Let There Be Light

Jonathan Kaufman, author of The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties That Helped Create Modern China:
An insightful and vivid history. Mark Clifford challenges the conventional view of Hong Kong as a laissez-faire state. He shows instead the complex and successful collaboration between its government and its most important industry—electricity. At the center stands Lawrence Kadoorie—a colonial British capitalist at the door of communist China, a Jewish entrepreneur in a city riven with antisemitism. This is a valuable history of business and of technology—and of Hong Kong’s and China’s rise.

Thomas W. Laqueur, author of The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains:
Let There Be Light is a cultural, business, and political history of the world’s single most indispensable technology—electricity generation—in a great city that it helped create. This elegantly written, deeply researched, and thoughtful book offers, in microcosm, a global vision of development, finance, and state engagement with the economy.