| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Christopher A. Reed. Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876–1937. (Contemporary Chinese Studies.) Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. 2004. Pp. xvii, 391. Cloth $85.00, paper $29.95.

This is an eye-opening book. It is long-winded at times and it is not always crystal clear, especially because of the frequent chronological jumps (each of the chapters covers a period of several decades). But Christopher A. Reed brings a neglected aspect to the prominent discussions of cultural transfer in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century China. Such studies have dealt in detail with the new print products, their contents, and their importance to the creation of a Chinese modernity, but not with those who actually labored to make them. Reed's book now uncovers the importance of the "uncultured businessman" and his employees to the creation and development of a modern Chinese culture, a culture that was Shanghai-based and Shanghai-made (pp. 164, 192, 200). By highlighting the material and technical side of the matter, this book constitutes a new—if not all that different—narrative on the "triumph of Western technology" in non-Western environments (p. vii). The pattern is, once more, not one of victory and subjugation, for Reed shows very clearly how the Chinese quickly beat the foreigners at their own game (and machines). According to Reed, it was books with Chinese fonts, not missionary fonts that would be sold; it was high-quality lithographs by Chinese publishers, not those by missionaries, that made big profits; and it was Chinese-made rather than foreign-imported machines that came to dominate the market. Foreign printing devices became part of the Chinese universe and would soon be given Chinese genealogies, too. China's modern media and the technology that had created them, so it was argued, belonged to the Chinese (p. 135).

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