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treat farm and ranch buildings east of the Cascades, and a Scandinavian-American farmstead near The Dalles.

Portland’s horizontal and vertical growth is featured in the section on ‘Cities and towns’ by Steven Dotterer. The changing community is well documented with plans and photographs which reveal the downtown area emerging from a cluster of low pioneer buildings to show a dark skyline of brick and stone in the 189Os, and later a light skyline of glazed terra cotta over steel frames, now being topped by a scattering of modern towers. Dotterer shows imagination in reaching into the hinterlands to find unusual towns, many of them little known, which are also part of the spirit of the North- west. Examples include the Mormon settlement of Bear Lake Valley in southeastern Idaho, the irrigation colony of New Plymouth in southwestern Idaho, the planned lumber town of Longview, Washington, and the small church convention centre of Turner, Oregon.

The mainstream of the professional architect is developed in several chapters by Wallace Kay Huntington and George McMath. Huntington deals with the Victorian buildings, beginning with the influence of Andrew Jackson Downing. His illustrations omit the famous Fort Dalles Surgeons Quarters, but include the Downing model from which it was adapted. He presents for view a richer collection of substantial Victorian buildings than is readily seen in Oregon today. McMath’s chapters deal with the twentieth century and the continuing dominance in both residential and business building of a few Portland architects, A. E. Doyle and Pietro Belluschi among them, closely linked through the years in a changing succession of firms. Of special interest is the emergence of a distinctive Northwest style, drawing on local building material (wood) and the simplicity of early farm building. First discerned early in the century in seashore cottages, it blossomed after the Second World War in residences and churches as a variant of the International Style, later embracing commercial buildings before losing its distinctiveness among more recent fashions.

‘Industrial buildings’ is the subject of four chapters by Lewis McArthur, himself a builder. Four chapters, three by Elisabeth Walton, deal with inns and hotels, primarily those exuberant structures outside the city, built to enhance scenic and resort sites. Parks and gardens are also well treated with chapters on Western Oregon by Huntington and on the Puget Sound area by Thomas Allsopp; a unifying link is the help which the Olmsted brothers gave to both Seattle and Portland in launching their modern park plans as well as their early twentieth-century expositions.

Victor Steinbrueck’s three short chapters, ‘Everyday architecture in the Puget Sound area’, comprise the only intensive presentation of Washington building, and are pleasantly illustrated by Steinbrueck’s own drawings taken largely from his previous works. The text of these chapters deals with general trends; architects are listed more than illustrated; the chapters remind us that the everyday architecture of modern Portland has not received much attention in all that city’s coverage. A few of the more specialized chapters of the work should also be mentioned: ‘Native peoples and shelters’, ‘Fur trade posts and early missions’, ‘Stone building east of the Cascades’, ‘Lewis and Clark exposition’, ‘The mission style and eclecticism in Idaho’, ‘Alvar Aalto in Oregon’. This reviewer’s enjoy- ment of the Northwest will be considerably enhanced by Space, Style, and Structure.

University of Oregon EDWARD T. PRICE

Other studies

MARK ELV~N and G. WILLIAM SKINNER (Eds), The Chinese City Between Two Worlds (Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 1974. Pp. xiii + 458. $18.50)

The present volume, second of three planned collections of papers on the Chinese city, covers the transitional period from the closing years of the Ch’ing Dynasty (1643-1911)

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until the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949. It includes (along with other solicited chapters) papers prepared originally for the first of two research conferences on the Chinese city convened by the now defunct Subcommittee on Research on Chinese Society of the Joint Committee on Contemporary China (of the Social Science Research Council and American Council of Learned Societies). These conferences were aimed at encouraging and supporting a growing scholarly interest in the response of one of the world’s oldest urban systems to the pressures of foreign contact. The book effectively conveys a sense of the challenges to be faced in the study of Chinese cities during this time of major national transformation.

The book does not, however, deal adequately with a question of major theoretical significance. That is, how can one account for urbanization phenomena as part of a larger and more encompassing set of institutional adjustments through time without first distinguishing those aspects of change which are directly attributable to urban factors from those which are responses to related political, social or ecological trends? The question, in other words, is whether Chinese cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries should be viewed merely as elements of a total cultural landscape reflecting in many subtle ways the social and economic effects of Western (and Japanese) influence, or as discrete social settings within which particular institutional changes could occur. This issue is not directly addressed by the editors and the book suffers from the absence of a cohesive theme, a shortcoming which detracts from its potential as a guide for future research.

Uncertainty as to an appropriate theme is revealed initially by a rather striking disparity between the editors’ statements of purpose and intent. In his preface, G. William Skinner claims that “The modern transformation of the world’s largest pre- modern urban system . . . [is] a subject of importance for the comparative study of urbanism as well as for Chinese studies”, and that the conference from which this book originated was aimed at “dialogue between social scientists and historians . . ., a more eclectic and imaginative use of sources, improved methodologies, a more rigorous approach to argumentation, and, above all, an augmented sense of problem”.

Mark Elvin, on the other hand, is more sensitive, in his introduction, to the pitfalls of attempts to generalize from the Chinese case, especially when so little is known of the role of cities in China’s historical evolution, or of the extent to which changes in urban function in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries represented clear-cut departures from traditional patterns. “China’s first encounter with modern industrial civilization took place in the cities; it was in the cities, too, that Chinese efforts at modernization began. Yet we still have had no systematic study of this urban setting. The interrelation of the new trends with the economic and political hierarchies of the central places, the pervasive realignment of lines of movement and points of concentration of men, goods, and ideas, are still almost terra incognita. Perhaps we have been bemused by the fact that the Maoist revolution came in from the countryside and seemingly (though only seemingly) bypassed the cities as agents of change”. In the introduction, Elvin expands on this theme by suggesting that a useful approach to the question of how “cities grew and functioned” might focus on the manner in which traditional urban-based institutions adapted themselves to modern requirements and conditions. Several of the best papers in the collection examine specific aspects of this question.

The book’s topical diversity reflects a basic organizational imbalance. Of the twelve papers, only Rhoads Murphey’s ‘The Treaty Ports and China’s modernization’ deals with a subject of general interest to students of Asian modernization. Murphey uses extensive data on foreign trade and customs, as well as Chinese and foreign accounts of industrialization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to sustain his argument that the Chinese economy was less affected by Western-induced change than is commonly assumed. He in fact suggests that it was not until after the 1911 Republican revolution that the rural-based economy became seriously influenced by economic and technological innovations generated in the Treaty Ports. Unfortunately, his otherwise

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convincing presentation is weakened somewhat by excessive dependence on foreigners’ observations of local urban and rural conditions, and by a lack of material which could more effectively convey local Chinese perspectives on the changes that were occurring. Here, the explanatory power of a thesis which lends itself to comparative scrutiny of the Treaty Port phenomenon throughout Asia (in the sense advocated by Skinner) is weakened by its inability to account more convincingly for specific variations in local responses.

At the other extreme, four papers examine the process by which traditional institutions became “modernized” inthe setting of particular cities. The point here is that these institu- tions could successfully adapt to changing circumstances because the opportunities for adjustment arose in a given place at a given time. We learn, for example, from the paper of Susan Mann Jones, ‘The Ningpo Pang and financial power at Shanghai’, that the late nineteenth-century Ningpo merchants, bound together by native-place ties while resident in Shanghai, were easily able to assume new rales as bankers and commercial entrepreneurs only as conditions developed which were congenial to the establishment of modern enterprises. Similarly, the study of Edward J. M. Rhoads, ‘Merchant associations in Canton, 1895-191 l’, shows clearly that in the case of Canton, a city with a long history as an important administrative centre, traditional rivalry between merchants and officials led to the growth by the end of the nineteenth century of a variety of merchant associ- ations. The operations of these diverse associations reflected the growing accommodation of both merchant and gentry groups to changing political and economic circumstances. Yet the historical and cultural determinants of accommodation were distinctly Cantonese in both spirit and practice.

Mark Elvin’s paper on ‘The administration of Shanghai, 1905-1914 illustrates the problem referred to earlier : that attempts to explain institutional change as a generalized function of urbanization processes often lead to overstatements and unwarranted generalizations. In the unique case of Shanghai, its developing r81e as an urban amalgam of China and the West was largely attributable to the special features of its location and to the fact that it served as the main point of contact with the Western world. This in turn fostered the growth of distinctive administrative arrangements which “constituted one of the clearest breaks between the early modern Chinese city and its late traditional predecessor”. Furthermore, as Elvin puts it, “The ‘modern’ city government that emerged after 1905 was largely a fusion of indigenous institutions that had evolved very late in traditional times, though it was the challenge and example of the West that induced, and to some extent directed, this fusion”.

Stephan Feuchtwang’s fascinating study of ‘City temples in Taipei under three regimes’ shows how adjustments at the central government level find expression locally in the modification of religious institutions. In the case of Taipei, changes in the organiza- tion, distribution and functions of temples have been taking place since the late nine- teenth century. These changes, in turn, were conterminous with particular stages in the evolution of Taipei from the late nineteenth century: the city served first as a regional marketing and distribution centre, then through the period of Japanese control (1895- 1945) as a colonial capital, assuming its present r61e in 1945 as the national capital of a government in exile. Since the end of the Second World War, religious identity based on association with local territorial temples has been of declining significance. In fact, as Feuchtwang suggests, efforts on the part of the Nationalist authorities to weaken the influence of local temples may be indicative of a conscious attempt to evolve religious institutions with more universal than localized appeal.

These four papers describe institutional changes in the context of individual cities. Their underlying premise is that the uniquely Chinese institutions that they deal with could not have evolved the way they did other than in the historical and social contexts of the particular cities which they describe. Another group of papers, in contrast, describes some of the political and social concomitants of Western-induced urbanization that were not necessarily dependent upon the characteristics of a given place.

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Thus Winston Hsieh’s ‘Peasant insurrection and the marketing hierarchy in the Canton Delta, 1911’ shows how the timing and distribution of peasant uprisings in the Pearl River delta at the time of the 1911 revolution reflected traditional marketing relationships among places at several hierarchical levels. Similarly, Robert A. Kapp’s study of ‘Chungking as a center of warlord power, 1926-1937’, traces the evolution of warlord activities in Szechwan and shows how the city of Chungking served as a convenient setting for the articulation of new forms of economic and political ties between city and country essential for the consolidation of the warlords’ power, In a somewhat different vein, Shirley S. Garrett discusses some of the factors that led to the rise of a Western- oriented urban middle class. Her thesis is that the public health, sanitation, social welfare and educational concerns of Chinese in the major cities probably would not have arisen except for the Christian influences which prevailed in these cities at a time when wealthy Chinese were seeking a modern identity. She also shows how chambers of commerce in the large cities gradually evolved as organizations with influential political power. Finally, David D. Buck, in his ‘Educational modernization in Tsinan, 1899- 1937’, uses the capital of Shantung Province as an example to illustrate the tendency of modern educational institutions to concentrate in large cities because of their expectation of gaining greater financial support in such places. He also shows how urban-rural tensions arising from disparities in the availability of Western-style education may have contributed to the differing values of Nationalists and Communists.

The three remaining papers, Alden Speare’s ‘Migration and family change in Central Taiwan’, Bernard and Rita S. Gallins’s ‘The integration of village migrants in Taipei’ and Irene B. Taeuber’s ‘Migrants and cities in Japan, Taiwan, and Northeast China’, do not deal with cities per se but with several comparative aspects of demographic change involving the migration of people from rural to urban areas. The inclusion of these papers in the volume underlines some of the difficulties mentioned above of attempts to deal with Chinese cities simultaneously as centres of change in their own right (where new forms of social and political life evolved) in contrast to an approach stressing their collective role as key determinants of China’s modernization.

Philip Hauser’s comment ten years ago on a major need in urban research is of interest here: “There is need to differentiate the study of the city as a dependent variable and as an independent variable. Much of the apparent conflict in the literature on urbanization lies in the failure to make the distinction clear”. The present volume provides ample evidence for the continuing validity of Hauser’s remarks.

Rutgers University BARUCH BOXER

JOHN ROWE, The Hard-rock Men: Cornish Immigrants and the North American Mining Frontier (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1974. Pp. xii+ 322. 25.50 and $12.95)

John Rowe, senior lecturer in history at the University of Liverpool and a Cornishman who specializes in Cornish economic and social history, has attempted a record of the Cornish people on the North American mining frontier between 1830 and 1900. A scholar seeking a careful analysis of Cornish settlement in America may be disappointed although, for the general reader, the book is descriptive, informative and enjoyable to read.

The book is divided into three main parts. An economic and social history of Cornwall is presented in the first part which describes the conditions contributing to Cormsh migration to the United States in the early 1800s. The second section, organized both regionally and chronologically, examines the various American mining districts beginning with the lead mining district of southwestern Wisconsin in the 1830s and ending with the Idaho, Montana and South Dakota region in the 1890s. Also surveyed are the copper mining district of Upper Michigan and the gold district of California during the 1850s. Attention is given to migrations to the Fraser Valley of Canada and to