Author: Joseph P. McDermott
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107048516
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 481
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Book Description
In examining the key merchant group in late imperial China this book provides a framework for understanding China's path to modernity.
Author: Joseph P. McDermott
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108850650
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 481
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Book Description
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.
Author: Gipouloux, François
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1800889909
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Book Description
Offering a fresh analysis of late imperial China, this cutting-edge book revisits the roles played by merchant networks, economic institutions, and business practices in the divergence between Europe and China during the trade revolution.
Author: Prof. Qitao Guo
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520385225
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Huizhou studies the construction of local identity through kinship in the prefecture of Huizhou, the most prominent merchant stronghold of Ming China. Employing an array of untapped genealogies and other sources, Qitao Guo explores how developments in the sociocultural, religious, and gender realms from the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries intertwined to shape Huizhou identity as a land of "prominent lineages." This gentrified self-image both sheltered and guided the development of mercantile lineages, which were further bolstered by the gender regime and the local religious order. As Guo demonstrates, the discrepancy between representation and practice helps explain Huizhou's triumphs. The more active the economy became, the more those central to its commercialization embraced conservative sociocultural norms. Home lineages embraced neo-Confucian orthodoxy even as they provided the financial and logistical support to assure the success of Huizhou merchants. The end result was not "capitalism" but a gentrified mercantile lineage culture with Chinese—or Huizhou—characteristics.
Author: Robert S. G. Fletcher
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 023155897X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324
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Book Description
Conventional narratives of empires and globalization focus on oceans and coasts, supposing that global connections are seaborne and that historical change proceeds inward from port cities into continental expanses. This book offers a new perspective, examining key inland areas around the world to show how interior regions have shaped global history. Inlands brings together an interdisciplinary group of experts to explore the modern histories of inland regions across North and South America, Africa, Eurasia, and Australasia, from the American heartland to the Yangzi valley, the Great Dismal Swamp to the Arabian Desert. Together, they argue that interior regions provide a fresh vantage point from which to rethink the history of global connection and disconnection. Each chapter reconsiders national, regional, or imperial histories from an inland perspective, demonstrating how such places have spurred global change. Contributors reveal the critical role inlands and their Indigenous inhabitants have played in the development, projection, and contestation of state power, showing how some interiors became essential to empire even as others developed in resistance to it. By examining the struggle to integrate inland regions into wider networks of exchange, this book also sheds light on the unevenness and the limits of contemporary globalization. A new global history of interior spaces, Inlands presents a bold challenge to dominant understandings of the making of today’s connected world.
Author: Markus Friedrich, Jörg B. Quenzer
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3111383083
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 356
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Book Description
Author: Lu Rong
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295749946
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 190
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Book Description
A forgotten century marks the years between the Ming dynasty's (1368–1644) turbulent founding and its sixteenth-century age of exploration and economic transformation. In this period of social stability, retired scholar-official Lu Rong chronicled his observations of Chinese society in Miscellaneous Records from the Bean Garden (Shuyuan zaji). Openly expressing his admirations and frustrations, Lu provides a window into the quotidian that sets Bean Garden apart from other works of the biji genre of "informal notes." Mark Halperin organizes a translated selection of Lu's accounts from Miscellaneous Records from the Bean Garden to create a panorama of Ming life. A man of unusual curiosity, Lu describes multiple social classes, ethnicities, and locales in his accounts of political intrigues, farming techniques, religious practices, etiquette, crime, and family life. Centuries after their composition, Lu's words continue to provide a richly textured portrait of China on the cusp of the early modern era.
Author: Ron Harris
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691185808
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 482
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Book Description
A historical look at the early evolution of global trade and how this led to the creation and dominance of the European business corporation Before the seventeenth century, trade across Eurasia was mostly conducted in short segments along the Silk Route and Indian Ocean. Business was organized in family firms, merchant networks, and state-owned enterprises, and dominated by Chinese, Indian, and Arabic traders. However, around 1600 the first two joint-stock corporations, the English and Dutch East India Companies, were established. Going the Distance tells the story of overland and maritime trade without Europeans, of European Cape Route trade without corporations, and of how new, large-scale, and impersonal organizations arose in Europe to control long-distance trade for more than three centuries. Ron Harris shows that by 1700, the scene and methods for global trade had dramatically changed: Dutch and English merchants shepherded goods directly from China and India to northwestern Europe. To understand this transformation, Harris compares the organizational forms used in four major regions: China, India, the Middle East, and Western Europe. The English and Dutch were the last to leap into Eurasian trade, and they innovated in order to compete. They raised capital from passive investors through impersonal stock markets and their joint-stock corporations deployed more capital, ships, and agents to deliver goods from their origins to consumers. Going the Distance explores the history behind a cornerstone of the modern economy, and how this organizational revolution contributed to the formation of global trade and the creation of the business corporation as a key factor in Europe’s economic rise.
Author: Kate Ekama
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110777312
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 346
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Book Description
The study of slavery and coerced labour is increasingly conducted from a global perspective, and yet a dual Eurocentric bias remains: slavery primarily brings to mind the images of Atlantic chattel slavery, and most studies continue to be based – either outright or implicitly – on a model of northern European wage labour. This book constitutes an attempt to re-centre that story to Asia. With studies spanning the western Indian Ocean and the steppes of Central Asia to the islands of South East Asia and Japan, and ranging from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, this book tracks coercion in diverse forms, tracing both similarities and differences – as well as connections – between systems of coercion, from early sales regulations to post-abolition labour contracts. Deep empirical case studies, as well as comparisons between the chapters, all show that while coercion was entrenched in a number of societies, it was so in different and shifting ways. This book thus not only shows the history of slavery and coercion in Asia as a connected story, but also lays the groundwork for global studies of a phenomenon as varying, manifold and contested as coercion.
Author: Mayfair Yang
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538156490
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 279
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Book Description
An interdisciplinary collection in the new field of environmental humanities, this volume brings together Chinese environmental ethics, religious ontology, and religious practice to explore how traditional Chinese religio-environmental ethics are actually put into social practice both in China’s past and present. It also examines how Chinese religious teachings offer a wealth of resources to the environmental project of forging new ontologies for humans co-existing with other living beings. Different chapters examine how: Buddhist ontology avoids anthropocentrism, fengshui (Chinese geomancy) can help protect the landscape from economic development, popular religion organizes tree-planting, ancient dream interpretation practices avoided constructing the possessive individual subjectivity of modern consumerism, Buddhist rituals and ethics promoted compassion for animals and modern recycling, Confucian ancestor rituals and tombs have deterred industrial expansion, and also how Daoism’s potential role to deter desertification in northern China was stymied by state operations in contemporary China. A significant advance in the field of Chinese environmental anthropology, the outstanding scholars in this volume provide a unique and much needed contribution to the scholarship on China and the environment.
