Entangled Colonialisms is a strikingly original and deeply researched contribution to the history of treaty-port China and global empire. Moving beyond nation-centred or single-empire narratives, Taoyu Yang traces the multi-imperial co-production of Shanghai and Tianjin, demonstrating how these cities not only hosted empires, but actively participated in making them. Drawing on a remarkable range of multilingual and transnational archival sources, the book illuminates how rival imperial powers interacted, competed, and collaborated in shaping urban governance, planning, and the built environment. Elegantly written and conceptually innovative, it will be essential reading for scholars and students of Chinese urban history, colonialism, and global urban studies.

Maurizio Marinelli, Professor of Chinese Development Planning, University College London, UK

Yang's rigorous research illustrates not only the heterogenous character of colonial authority in places like Shanghai and Tianjin, but also the ways in which its precarity allowed for the emergence of China on the world stage, as a strategically nationalist actor, in a swiftly changing imperial order.

Antoinette Burton, Professor of History, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA