Essays address expressions of modernity in relation to non-Western politics and national cultures. Topics range from the installation of gas streetlights in Sha

Is modernity in non-Western societies always an “alternative” modernity, a derivative copy of an “original modernity” that began in the West? No, answer

Over the first half of the twentieth century, the lives of millions of urban Chinese were transformed by new ideas, new objects, new jobs, new leisure pursuits,

This book analyses modernity and tradition in China today and how they combine in striking ways in the Chinese school. Paul Willis – the leading ethnographer

Exotic Commodities is the first book to chart the consumption and spread of foreign goods in China from the mid-nineteenth century to the advent of communism in