In this book, Xiong Yuezhi and a team of distinguished scholars bring together cutting-edge research on the urban history of Shanghai and the diversity of its distinctive culture. Occupying an interstitial space between Chinese and foreign power, Shanghai from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century experienced almost unimaginably complex developments in its political, social, economic, and cultural history. To untangle this complexity, Xiong and his team have carefully constructed, in thematic and chronological fashion, the interactions between the imperialist powers, foreign settlers, and the Chinese community of Shanghai from the origins of the racially-segregated International Settlement in the 1840s to the internment of foreign settlers in Shanghai during World War II in the 1940s.