In the mid-1910s, what historians call the Golden Age of Chinese Capitalism began, accompanied by a technological transformation that included the drastic expansion of China's Gutenberg revolution. Gutenberg in Shanghai is a brilliant examination of this process. It finds the origins of that revolution in the country's printing industries of the late imperial period and analyzes their subsequent development in the Republican era.

Under diverse social, political, and economic influences, this technological and cultural revolution saw woodblock printing replaced with Western mechanical...