Dr. James Carter has been teaching and writing about Modern Chinese and World History for over 20 years. He is a Professor of History at St. Joseph’s University. You will find more info about Dr. Carter on his personal website. Professor Carter’s new book Champion’s Day came out earlier this year from W. W. Norton. I took this opportunity to interview Dr. Carter about his new book and about the process of researching and writing a book that carries a narrative punch and has the potential to reach a broad audience, without sacrificing the painstaking research and methodology that goes into crafting a book of historical non-fiction.
AF: First of all, congratulations on a fantastic book! You’ve succeeded in integrating a very unique and original story of the history of horse racing in treaty port era Shanghai (1842-1943) with a broader history of both the city and of modern China.
This is the first thematic book (as opposed to a general history) I’ve read that I feel could work well as a textbook on the history of treaty port era Shanghai. It really covers an admirable range of subject matter, stories, personalities and characters. Although the ostensible focus is on the history of horse racing, you also manage to include information about Shanghai’s built environment—particularly the Jiangwan Civic Center built in the 1930s, as well as the Shanghai Race Club and racecourse area, which eventually became integrated into the People’s Square/Park area. You also cover other subjects such as social and economic history, political history, business history, the history of theater and film, and many others.
It seems that choosing racing as a theme enabled you to branch out into these areas, since people who were into horse racing were also doing other things of importance and significance in the city. Since horse racing appealed to such a diverse set of people—rich and poor, Chinese and westerners, etc., you are able to use this topic to showcase the polyglot and cosmopolitan colonial environment, while also elucidating the politics of western and Japanese colonialism and Chinese nationalism during this era.
Choosing one day for a special focus--Champions Day on November 12, 1941--enables you to tell multiple stories, including the fascinating story of Liza Hardoon, one of the wealthiest women in Asia at that time. Not to mention that you also cover the history of the Japanese invasion and occupation of China and Shanghai during the 1930s and 1940s, and the fall of Nationalist China to the Communists in 1949. And you manage to do all this in an engaging and compelling way.
Author and Historian Dr. James Carter
JC: Thanks for the kind words about Champions Day! It really was a pleasure to write and to research, and I am always pleased when people enjoy it.
AF: Given that your previous work focused on other topics such as Buddhism and on the history of another city in China (Harbin), can you elaborate on the process by which you came to embrace the subject of Shanghai history? What was your overall strategy for getting to know about Shanghai’s history? What were the most important sources and voices you encountered along the way as you developed your own expertise in this area?
JC: I’ve always felt that history was most interesting, and most important, when it is connecting big processes or events with the lives of individuals. Neither makes complete sense without the other. With that in mind, I’ve looked for characters that helped make sense of the time they lived in. And after Heart of Buddha, Heart of China—my second book—I took a look around and realized that most of my writing focused on the history of China’s relations with “the West,” not on a state-to-state level, but a personal level. It made sense to me that I would stick with that (very broad) topic.
Taking those two trends together, Shanghai was a natural fit. There’s no better place to see the intersection of China with other parts of the world. And it was a lot easier to work in than, for instance Harbin!
As for developing a strategy, I have to say that I have been very fortunate to find generous scholars and writers who were willing to help. I’ve been writing about China for 25 years or so, but Shanghai is its own subfield, and this was my first time venturing into it. I couldn’t have done this without the help and expertise of so many. Maura Cunningham, Jeff Wasserstrom, and Robert Bickers stand out, but there were many others (yourself included!) who gave generously of their time and expertise. The list of people who helped me is very long indeed.
Beyond people, one aspect of Shanghai’s history in the treaty-port era that lends itself to research from abroad is the tremendous periodical literature. Newspapers in many languages, but especially Chinese and English, allowed me to immerse myself in the period I was researching.
AF: This book strikes me as the work of somebody who has spent a great deal of time teaching undergraduate students about modern Chinese history. Is that a fair assessment? Can you discuss how you integrated the specific histories of horse racing and of treaty port era Shanghai with the larger story of China’s transformation from a dynastic empire into a modern nation-state in the early 20th century, and with China’s crises during the 1930s and 1940s? What were some of the challenges that you faced as you did so?
JC: At Saint Joseph’s University, I teach exclusively undergraduates, and I have been teaching about China at St Joe’s for more than 20 years now. I didn’t design this book for undergraduates—I have co-written a world history book called Forging the Modern World that IS designed that way—but that’s not a bad way to think about my ideal audience. I didn’t write this primarily for specialists, though I think that there is material in Champions Day that would interest specialists.
The goal—and this is true for undergraduate courses as well as for narrative history—was to tell a story or series of stories that would help illuminate the bigger picture. And that picture wasn’t only modern China: the British Empire, colonialism, and many others.
You know this as well as I do, and you’ve engaged Shanghai’s history even more deeply than I have. The challenge for a book like this (and again, a parallel with undergraduate history) is how to simplify what is complex and complicate what seems simple. In Champions Day, that meant situating Shanghai’s political transformations of the 1920s and 1930s without losing the narrative thread. A focus like horseracing, or my handful of characters, helped with that. Even though so the political environment was constantly shifting, I could see how that played out in the lives of people like Arthur Henchman or Nates Wong or Ing Tang.
As for complicating what seems simple, the race club itself was probably the biggest challenge. It was a racist institution and an emblem of colonialism. I didn’t want to glorify that. It needed to be clear that the privilege of many at the club was built on racism. At the same time, 90% of the people at the race were Chinese, Chinese owners and racing fans made racing the institution that it was in Shanghai, and there was much more to the story than the racist membership policies of the club. Conveying the nature of that scene was really important, especially since the book published at a moment in American history when race is so central to our national conversation. One of the formulations I used in the book seemed to capture it pretty well: “quintessentially Shanghai: cosmopolitan, racist, pragmatic, cooperative, and cynical all at once.”
AF: You chose to work with a trade publisher for this book. Your previous books appear to have been published by academic publishers or university presses. It would be interesting to know more about your experiences with a trade publisher—how did the expectations differ from those of an academic publisher? How did this choice shape the book? What were some challenges you faced during this process?
JC: The differences between trade and academic presses are sometimes exaggerated. Increasingly, academic presses are trying to reach the same broad audience that a trade press does. I was really happy with the university presses that published my earlier books, but the resources that Norton put into editing and marketing were extraordinary. At every stage of the process, the support and expertise I encountered was brilliant. I don’t know that it was mainly the contrast between a trade and an academic press, or it was about the team at Norton specifically.
The biggest difference was probably in when I put time into the process. For my earlier books, most of the time went into the research and writing of the first draft. After that, revisions were relatively small. For Champions Day, I put in the same amount of time into the research, but there was a lot more time invested in the revision and rewriting process. The first draft of what would become Champions Day looked very little like what was eventually published.
To some extent it was a question of priorities. I think there is a misimpression, at times, that trade presses don’t care about the academic aspect of the book. In my experience, that was not true at all! The editors there pressed me on sources, perspective, and argument just as much as any university press did. But there was definitely more attention to narrative and how to tell the story. In general, trade presses seem to have more resources and expect to use them to help promote the book, but university presses are increasingly following this same approach.
AF: Your book seems to be targeted to a much wider audience than the typical Chinese or Shanghai history monograph. Who is your intended audience and what are your hopes in terms of its reception by a broader public outside our narrow field of Chinese/Shanghai studies? Who do you envision as the ideal reader of your book?
JC: This speaks to the previous questions. This book is trying to reach a broad audience, one that includes historians of China and/or Shanghai, but my ideal reader is an educated, interested person with an interest in but probably not a ton of background on China or Shanghai. If the book succeeds, I think it may be the first book, or one of the first books, about China that many readers pick up. That shaped a lot of how I wrote, for instance how much background to include or how thoroughly to explain concepts.
It’s not harder or easier to write for a broad audience, in my view. They both have challenges and opportunities. Writing a complicated argument is hard…but conveying complex ideas in straightforward terms can be just as difficult! And there is a comfort writing for specialist when you can expect your audience will have read the same texts.
The weekly column I recently started writing for SupChina called This Week in China’s History is doing some of the same things: trying to write accessibly about China’s past, for an audience that is not, primarily, academic.
AF: You chose a very fascinating topic—horse racing—and a very particular date—November 12, 1941—to anchor and frame your book. Can you describe the process by which you came to structure the book as you did? Did you encounter any major difficulties along the way and if so, how did you overcome them?
JC: I came to the two pieces—the single day and the races—separately. For racing, I have long had a love of sports and sports history, though I have not had a chance to write about that. Horseracing was central in Shanghai, physically, culturally, and socially, so it seemed an obvious choice as a means into the city’s history. The more I looked, the more I found, and I was especially pleased to see that the races cut across all aspects of the city. It wasn’t just a white, elite institution. It involved all of Shanghai.
I was also captivated by the races themselves. That part of the book may have been a little self-indulgent; I am not sure most reviewers really enjoyed my descriptions of the action on the track as much as I enjoyed writing them! But I felt it was important to immerse myself in the races that were distracting so many people from the cataclysmic events going on all around them.
As for the single day, that had been an idea I had been carrying around for a long time. I spent a year or more going through newspapers and books about Shanghai to see if there was a single day that would be a good focus. I didn’t want an obvious “red letter” day, necessarily. In the same way that “important” people are often not the best way to understand an era, less prominent days can be lenses that reveal unexpected details.
In this case, I at first started looking at the wrong day! The history of racing in China contended that the last Champions Stakes in Shanghai was in May, 1941, so I spent a few months developing that as my focus, but once I got into the primary sources I found that this information was wrong. And November 12—because of Sun Yat-sen’s birthday and Liza Hardoon’s funeral—turned out to be a much better day.
Initially, the book was going to focus more narrowly on the single day. It would start at dawn and end at sundown, or maybe midnight. But as I developed and shared the early drafts of the manuscript, it became clear that more background was needed. So, even though the book takes this one day as the frame, it extends back and forward in time beyond just November 12, 1941.