Course Overview

Course Title: The Urban Management for Port Cities in the 19th and 20th Centuries

Relevant SDGs: Sustainable Cities and Communities; Good Health and Wellbeing

Credit(s): 3 Credits

Course Description:

This course aims to answer the question of how modern port cities managed themselves in the 19th and 20th centuries and created an intercultural sphere for global inhabitants. The core of this course focuses on East Asian port cities which were opened by the “unequal treaties” with the foreign powers in the mid-19th century. The opening of the port cities in East Asia also provided the world with an access to settle down in these treaty ports and provided China, Japan and Korea with an opportunity to observe and learn from the West. Because of the cultural gap between the East and the West, the port cities naturally built up settlements and concessions for dividing various communities. The design of which could decrease the potential tensions between ethnicities or nationalities but it could not stop the following issues of globalisation, such as the spreading of diseases, crimes, pollution, etc. Thus, these port cites then had to work out solutions for communicating different concessions and settlements. 

The other focus of this course is to bring in specialists who study other continents’ port cities, such as in North America and Continental Europe, and to provide students with a comparative perspective for advanced knowledge of the urban issues shared by all port cities. This course then focuses on the shared issues, such as cultural preservation, migration, crimes, diseases, pollution, inflation, etc., in American and European port cities. Thus, Professors Lockley, Purseigle, Perez-Garcia and Du are invited to demonstrate their knowledge about port cities in North America and Europe. Students can then understand how the shared challenges affected global port cities in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Academic Team

PI:

• Manuel Perez-Garcia, School of Humanities, SJTU, mpergar@sjtu.edu.cn

Collaborators:

• Tim Lockley (Warwick University) T.J.Lockley@warwick.ac.uk
• Pierre Purseigle (Warwick University) p.purseigle@warwick.ac.uk
• Qian Du (SJTU) qian.du@sjtu.edu.cn

What skills will students get?

1. Advance students’ understanding of global port cities’ historical backgrounds
2. Provide students with an analytical framework for ethnic issues in global port cities
3. Hammer out solutions for addressing ethnic and other issues in global port cities
4. Advance students’ understanding of the impact of globalization to port cities
5. Hammer out solution for tackling globalization

Mode of Teaching

Synchronous. Online Lecture + group discussion + group project.

Grading

1. Attendance: 10%;
2. Class performance: 10%;
3. Break-up Room Discussion: 20%;
4. Preparation for Final Group Discussion: 20%;
5. Final Group Presentation: 40%

Course-specific Restrictions

None.

Class Schedule

Instructors

Manuel Perez-Garcia

Manuel Perez-Garcia (PhD.) is Tenured Associate Professor at the Department of History, School of Humanities, at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China. He is Principal Investigator of GECEM Project funded by the ERC (European Research Council)-Starting Grant / Horizon 2020, www.gecem.eu. Founder and director of the Global History Network in China (GHN). He is specialized in Digital Humanities, development of databases, Big Data analysis applied to global (economic) history, and comparisons between Qing China and early modern Europe. He worked at Tsinghua University, Renmin University of China, and visiting scholar at UC Berkeley and British Columbia University, among others. He is editor-in-chief of the Palgrave Studies in Comparative Global History www.palgrave.com/de/series/15711. Author of the book Vicarious Consumers (Routledge, 2013), Global History with Chinese Characteristics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), Blood, Land and Power (Wales University Press, 2021). He has published many articles in SSCI and AHCI journals. 

Pierre Purseigle

Purseigle’s research and teaching agenda have been driven by a strong commitment to the comparative and interdisciplinary study of warfare and urban catastrophes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His work to date has mainly focused on the European and global history of the First World War and on the urban experience of modern warfare. From the local to the transnational, he endeavours to combine different scales of analysis and to engage with a range of disciplinary perspectives. He is the author of Mobilisation, Sacrifice et Citoyenneté. Des communautés locales face à la guerre moderne. Angleterre (2013) and Le Monde Britannique, 1815-1931 (2010). 

Donglai SHI

Flair Donglai SHI is Tenure-Track Associate Professor of Comparative Literature based at the School of Humanities, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He holds a PhD in English from Oxford University and works as Associate Tutor in Translation Studies at Warwick University. His research areas include world literature theory, race and postcolonial studies, Sinophone Studies, and China-Africa cultural relations. He has published an edited book, World Literature in Motion, and many articles in international journals and media platforms. He is currently working on his monograph entitled Yellow Peril Revisited while furthering his research on the interracial politics represented in contemporary China-Africa cultural products. 

Tim Lockley

Tim Lockley, Professor of American History and Chairman of the History Department at Warwick University, studies the pre-colonial and post-colonial history of North America and the West Indian Islands. He teaches “Mapping England’s Atlantic Empire” and “Slavery and Slave Life in the American South 1619-1865”. He is the author of Military Medicine and the Making of Race: Life and Death in the West India Regiments 1795-1874 (2020) and Welfare and Charity in the Antebellum South (2009). 

Course Contact

Manuel Perez-Garcia: mpergar@sjtu.edu.cn;

Pierre Purseigle: p.purseigle@warwick.ac.uk;

Qian Du: qian.du@sjtu.edu.cn;

Tim Lockley: t.j.lockley@warwick.ac.uk.