This chapter shows how nationalist politics in Shanghai and Bombay in the 1920s and 1930s followed similar patterns in which leaders organized protests, mobilized workers, introduced a set of “national days” to mark events and tragedies, and called for boycotts of foreign goods while promoting national products. Unlike episodes of contentious politics during the first two decades of the twentieth century, by the 1930s, political parties and unions directed political mobilization toward state-building. National citizenship displaced urban citizenship. An armed intervention in Shanghai by Japanese troops in early 1932 and encroachments by Japan elsewhere in China prompted nationalist protests in Shanghai. During the Sino–Japanese War in (1937–45), the city came under Japanese occupation. In Bombay, labor politics retained connections with neighborhood concerns, and successful union organizing strategies began with the neighborhood rather than the workplace. The gradual transfer of sovereignty to the Indian National Congress in the 1930s ushered in bureaucratic controls over the workforce and disengagement from questions of housing and public services.