A review of Crossing the Urban-Rural Divide in Twentieth Century China, by JEREMY BROWN. In this well-written and extensively documented dissertation, Jeremy Brown tackles the daunting and demanding topic of urban-rural relations in twentieth-century China through the case of Tianjin, focusing on the years 1949 to 1978. He argues that the fraught and mutually defining relationship between city and country, though framed by institutional structures and administrative fiat, formed from continuing personal interactions that reified difference even as they spanned those two zones. Chapter One...

A review of Law and Sensibility of Empire in the Making of Modern China, 1750-1900, by LI CHEN. Li Chen’s dissertation title is too modest. The dissertation goes a long way toward demonstrating not just how law (British) and sensibility (British) made and remade modern China (a significant accomplishment), but also how law (Chinese) and sensibility (Chinese) made and remade modern Britain and the British empire. Or rather, that it was the circulations of a discourse of law and sensibility, backed by competing imperial assertions of sovereignty, which remade Qing China and Britain. The argument...