2026/02/02 by Yuansha Niu · 1 voice
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Social Sciences · #Australian History and Society #Historical Economic and Social Studies #Socioeconomic Development in Asia
paper · pdf · doi:10.1017/s0963926825100692
openalex publication_date 2026/02/02 · openalex created_date 2026/02/03 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Abstract This article traces the origins and evolution of the Shanghai Bund within a comparative framework of transimperial urban forms. Existing scholarship has offered divergent interpretations – imperial metropolitan precedents, cross-colonial transfers and local antecedents – which this article argues are complementary rather than contradictory. It further moves beyond broad regional claims through specifying concrete cases supported by new archival evidence. Drawing on records mainly from the Shanghai Municipal Archives, The National Archives in the UK and contemporary newspapers, the article shows how Singapore’s Boat Quay, Calcutta’s Strand Road and London’s Thames Embankment were selectively appropriated to meet shifting sanitary, political and economic needs. Localized over successive decades, these borrowings crystallized into a Bund form – landscaped, monumental, with a financial core and technologically modern – that became a model for other treaty ports and was reproduced across the imperial world and beyond. The Bund’s history is thus a microcosm of the circulation and remaking of ideas within the wider networks of the British Empire.