The 1920s and 1930s were a period of cosmopolitan globalization—and no one, perhaps, exemplified it more than Victor Sassoon, business tycoon, trader and industrialist. He’s the subject of Rosemary Wakeman’s latest book The Worlds of Victor Sassoon: Bombay, London, Shanghai, 1918–1941 which traces Victor’s journey through these three cities—and explores how the world economy changes as he travels. After all, it’s a period where the world trading system is beginning to unravel, as British dominance in manufacturing is starting to be challenged by cheaper rivals in Germany and Japan, with arguments for economic policies that seem very familiar to us today.
Shanghai
The Sassoon family was and remains legendary in global business and social history, with Victor Sassoon as its most iconic figure. He embodied the spirit of the cosmopolitan elite in the early 20th century, maintaining residences and businesses across the major financial centers of his time, dividing his life between Bombay, London, and Shanghai. As a financier, he operated worldwide, skillfully navigating the complex networks of empire and commerce that defined his era.
Shanghailanders, the debut novel from Juli Min, starts at the end: Leo, a wealthy Shanghai businessman, sees his wife and daughters off at the airport as they travel to Boston. Everyone, it seems, is unhappy.
Baseball’s introduction to the Philippines. The slot machine trade between Manila and Shanghai. A musical based extremely loosely on the life of the sultan of Sulu.
Paul Bevan is the one of the most prominent scholars of early 20th-century Shanghai and it’s thanks to him that English language readers have learned of the contributions of Chinese illustrators, writers, publishers and other artists in late-Qing and Republican-era Shanghai. A few years ago, he translated a novel titled The Adventures of Ma Suzhen: An Heroic Woman Takes Revenge in Shanghai. This novel was originally written in the early 1920s, but takes place several decades before that.
The term “Shanghailander”, coined over a hundred years ago, referred to foreigners who lived in Shanghai’s French Concession or International Settlement. In her debut novel, Shanghailanders, Juli Min has reclaimed this term for contemporary use to include a wider spectrum of expatriates and to indicate, somewhat contrary to current narratives, that Shanghai remains—and will remain in the decades to come—an international city.
In its eclectic choice of subjects, Filipino writer Lio Mangubat’s collection of historical essays Silk, Silver, Spices, Slaves betrays its origins as a podcast. It resembles, not least due to Mangubat’s skill at spinning a good yarn, a collection of short stories rather than non-fiction pieces; and what the book lacks in an easily recognizable throughline, it more than makes up for in a readable prose style that manages to be both erudite and conversational.
In 1929, Bernardine Szold Fritz left Paris on a train bound for China. She was on her way to her fourth wedding, and her fourth husband: An American investment banker named Chester Fritz, who’d proposed after a whirlwind meeting earlier in Shanghai. Bernardine is then forced to find herself things to do in interwar China—and her husband isn’t helping much.
By any measure, Jewish American writer-cum-Shanghai-based salonnière Bernardine Szold Fritz (1896-1982) led an extraordinary life. Whether on familiar terms with American writers of the Lost Generation (Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway) and French modernist masters (Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso) in and around Paris, or influential Chinese writers and intellectuals during 1930s Shanghai (Lin Yutang, Hu Shi), or even A-list celebrities from Hollywood’s Golden Age (Gary Cooper, Frank Capra), Fritz was remarkably well-connected.
The ’30s and ’40s were some of the first instances of aerial bombardment of civilian populations—and an indication of their destructive power. We often point to the Nazi bombing in Guernica, Spain in 1937—immortalized by Pablo Picasso—as the first instance of what happens when “the bomber gets through”, to paraphrase then-Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. But just a few months later, across a continent, the world got a glimpse of what bombardment would look like in one of the world’s most built-up and international cities of the time: Shanghai, and “Bloody Saturday”: 14 August 1937.
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