Histories of St. Petersburg, Shanghai, Bombay, and Singapore. Juxtaposing the stories of the architects and authoritarians, the artists and revolutionaries who seized the reins to transform each of these precociously modern places into avatars of the global future, Brook demonstrates that the drive for modernization was initially conflated with wholesale Westernization. He shows, too, the ambiguous legacy of that emulation-the birth (and rebirth) of Chinese capitalism in Shanghai, the origins of Bollywood in Bombay"s American-style movie palaces, the combustible mix of revolutionary culture and politics that rocked the Russian capital-and how it may be transcended today.