A comprehensive look into how Macau’s recent decades of gambling-related growth produced one of the wealthiest territories on the planet

Betting on Macau delves into the radical transformation of what was formerly the last remaining European territory in Asia, returned to the People’s Republic of China in 1999 after nearly half a millennium of Portuguese rule. Examining the unprecedented scale of its development and its key role in China’s economic revolution, Tim Simpson follows Macau’s emergence from historical obscurity to become the most profitable casino gaming locale in the world.

Identified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site and renowned for its unique blend of Chinese and Portuguese colonial-era architecture, contemporary Macau has metamorphosed into a surreal, hypermodern urban landscape augmented by massive casino megaresorts, including two of the world’s largest buildings. Simpson situates Macau’s origins as a strategic trading port and its ensuing history alongside the emergence of the global capitalist system, charting the massive influx of foreign investment, construction, and tourism in the past two decades that helped generate the territory’s enormous wealth.

Presented through a cross section of postcolonial studies and social theory with extensive insight into the global gambling industry, Betting on Macau uncovers the various roots of the territory’s lucrative casino capitalism. In turn, its trenchant analysis provides a distinctive view into China’s broader project of urbanization, its post-Mao economic reforms, and the continued rise of its consumer culture.

Tim Simpson is associate professor of communication at the University of Macau.

"In this timely and impressive book, Tim Simpson charts the predicament of Macau—a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China—as a laboratory of consumption, and of planning and architecture as disciplinary technologies, all employed toward prototyping a scholastic program for the production and naturalization of commodity-driven social imaginaries in post-Mao China. A must-read for scholars and practitioners of urban planning and architecture, particularly those working in or studying urbanization in China."—Miodrag Mitrašinović, coeditor of The Emerging Public Realm of the Greater Bay Area: Approaches to Public Space in a Chinese Megaregion

"Betting on Macau is a creative, engaging, wide-ranging, and insightful analysis that both dazzles the reader with a litany of the astonishing transformations Macau has undergone in the past two decades and provides a solid conceptual framework for understanding those changes in a world-historical context."—Cathryn H. Clayton, author of Sovereignty at the Edge: Macau and the Question of Chineseness

 

"Presented through a cross section of postcolonial studies and social theory with extensive insight into the global gambling industry, Betting on Macau uncovers the various roots of the territory’s lucrative casino capitalism. In turn, its trenchant analysis provides a distinctive view into China’s broader project of urbanization, its post-Mao economic reforms, and the continued rise of its consumer culture."—Progressive Geographies

"Betting on Macau is a worthy introduction to Macau and suitable for anyone, inside and outside academia, interested in a place of exception for Chinese gambling tourists."—Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change

"Tim Simpson’s book is a timely contribution to a slender yet growing volume of works that have sought to reposition Macau within a cocktail of national, regional, and global themes."—Current History