The foreign builders of nineteenth-century treaty ports in China saw themselves as the wave of the future that must sooner or later engulf the country.
"Backward" China, they believed, would come to emulate the
"progress" whose banner these Western outposts so confidently flew. Behind these expectations there lay not only the supreme self-confidence of the nineteenth-century West, but the earlier and concurrent Western colonial experience in most of the rest of Asia. Economies were commercialized under the impetus of foreign investments in production and transport, and the market was widened in more general terms. The new port cities, founded or dominated by foreigners in most cases, experienced boom growth and soon became the largest in each country, even though they had scarcely existed or were small towns before the seventeenth century. The Treaty Ports and China's Modernization argues that, far from being just a commercial or industrial phenomenon, the port cities introduced a flow of ideas and non-economic institutions that was perhaps of greater revolutionary importance in the long run. The modernization spurred by the ports entailed institutional, organizational, and ideological adjustments to a new commercial, industrial, and national order, as well as the early emergence of Asian nationalism. The port cities constituted a working model of dynamic nineteenth-century Europe, functioning as points of entry into Asia of an alien Western order at a time when the West was in the midst of vigorous economic, technological, and institutional growth and when, as it happened, most of Asia was experiencing a period of relative deterioration. The European impact was correspondingly devastating, not only on the economic landscape but on Asian cultural and national perceptions. The physically unplanned urban growths around ports neatly symbolized the disruption and conflict that they introduced into each Asian order.
