The Italian community in ‘Old Shanghai’ (1842–1941)

Besides huge communities of British, French, Americans, Japanese and Russians (the last, only after October 1917 Revolution), the quasi-colonial urban environment of the so-called ‘Old Shanghai’ (1842-1941), originated on the basis of the Treaty of Nanjing, hosted also a minority group of Italians (from some dozens in the late 19th century to some hundreds in the 1920s-1930s). Through the decades, this expat community was characterized by a swinging between two poles, almost opposite. From one side, Italians were usually not familiar with English language (the lingua franca of Shanghai’s International Settlement) and, unlike other Western communities in the city, their activities had not the formal support of a foreign concession. As a reaction to a poor degree of social integration with the native and the international population, and with a significant analogy with Italian migration flows in the USA in these years, some Italians chose, for services and shops, to cluster in specific urban blocks, aiming at creating a small and divided ethnic space. At the same time, an important part of the Italian migrants in the ‘Pearl of the East’ was made up of businessmen, plant directors and skilled supervisors, from Lombardy, mainly involved in the silk sector: in these cases, the work environment needed a real encounter and exchange, both with the Western finance (most of the silk filatures in Shanghai were American- or English-owned, and run by Italians) and Chinese working class (the textile workers were Chinese, women mainly). The paper will analyze the spatial and the social dynamics of this atypical expat community of Italians, in a geo-historical perspective.