Hankow : conflict and community in a Chinese city, 1796-1895

Author(s)

Bibliographic Information

Hankow : conflict and community in a Chinese city, 1796-1895

William T. Rowe

Stanford University Press, c1989

  • : alk. paper
  • : pbk

Available at  / 39 libraries

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Note

Bibliography: p. [399]-415

Includes index

"This book offers the second half of a comprehensive social history of nineteenth-century Hankow ... "--Pref

Description and Table of Contents

Volume

: alk. paper ISBN 9780804715416

Description

This second volume of a two-volume social history of Hankow focuses on the people of Hankow, in all their ethnic diversity, occupational variety, constant mobility, and social bonds.

Table of Contents

  • Introduction
  • Part I. The City: 1. City people
  • 2. Urban space
  • Part II. Community: 3. Popular welfare
  • 4. Public goods and public services
  • Part III. Conflict: 5. Structures of conflict
  • 6. Dangerous classes and laboring classes
  • 7. True believers
  • Part IV. Control
  • 8. Forces of order
  • 9. Crisis and response
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Selected bibliography
  • Character list
  • Index.
Volume

: pbk ISBN 9780804721608

Description

This is the second volume of a two-volume social history of nineteenth-century Hankow, a city of over one million inhabitants and the commercial hub of central China. In the first volume, Hankow: Commerce and Society in a Chinese City, 1796-1889 (1984), the author emphasized the dynamism of late imperial commerce, the relation of the metropolis to its hinterland, and the corporate institutions of the city, notably its guilds, which assumed a number of functions we normally attribute to a municipal government. In this volume, the focus is on the people of Hankow, in all their ethnic diversity, occupational variety, and constant mobility, and on the social bonds that enabled this mass of people to live and work in a crowded city with much less disruptive social conflict than occurred in Hankow's counterparts in early modern Europe. Built into the argument of the book is a running comparison nineteenth-century Hankow with such cities as London and Paris in the somewhat earlier period when they, too, were experiencing the growing pains of nascent preindustrial capitalism. How are we to account for the fact that the cities of early modern Europe were so much more prone to protest and social upheaval than Hankow was in a comparable stage of development? The author finds the answer in the cultural hegemony of an activist elite that fostered moral consensus, social harmony, and an aura of solicitude for the well-being of residents at every social level, exemplified in such service institutions as poor relief, firefighting, and public security. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, however, the social bonds that had held Hankow together were beginning to fragment, as social polarization and growing class-consciousness fostered an atmosphere of increasing unrest.

Table of Contents

  • Introduction
  • Part I. The City: 1. City people
  • 2. Urban space
  • Part II. Community: 3. Popular welfare
  • 4. Public goods and public services
  • Part III. Conflict: 5. Structures of conflict
  • 6. Dangerous classes and laboring classes
  • 7. True believers
  • Part IV. Control
  • 8. Forces of order
  • 9. Crisis and response
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Selected bibliography
  • Character list
  • Index.

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