Textbooks are hard to review. The natural audience is students, rather than scholars, and I am blessedly no longer a student. Textbooks work or fail to work in the context of the varied mysteries of classroom practice. Some instructors desire encyclopedic comprehensiveness; some seek inspiring prose. I have known teachers to anchor every beat of the class in the textbook's unfolding exercises, and I have endured courses in which the wizened professor recited from his self-authored text. Even trickier is imagining how students will respond to a textbook. Do they take copious notes on each chapter? Do they expect review questions? Are they coming to the material with previous experience, or will the book serve as their sole guide to an unknown past? The textbook, in short, is a tool that proves itself in the wild, not on a reviewer's desk.
Toby Lincoln's An Urban History of China is a considerable achievement. It opens with a useful introduction reviewing approaches to urban history in general, and then in successive chapters describes the growth of Chinese cities and the driving forces of urbanization from the Neolithic era into the early twenty-first century. Despite its broad coverage, the work is mercifully brief. Of course it has omissions, but instructors and students alike will be grateful that such a book is available to them, and that Lincoln is upfront about his choices of material to include or exclude. If this book serves as the backbone of your urban history course, you will have time in the semester for supplemental readings on environment, gender, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, and whatever other themes you may wish to explore. Because the work is both unique and flexible, it is likely that people will want to employ this tool for a variety of purposes. I can't tell you whether or not the book will work for your particular job, only describe the kind of tool that Toby Lincoln has fashioned for us so that you can decide how best to wield it.
Lincoln's central concern is to explain the deep historical roots of present-day Chinese urbanism, and in particular the recent shifts in Chinese society that have resulted in over 50 percent of the population living in cities. In a concise and clarifying conclusion (which many readers may find a useful starting point), he explains long-term factors affecting urban life in China. These include the seemingly ever growing linkages between cities by “road, river, and sea” (254), the evolving interests of the state in urban governance, and the influence of non-Chinese models of urbanism. Lincoln emphasizes in particular the important role of first Inner Asian, and later modernizing imperialist powers on the development of Chinese cities. In that sense, Lincoln is right to describe his project as a form of global urban history, but the reader should note that Lincoln's “global” view extends neither to overseas Chinese communities nor to the effects of Chinese urban ideas and practices outside of China. It does, however, celebrate the variety of urban forms within China, attending to the administrative, economic, and social functions that cities could perform, the different symbolic and emotional meanings people ascribed to cities, and the manner in which different urban formations could shape and reshape the countryside.
A first glance at the Table of Contents may give some historians pause. The first four chapters discuss, and often celebrate, what Lincoln calls “China's Imperial Urban Civilization.” Next follow two chapters on modernity and two on developments since Mao. My first impression was of a tradition vs. modernity trope in which China moves from relative stasis in the imperial period to dynamism by way of the cataclysms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My anxieties, however, were mostly misplaced. Lincoln rejects European-based normative models of city development, including Weber's characterization of Chinese cities as lacking the forms of political independence that made them important (according to Weber) in European history. Lincoln wishes to explain how people in China created cities, but also how they understood the products of their creation. The word “civilization” seems intended not as a synonym for “tradition,” but rather as a way to emphasize the scope of Lincoln's interest. This civilization changed over time. It encompassed not only diverse urban formations, but also a huge variety of ways of describing cities in poetry and prose.
Lincoln brings order to this complexity through consistency of presentation. Each chapter includes three sections. “Urban System” describes the relative levels of urbanization in different parts of China, the approximate size of cities (including the percentage of urban dwellers in the total population), and the networks connecting cities. “Urban Planning and Governance” offers a view of the administration of cities from the imperial center alongside the ways urban residents managed essential tasks. “Urban Culture and Daily Life” encompasses descriptions of cities and urban life, and in this section Lincoln attempts to convey how the experience of inhabiting a city might differ from that of the countryside.
The structure of the book is logical, and China specialists will find it useful for the way it crystallizes important themes. Each chapter includes helpful maps and suggestions for further reading. Those unfamiliar with Chinese history, however, may find the early chapters particularly challenging. The “Urban System” section of Chapter 1, for example, describes developments from the earliest settlements to the Han Dynasty, but the “Urban Planning and Governance” and “Urban Culture and Daily Life” sections then jump around within that vast timespan, leaving the reader a bit dizzy. The organization and argument become more manageable in later chapters, where the time periods are much shorter.
Lincoln's textbook is an extremely useful tool, but you will want to use it with care. It is schematic rather than encyclopedic, and despite its wide scope, the emphasis lies mainly on recent developments. If you are looking for an introductory text, or if you are considering assigning chapters of this book in global urban history courses, you would be wise to devote time to helping students navigate the early chapters. More advanced students will appreciate the book's many strengths on their own. For my part, I admire how Lincoln foregrounds the historical legacies of administrative centralization, economic interconnection, and cultural production in China today while still conveying the many transformations of Chinese urban forms.
