Kristin Stapleton, The Modern City in Asia

The Modern City in Asia is a short, didactic book written by Kristin Stapleton -an American specialist of modern Chinese history.Stapleton's case rejects the nostalgic historiographical tradition dating back to the colonial era concerning the founding of modern cities in Asia: indeed, Stapleton argues that the conquering West has so far attached far too much weight to the role of figures like Wellesley, Raffles or Lutyens.Rather, the origin of cities in today's globalised Asia should be considered not so much from the colonizer's point of view, as from the Asian elite's "subaltern" perspective ("entrepreneurs and activists [who] took advantage of the new significance of the city [...] to pursue a wide variety of goals", p. 1).These elites have played a key role in the process of urban development in Asia -a territory which, according to the author whose comparative approach rejects traditional "area studies", stretches from Japan to Pakistan.