BUSINESS HISTORY Taxi Shanghai: Entrepreneurship and semi-colonial context Shuang L. Frost a and Adam K. Frost b a Marshall School of Business, Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA; b East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA ABSTRACT Scholars of entrepreneurship can agree that ‘context matters.’ However, there is little consensus regarding the processes through which context and entrepreneurship are mutually constructive. While the influence of top-down forces on entrepreneurial action is well-studied, the ways in which ‘bottom-up’ entrepreneurial processes reshape context remain undertheorized. To help fill this void, this article explores the dynamic interplay between entrepreneurship and semi-colonial context in Republican Shanghai (1911–1949), by retracing the history of Shanghai’s ‘Taxi King’, Zhou Xiangsheng, and his enterprise, Johnson Taxi. Through context theorising, the article explicates mechanisms by which Chinese entrepreneurs reshaped semi-colonial Shanghai: how they launched informal taxi services that filled critical gaps in urban connectivity; com- bined heterogenous technologies to build city-wide taxi networks that traversed Shanghai’s many divides; and harnessed rising nationalistic sentiments to link the consumption of transportation services with political identity. We argue that through such mechanisms, Chinese entrepreneurs not only navigated their situated context, but actively re-imagined and transformed it. Entrepreneurship and context Entrepreneurship and context are mutually constructive. Context defines the landscape of opportunities that are available to entrepreneurs, structures their rewards, constrains their actions, and shapes their decision-making processes. 1 At the same time, entrepre- neurs, in the pursuit and fulfilment of opportunities, purposefully reconfigure their con- texts. 2 Over time, this dynamic interchange drives the emergence and stabilisation of new economic, social, institutional, and cultural environments as well as new entrepreneur- ial forms. While scholars increasingly recognise the importance of including contextual factors in theories of entrepreneurship, the mechanisms of mutual influence between context and entrepreneurship remain under-studied and under-theorized. As Friederike Welter has argued, most entrepreneurship research still implicitly or explicitly assumes a ‘one-way © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group CONTACT Shuang L. Frost slfrost@marshall.usc.edu https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2021.1925649 KEYWORDS Entrepreneurship; semi-colonialism; China; contextualisation; transportation; Urban Studies; Shanghai; Automobiles; Nationalism