In this first attempt, this bibliography will focus on English language secondary scholarship and only include a small number of works in the huge literature that exists on the history of Shanghai, with an emphasis on works that make use of SMP sources, discuss the police, or else are on the period of time that the bulk of SMP records comes from.

In addition to the list of secondary scholarship on the history of Shanghai, there is a large tagged list of open access and online primary sources texts related to Shanghai history here (click the buttons): Primary Sources: Memoirs, Accounts, and Other Sources

• Baxter, Christopher. ‘The Secret Intelligence Service and China: The Case of Hilaire Noulens, 1923–1932’. In Britain in Global Politics Volume 1, edited by Michael L. Dockrill and Keith Hamilton, 132–52. Security, Conflict and Cooperation in the Contemporary World. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137367822_6.
• Bergère, Marie-Claire. Shanghai: China’s Gateway to Modernity. Stanford University Press, 2009.
• ———. The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie 1911-1937. Cambridge University Press, 2009.
• Bevan, Paul. A Modern Miscellany: Shanghai Cartoon Artists, Shao Xunmei’s Circle and the Travels of Jack Chen, 1926-1938. BRILL, 2015.
• ———. ‘Intoxicating Shanghai’ – An Urban Montage: Art and Literature in Pictorial Magazines during Shanghai’s Jazz Age. BRILL, 2020.
• Bickers, Robert. Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai. Penguin UK, 2004.
• ———. ‘Moving Stories: Memorialisation and Its Legacies in Treaty Port China’. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 42, no. 5 (20 October 2014): 826–56. https://doi.org/10.1080/03086534.2014.959716.
• ———. ‘Shanghailanders: The Formation and Identity of the British Settler Community in Shanghai 1843-1937’. Past & Present, no. 159 (1 May 1998): 161–211.
• ———. Britain in China: Community, Culture and Colonialism, 1900-49. Manchester University Press, 1999.
• ———. Getting Stuck in For Shanghai: Putting the Kibosh on the Kaiser from the Bund: The British at Shanghai and the Great War Penguin Specials. Penguin Group Australia, 2014.
• ———. The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire, 1832-1914. Penguin UK, 2016.
• ———. Out of China: How the Chinese Ended the Era of Western Domination. Penguin UK, 2017.
• ———. China Bound: John Swire & Sons and Its World, 1816 – 1980. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020.
• Bickers, Robert, and Christian Henriot, eds. New Frontiers: Imperialism’s New Communities in East Asia, 1842-1953. Manchester University Press, 2000.
• Bickers, Robert, and Isabella Jackson, eds. Treaty Ports in Modern China: Law, Land, and Power. Routledge, 2015.
• Bickers, Robert, and Jonathan J. Howlett, eds. Britain and China, 1840-1970: Empire, Finance and War. Routledge, 2015.
• Bickers, Robert A., and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom. ‘Shanghai’s “Dogs and Chinese Not Admitted” Sign: Legend, History and Contemporary Symbol’. The China Quarterly, no. 142 (1995): 444–66.
• Bracken, Gregory Byrne. The Shanghai Alleyway House: A Vanishing Urban Vernacular. Routledge, 2013.
• Cao, Yin. From Policemen to Revolutionaries: A Sikh Diaspora in Global Shanghai, 1885-1945. BRILL, 2017.
• Carter, James. Champions Day: The End of Old Shanghai. W. W. Norton & Company, 2020.
• Cassel, Pär. ‘Excavating Extraterritoriality: The “Judicial Sub-Prefect” as a Prototype for the Mixed Court in Shanghai’. Late Imperial China 24, no. 2 (2003): 156–82.
• ———. Grounds of Judgment: Extraterritoriality and Imperial Power in Nineteenth-Century China and Japan. Oxford University Press, USA, 2012.
• Chashchin, Kirill. Russians in China. Shanghai D-917 Police Applicants: 1930-1942. SouthEastern Publishers, 2018.
• Chen, Janet Y. Guilty of Indigence: The Urban Poor in China, 1900-1953. Princeton University Press, 2012.
• Clifford, Nicholas Rowland. Spoilt Children of Empire: Westerners in Shanghai and the Chinese Revolution of the 1920s. Hanover; London: University Press of New England, 1991.
• Coble, Parks M. The Shanghai Capitalists and the Nationalist Government, 1927-1937. Harvard Univ Asia Center, 1986.
• Cochran, Sherman, ed. Inventing Nanjing Road: Commercial Culture in Shanghai, 1900-1945. East Asia Program, Cornell University, 1999.
• Eber, Irene. Wartime Shanghai and the Jewish Refugees from Central Europe: Survival, Co-Existence, and Identity in a Multi-Ethnic City. Place of publication not identified: De Gruyter, 2016.
• Farrer, James, and Andrew David Field. Shanghai Nightscapes: A Nocturnal Biography of a Global City. University of Chicago Press, 2015.
• Field, Andrew. Shanghai’s Dancing World: Cabaret Culture and Urban Politics, 1919-1954. The Chinese University Press, 2010.
• Fogel, Joshua A. ‘“Shanghai-Japan”: The Japanese Residents’ Association of Shanghai’. The Journal of Asian Studies 59, no. 4 (1 November 2000): 927–50. https://doi.org/10.2307/2659217.
• ———. A Friend in Deed: Lu Xun, Uchiyama Kanzō, and the Intellectual World of Shanghai on the Eve of War. Association of Asian Studies, 2019.
• Fu, Poshek. Passivity, Resistance, and Collaboration: Intellectual Choices in Occupied Shanghai, 1937-1945. 1st ed. Stanford University Press, 1997.
• Gao, Bei. Shanghai Sanctuary: Chinese and Japanese Policy Toward European Jewish Refugees During World War II. Oxford: New York : Oxford University Press, 2013.
• Gerth, Karl. China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation. Harvard Univ Asia Center, 2003.
• Goodman, Bryna. Native Place, City, and Nation: Regional Networks and Identities in Shanghai, 1853-1937. University of California Press, 1995.
• ———. ‘Being Public: The Politics of Representation in 1918 Shanghai’. Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 60, no. 1 (2000): 45–88. https://doi.org/10.2307/2652700.

• Henriot, Christian. Prostitution and Sexuality in Shanghai: A Social History, 1849-1949. Cambridge University Press, 2001.
• ———. Scythe and the City: A Social History of Death in Shanghai. Stanford University Press, 2016.
• ———. Shanghai, 1927-1937: Municipal Power, Locality, and Modernization. University of California Press, 1993.
• ———. ‘Shanghai and the Experience of War. The Fate of Refugees’. European Journal of East Asian Studies 5, no. 2 (2006): 215–45.
• ———. ‘Slums, Squats or Hutments? Constructing and Deconstructing an in-Between Space in Modern Shanghai (1926-1965)’. Frontiers of History in China 7, no. 2 (2012): 499. https://doi.org/10.3868/s020-001-012-0030-5.
• ———. ‘The Shanghai Bund in Myth and History: An Essay Through Textual and Visual Sources’. Journal of Modern Chinese History 4, no. 1 (2010): 1–27.
• Henriot, Christian, Lu Shi, and Charlotte Aubrun. The Population of Shanghai (1865-1953): A Sourcebook. BRILL, 2018.
• Henriot, Christian, and Wen-Hsin Yeh, eds. In the Shadow of the Rising Sun: Shanghai Under Japanese Occupation. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
• Hershatter, Gail. Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai. University of California Press, 1997.
• Hochstadt, Steve, ed. A Century of Jewish Life in Shanghai. Electronic book. Touro University Press. De Gruyter: Academic Studies Press, 2019.
• Honig, Emily. Creating Chinese Ethnicity: Subei People in Shanghai, 1850-1980. Yale University Press, 1992.
• ———. ‘Invisible Inequalities: The Status of Subei People in Contemporary Shanghai’. The China Quarterly, no. 122 (1990): 273–92.
• ———. ‘The Politics of Prejudice: Subei People in Republican-Era Shanghai’. Modern China 15, no. 3 (1989): 243–74.
• ———. Sisters and Strangers: Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mills, 1919-1949. Stanford University Press, 1992.
• Horesh, Niv. ‘Why Shanghai? On Engagement and Empiricism in the Field of Chinese Urban History’. China Review International 16, no. 4 (2009): 419–39. https://doi.org/10.1353/cri.2009.0095.
• Jackson, Isabella. Shaping Modern Shanghai: Colonialism in China’s Global City. Cambridge University Press, 2018.
• Jackson, Isabella. ‘The Raj on Nanjing Road: Sikh Policemen in Treaty-Port Shanghai’. Modern Asian Studies 46, no. 06 (2012): 1672–1704. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X12000078.
• Johnson, Chalmers A. An Instance of Treason: Ozaki Hotsumi and the Sorge Spy Ring. Expanded ed. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1990.
• Johnson, Linda Cooke. Shanghai: From Market Town to Treaty Port, 1074-1858. Stanford University Press, 1995.
• Jordan, Donald Allan. China’s Trial by Fire: The Shanghai War of 1932. University of Michigan Press, 2001.
• Ladds, Catherine. Empire Careers: Working for the Chinese Customs Service, 1854-1949. Manchester University Press, 2013.
• Larkin, Thomas. The China Firm: American Elites and the Making of British Colonial Society. New York: Columbia University Press, 2024.
• Leck, Greg. Captives of Empire: The Japanese Internment of Allied Civilians in China, 1941-1945. Shandy Press, 2006.
• Lee, Leo-ou-fan. Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of New Urban Culture in China, 1930-45. Harvard University Press, 1999.
• Li, Jie. Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life. Global Chinese Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.
• Liang, Samuel Y. Mapping Modernity in Shanghai: Space, Gender, and Visual Culture in the Sojourners’ City, 1853-98. Routledge, 2012.
• Litten, Frederick S. ‘The Noulens Affair’. The China Quarterly 138 (June 1994): 492–512. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305741000035852.
• Liu, Jianhui, and Joshua A. Fogel. ‘Demon Capital Shanghai: The “Modern” Experience of Japanese Intellectuals’. Sino-Japanese Studies 16, no. 0 (7 February 2009).
• Lu, Hanchao. Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century. University of California Press, 1999.
• MacKinnon, Janice R., and Stephen R. MacKinnon. Agnes Smedley: The Life and Times of an American Radical. Virago, 1988.
• Martin, Brian G. The Shanghai Green Gang: Politics and Organized Crime, 1919-1937. University of California Press, 1996.
• Nakajima, Chieko. Body, Society, and Nation: The Creation of Public Health and Urban Culture in Shanghai. BRILL, 2020.
• Perry, Elizabeth J. Shanghai on Strike: The Politics of Chinese Labor. Stanford University Press, 1995.
• Price, Ruth. The Lives of Agnes Smedley. Oxford University Press, 2005.
• Rankin, Mary Backus. Early Chinese Revolutionaries: Radical Intellectuals in Shanghai and Chekiang, 1902-1911. Harvard University Press, 2013.
• Reed, Christopher A. Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876-1937. UBC Press, 2011.
• Ristaino, Marcia R. Port of Last Resort: Diaspora Communities of Shanghai. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001.
• Shen, Shuang. Cosmopolitan Publics: Anglophone Print Culture in Semi-Colonial Shanghai. New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 2009.
• Smith, Stephen Anthony. A Road Is Made: Communism in Shanghai, 1920-1927. University of Hawaii Press, 2000.
• ———. Like Cattle and Horses: Nationalism and Labor in Shanghai, 1895-1927. Durham [N.C.]: Duke University Press, 2002.
• Streets-Salter, Heather. ‘The Noulens Affair in East and Southeast Asia: International Communism in the Interwar Period’. Journal of American-East Asian Relations 21, no. 4 (26 November 2014): 394–414. https://doi.org/10.1163/18765610-02104006.
• Swislocki, Mark. Culinary Nostalgia: Regional Food Culture and the Urban Experience in Shanghai. Stanford University Press, 2008.
• Wakeman, Frederic. Policing Shanghai, 1927-1937. University of California Press, 1996.
• ———, The Shanghai Badlands: Wartime Terrorism and Urban Crime, 1937-1941. First Edition. Cambridge University Press, 1996.
• Wakeman, Frederic E., and Wen-Hsin Yeh, eds. Shanghai Sojourners. Berkeley, Calif: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1992.
• Wakeman, Frederic, Jr. ‘Policing Modern Shanghai’. The China Quarterly, no. 115 (1 September 1988): 408–40.
• Wang, Juan. Merry Laughter and Angry Curses: The Shanghai Tabloid Press, 1897-1911. UBC Press, 2012.
• Wasserstein, Bernard. Secret War in Shanghai: Treachery, Subversion and Collaboration in the Second World War. Bloomsbury Publishing, 1998.
• Wasserstrom, Jeffrey N. Global Shanghai, 1850-2010: A History in Fragments. Routledge, 2008.
• ———. Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China: The View from Shanghai. Stanford University Press, 1991.
• Yeh, Catherine. Shanghai Love: Courtesans, Intellectuals, and Entertainment Culture, 1850-1910. University of Washington Press, 2006.
• Yeh, Wen-Hsin. Shanghai Splendor: Economic Sentiments and the Making of Modern China, 1843-1949. University of California Press, 2008.
• ———, ed. Wartime Shanghai. New York: Routledge, 1998.
• Yue, Meng. Shanghai and the Edges of Empires. University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
• Zhang, Yingjin. Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922-1943. Stanford University Press, 1999.
• Zia, Helen. Last Boat Out of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Fled Mao’s Revolution. Random House Publishing Group, 2019.