Shanghai: Between China and the World

4 credits · Undergraduate

This seminar explores the history of Shanghai as a place of interaction between China and the world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Shanghai’s opening to foreign trade and residence after 1842 sparked its rapid growth into China’s largest metropolis, and one of the great cities of the world, less than a century later. We will focus on how the accelerating flow of people, goods, and ideas through Shanghai from across the world and throughout China dramatically transformed the material and mental landscape of the metropolis, which in turn shaped the lives and identities of the many different groups of residents who crowded into its expanding borders.