the book conveys the localization of global processes (glocalization), it does not comprehensively trace how those processes, modulated by local actors in Zhenjiang, reflected outwards into global space. Without this side of the story, Zhang's account of how the global inhered in the local is more one-directional than I think he intends.Instead, the book formulates the global ramifications of local agency through a triumphalist vocabulary of “success.” The closing sentences of the book state, “By successfully navigating the challenges posed by and seizing the opportunities afforded by global changes, [the people of China] effected local changes that helped place China on its own path to modernity. As the result of the negotiation, global and local processes merged, enabling the global and the local to become a continuum” (196). Here, success operates primarily on the conceptual plane, referring to the achievement of the continuum Zhang's theoretical framework presupposes. As an argument about Zhenjiang's history, this argument is not so much unconvincing as dissatisfying because it is hard to imagine an alternative to this success besides, perhaps, the total obliteration of the local or the global, if that is even possible. (As part 1 reminds us, mass death and destruction can be construed as constitutive of “the local” and “the global,” even if in a negative sense.) Missing is a compelling, overarching answer to how far Zhenjiang's people experienced and understood their negotiation with global changes as successful or how this negotiation ultimately reconfigured any number of power hierarchies within Zhenjiang or its relationship to other places.As this critique suggests, the book does not convey as coherent a view of local history as one might expect. The text tends to oscillate between general background and Zhenjiang's local history unpredictably and without developing deep attention to locally specific dynamics. For example, the first two-thirds of chapter 4 consists of a general historical and historiographical discussion of changes in trading patterns in nineteenth-century China. Then the final few pages of the chapter abruptly shift attention to Zhenjiang, quickly reviewing some of the major changes in its trading functions over the course of the nineteenth century. Chapter 5 repeats this pattern, beginning with an overview of provincial merchant groups in China without clearly explaining how they operated in Zhenjiang or related to the more Zhenjiang-specific brokerage practices discussed later in the chapter. Another example of narrative discontinuity is the relationship between part 1 and the rest of the book. Part 1 does establish a theme of ongoing negotiation between Zhenjiang's people and global forces, and the conclusion of the Treaty of Nanjing does set up the history of commercial transformations described subsequently. However, the themes of warfare and violence that are central to part 1 subsequently disappear from the narrative. Someone reading parts 2 and 3 would little suspect that Zhenjiang had such a traumatic recent past. The book's inattention to Zhenjiang's history during and in the aftermath of the Taiping War (Zhenjiang was occupied by the Taiping between 1853 and 1857) or the immediate ramifications of its establishment as a treaty port and the transcultural encounters—positive or negative—this engendered undermines the book's effort to relate a history of the locality as a “lived space.”4In places, the book uses a compelling range of source material, but there is unevenness here too. The use of English and Chinese diaries in part 1 to examine firsthand experiences of the Opium War and early transcultural interactions is promising. However, not interrogating the sources themselves to examine the globality (or local distinctiveness) of the practice of keeping diaries feels like a missed opportunity. Chapter 5 relies heavily on Jiangsu Hangyun shi: Jindai bufen, edited by Guo Xiaoyi.5 By my count, thirty-three of the chapter's fifty-eight notes refer to this source, and the chapter unsurprisingly has the feel of a summary of a secondary source. Chapter 6 repeatedly references (twenty-one out of fifty-five notes) a source titled “Zhenjiang shangye shiliao,” which the bibliography identifies as an unpublished manuscript “written or compiled in the late 1950s by an anonymous author” (248). An eleven-page range from this manuscript constitutes nearly the only primary source referenced in chapter 6’s crucial discussion of financial institutions in Zhenjiang (120–28). Setting aside questions of reliability, such heavy reliance on a single source likely explains the limited and imprecise detail on specific examples of financial relationships between Zhenjiang, Shanghai, and other cities, the lack of clear indications of the scope and scale of these relationships, and the absence of a compelling explanation of why Zhenjiang's financial community in particular was able to assume such an important role.In sum, The Global in the Local offers a compelling, if incompletely elaborated, framework for how historians might approach the relationship between local and global dynamics. It also reminds us that there are interesting and diverse stories to be told about places in between oft-studied global cities and far-flung frontiers. If anything, the book's shortcomings illustrate that places like Zhenjiang are worth more than just a single look.