The Power of Place Contentious Politics in Twentieth-Century Shanghai and Bombay

Riots, strikes, and protests broke out in the streets of Shanghai and Bombay (renamed Mumbai in 1995), with impressive frequency during the twentieth century. Many of the landmark protests and social movements had close connections with the neighborhoods, workplaces, and civic space of each city. By the late twentieth century, as the political geography of each city changed rapidly with the commodification of urban land, so too did the patterns of political contention. Using a comparative historical lens, Frazier chronicles the political biographies of these two metropolises and leading centers of manufacturing and finance. Debates over ideology, citizenship, and political representation took material form through clashes over housing, jobs, police violence, public space, among much else, in the lived experience of urban residents. Frazier puts contemporary debates over informal housing, eviction of inner-city residents, scarcities of manufacturing jobs, and questions of unequal citizenship in an illuminating historical context.

Introduction; 1. Political geographies and contentious ports; 2. Nationalism and urban social movements, 1919; 3. Containing contention through nationalist movements; 4. In search of the socialist-modernist metropolis; 5. The rebellions of 1966; 6. Relocation, de-industrialization, and the politics of compensation in Mumbai; 7. Relocation, de-industrialization, and the politics of compensation in Shanghai; Conclusion.

Mark W. Frazier is Professor of Politics at The New School for Social Research and Academic Director of the India China Institute at The New School, New York.