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地方中的全球：

中国的战争、商业与科技百年史

基本信息

Xin Zhang, The Global in the Local: A Century of War, Commerce, and Technology in China, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2023.

About this book

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 modern China. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, world-historic political, economic, and technological developments transformed the textures of everyday life in places like Zhenjiang, a midsize river town in China’s prosperous Lower Yangzi region. Drawing on rare primary sources, including handwritten diaries and other personal writings, Zhang offers a ground-level view of globalization in the city. We see civilians coping with the traumatic international encounters of the Opium War; Zhenjiang brokers bankrolling Shanghai’s ascendance as a cosmopolitan commercial hub; and merchants shipping goods to market, for the first time, on steamships.

Far from passive recipients, the Chinese leveraged, resisted, and made change for themselves. Indeed, The Global in the Local argues that globalization is inevitably refracted through local particularities.

关于本书

本书讲述了十九世纪和二十世纪早期，中国镇江这座江畔城市的普通民众如何经历全球化的故事。

1842年夏，当英军在城外集结时，恐慌席卷了镇江。当地居民本就对外国人心存疑虑，而且他们还听说了两个月前英军在乍浦制造的苦难。随之而来的是一波自杀和慈悲杀人的浪潮：为了不让家人落入侵略者之手，数百名妇女选择自尽并杀死自己的孩子，或死于男性家庭成员之手。 英国观察者将此归咎于"亚洲文化"中的仪式性自杀传统。实际上，这是一个独特的事件——是十九世纪中国地方力量与全球力量碰撞的悲剧性结果。

张信的这部开创性著作考察了地方社会与全球变革之间激烈的博弈如何塑造了现代中国。在十九世纪和二十世纪早期，具有世界历史意义的政治、经济和技术发展改变了像镇江这样的地方的日常生活面貌。镇江是长江下游富庶地区的一座中等城市。 借助罕见的第一手资料，包括手写日记等个人文献，张信为我们呈现了这座城市经历全球化的基层视角。我们得以看到平民百姓如何应对鸦片战争中创伤性的国际遭遇；镇江的中间人如何为上海崛起为世界性商业中心提供资金支持；商人们如何首次使用轮船运送货物到市场。

中国人绝非被动的接受者，他们善用、抵制变革，并为自己创造改变。 事实上，《地方中的全球》一书论证了全球化必然会通过地方特色折射出不同面貌。

About the Author

Xin Zhang is the author of Social Transformation in Modern China: The State and Local Elites in Henan, 1900–1937. He is Professor of History at Indiana University Indianapolis and a member of the Association for Asian Studies.

关于作者

张信是《现代中国的社会转型：河南的国家与地方精英，1900-1937》一书的作者。他是印第安纳大学印第安纳波利斯分校历史系教授，也是亚洲研究协会会员。