The Making of a New Rural Order in South China: Volume 2, Merchants, Markets, and Lineages, 1500–1700

In examining the key merchant group in late imperial China this book provides a framework for understanding China's path to modernity.

Joseph P. McDermott (Author)

9781107658615, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 27 October 2022

480 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.5 cm, 0.691 kg

'McDermott has written a significant … contribution to the study of merchants and finance in early modern China. Readers should come equipped with a willingness to work through extended narrative digressions and long assessments of conflicting evidence.' Ian M. Miller, Agricultural History

This volume is written for anyone who has wondered about the growth of Chinese businesses and their relation to Chinese family and government institutions. Making full use of its partner volume's findings on village institutions in the southern prefecture of Huizhou, this volume explains how late imperial China's key regional group of merchants emerged from this prefecture's village lineages. It identifies the strategies they deployed to overcome the serious obstacles to their domination of major financial transactions and commodity markets throughout much of China from 1500 to 1700. At the same time it describes how the commercial success enjoyed by these 'house firms' undermined their lineages' social stability, making them vulnerable to competition from popular religious cults back home. In recounting how rural and urban institutions interacted through state and economic development, McDermott provides a powerful new framework for understanding late imperial China's distinctive trajectory to social and economic transformation.

Introduction
1. Ming markets and Huizhou merchants
2. Ancestral halls and credit: building, investing, and lending
3. The working world of Huizhou merchants, travel and trade, problems and resolutions
4. Huizhou merchants and their financial institutions
5. Huizhou merchants and commercial partnerships
6. Huizhou house firms: the binds of kinship and commerce
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Economic history [KCZ], Asian history [HBJF]