Counting in, counting out: a history of census-making in Shanghai, 1840s-1949

Between the mid-1850s and early-1940s, two foreign "settlements" (extraterritorial jurisdictional enclaves) occupied the north of Shanghai: the Anglo-American dominated International Settlement and the French Concession. Over this period, both settlements had a demographic boom. In 1850, less than a hundred foreign settlers made up the settlements' population. By 1900, Chinese people accounted for 98% of the 352,000 residents in the International Settlement and 99% of the 92,000 in the French Concession. Today, the districts of former settlements remain the most densely populated and prosperous in Shanghai.

Accounting for such a massive, growing, and diverse population was important, but it was never an easy task. Western civic leaders tried to keep track of "who's who" in the Shanghai foreign settlements since their establishment in the 1840s. The year 1865 marked the start of foreign led, organised, synchronised, and regular census-making in the settlements. Going into the twentieth century, reformist bureaucrats in Imperial Chinese courts, the Republican Chinese government, as well as a puppet Chinese government under Japanese control all made their own attempts to enumerate people in Shanghai, alongside continuous foreign efforts. Utilising archival sources currently located in Shanghai, France, the UK, and beyond, this is a study of why and how each of them did so, and a story of cooperation, conflict, and emulation across empires on their East Asian edge.

Western civic leaders in Shanghai aspired to the concept and practice of so-called modern census-making in contemporaneous European states, and they introduced them into the settlements as part of a "modernist" packet. In the meantime, the enumerated - Chinese and foreigners alike - observed but also took actions, in the heartland of a developing modern nation. This is a story of and for these people, counted-in or counted-out, as well.