Product Information
By the early twentieth century, Chinese residents of the northern treaty-port city of Tianjin were dwelling in the world. Divided by nine foreign concessions, Tianjin was one of the world's most colonized and cosmopolitan cities. Residents could circle the globe in an afternoon, strolling from a Chinese courtyard house through a Japanese garden past a French Beaux-Arts bank to dine at a German cafe and fall asleep in a British garden city-style semi-attached brick house. Dwelling in the World considers family, house, and home in Tianjin to explore how tempos and structures of everyday life changed with the fall of the Qing Empire and the rise of a colonized city. Elizabeth LaCouture argues that the intimate ideas and practices of the modern home were more important in shaping the gender and status identities of Tianjin's urban elites than the new public ideology of the nation. Placing the Chinese home in a global context, she challenges Euro-American historical notions that the private sphere emerged from industrialization. She argues that concepts of individual property rights that emerged during the Republican era became foundational to state-society relations in early Communist housing reforms and in today's middle-class real estate boom. Drawing on diverse sources from municipal archives, women's magazines, and architectural field work to social surveys and colonial records, Dwelling in the World recasts Chinese social and cultural history, offering new perspectives on gender and class, colonialism and empire, visual and material culture, and technology and everyday life.Product Identifiers
PublisherColumbia University Press
ISBN-139780231181792
eBay Product ID (ePID)8049043079
Product Key Features
Number of Pages376 Pages
LanguageEnglish
Publication NameDwelling in the World: Family, House, and Home in Tianjin, China, 1860-1960
Publication Year2021
SubjectHistory
TypeTextbook
AuthorElizabeth Lacouture
SeriesStudies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
Dimensions
Item Height229 mm
Item Width152 mm
Additional Product Features
Country/Region of ManufactureUnited States
Title_AuthorElizabeth Lacouture