The Global in the Local: A Century of War, Commerce, and Technology in China Zhang Xin
The story of globalization in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as experienced by ordinary people in the Chinese river town of Zhenjiang.Fear swept Zhenjiang as British soldiers gathered…
Specifikacia The Global in the Local: A Century of War, Commerce, and Technology in China Zhang Xin
The story of globalization in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as experienced by ordinary people in the Chinese river town of Zhenjiang.Fear swept Zhenjiang as British soldiers gathered outside the city walls in the summer of 1842. Already suspicious of foreigners, locals had also heard of the suffering the British inflicted two months earlier, in Zhapu. A wave of suicides and mercy killings ensued: rather than leave their families to the invaders, hundreds of women killed themselves and their children or died at the hands of male family members. British observers decried an "Asian culture" of ritual suicide. In reality, the event was sui generis--a tragic result of colliding local and global forces in nineteenth-century China.Xin Zhang's groundbreaking history examines the intense negotiations between local societies and global changes that created