Cities under duress

Peter J. Carroll reviews some essays related to cities under duress, whether from war, economic development and industrial change, poverty, or other forms of societal strife and dislocation. In What Remains: Coming to Terms with Civil War in 19th Century China, Tobie Meyer-Fong makes the experience and significance of this horrific violence her main focus. She explores the attempts of a polity and society to grapple with the trauma of widespread carnage. What Remains is part of an ongoing reassessment of the Taiping as a watershed in China's global relations, patterns of urban development, and the revaluation of key tenets of moral and political community. Food and War in Mid-Twentieth-Century East Asia by Toby Lincoln explore the logistical, political, and cultural implications of mobilizing society to provide nourishment to civilians and soldiers during and after World War II and the Korean War. Moving away from war, the contributors to Unemployment, Inequality and Poverty in Urban China by Li Shi and Hiroshi Sato examine the travails and social stresses of urban workers due to the restructuring of the labor market as part of the marketization of the economy during the 1990s.