Chinese Merchants

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

  • Joseph P. McDermott(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  76 In short, the traditional Confucian-statist values that had for so long dominated elite official life in China retained a strong pull even among those Huizhou groups supposedly trying to break down its narrow gates with satchels of silver. An even greater obstacle to an understanding of “merchants” in late imperial times is the overuse of this single term “merchant” for all traders regardless of their work, wealth, and status. If variety, then, is recognized for the types of merchants, so should it serve as a guide to the types of category Chinese devised for merchants. Some categories refer to a merchant’s place of origin (for example, Huizhou) or site of trading (Yangzhou), and yet others to their proximity to the govern- ment (such as imperial merchants or official merchants). Also, Chinese traditionally distinguished between traveling merchants (xingshang 行商) and settled shopkeepers (zuogu 座贾), who traded usually at just one urban site. 77 To these largely descriptive distinctions, late Ming writers in Huiz- hou and elsewhere added four sets of economic categories, two of them primarily functional and the other two essentially quantitative. Two types of merchant work appeared, then, very frequently for the first time in Chinese discourse: the broker (yaren 牙人) and the long- distance outsider, itinerant merchant, or “sojourning merchant” (keshang 客商), 78 be they sun-bronzed peddlers or pale-faced salt 75 Cao Sixuan, Xiuning mingzu zhi (henceforth Xiuning mingzu zhi), editor’s preface, Xiuning mingzu zhi, editor’s pref., 4, for the 1626 or later date. 76 Xin’an mingzu zhi, 2, 396. 77 Tang Lixing, Shangren, 14–18, lists several uncommon means of distinguishing merchants. 78 Adachi, Min Shin Chu ̄ goku, 521–51. Changes for Ming Merchants 37 merchants sailing on their own boat over the empire’s waves.

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  Chinese Circulations : Capital, Commodities, and Networks in Southeast Asia

  • Wen-Chin Chang, Eric Tagliacozzo, Wang Gungwu, Anthony Reid(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Duke University Press

    (Publisher)

  Introduction THE ARC OF HISTORICAL COMMERCIAL RELATIONS BETWEEN CHINA AND SOUTHEAST ASIA Wen-Chin Chang and Eric Tagliacozzo Theoretical Review Chinese Merchants have been trading down to Southeast Asia for centuries, sojourning—and sometimes settling—during the course of their voyages. Tese ventures have taken place by land and by sea, linking the wider orbit of the Chinese homeland with vast stretches of Southeast Asia in a broad, mer- cantile embrace. Te present volume aims to examine these contacts, trans- actions, and transmissions over what the great French historian Fernand Braudel called the longue durée. Despite the presence of several foundational volumes by Wang Gungwu and others, which have charted the directions of this feld of study over the past several decades, the feld of Chinese trade in Southeast Asia has become so large and so complex that a syncretic book on its parameters seems long overdue.1 We hope to build on past achieve- ments and outline the scope, diversity, and complexity of Chinese trade interactions over a vast geography and an equally broad temporal spectrum. Because the languages, archives, and sources needed to master a task such as this are beyond the grasp of any one person, we hope that this book will make a signal contribution to the feld, in summarizing where our knowl- edge now stands and where future directions of research may wish to go. Te idea of networks as being crucial to the linking of human societies has received much attention in the past several decades. Philip Curtin was among the frst to point this out in his broad and wide-ranging study Cross- Cultural Trade in World History.2 In that book, he linked the Phoenicians of Mediterranean antiquity, the Hanseatic merchants of the early-modern Bal- tic, and Bugis traders of modern Indonesia in a single, coherent narrative, showing how merchant diasporas could be analyzed with theoretical rigor 2 WEN-CHIN CHANG AND ERIC TAGLIACOZZO over the centuries.

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  The Resurgence of East Asia

  500, 150 and 50 Year Perspectives

  • Giovanni Arrighi, Takeshi Hamashita, Mark Selden, Giovanni Arrighi, Takeshi Hamashita, Mark Selden(Authors)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  We can set these organized economic activities into motion by showing how the textile trade worked. The important point to emphasize here is that the organization of the late imperial economy is not a static system, but rather an evolving one. We will divide our discussion of late imperial commercial organization between the period before and after 1850. Before 1850, China was a net exporter of commodities (e.g. teas and silks) and an importer of bullion. Although both the exports and imports had important effects on China’s economy, the internal organization of trade was largely insulated from the diffusion of Western goods. After 1850, with China’s defeat in the Opium Wars, Western products, technologies, and organizational forms were introduced into China, where they began to reshape the organization of the Chinese economy.

  Long before 1850, Chinese Merchants had gained control of both the collection of textiles from producing areas and their final dispersion to local sellers throughout the area of distribution. The same is true for other products as well. While it is the case that, in the mid-nineteenth century, long-distance trade was in the hands of different sets of merchants in different places, all the merchant groups seemed to work in much the same way (Rowe 1984; Hamilton 1985). The groups specializing in textiles, for instance, would attempt to make connections in particular producing regions and would concentrate their distribution in other areas. Merchants typically went to regional markets in the producing areas and bought cloth from commission agents or petty merchants who had collected the cloth in smaller markets from producing households in the region. Merchants then delivered the cloth to groups specializing in finishing the cloth though dyeing and calendering. According to Craig Dietrich (1972: 130), the merchants would give the cloth, together with “calendering contracts,” to a set of people called pao-tou, or bosses. These bosses, in turn, would hire independent artisans, who rented their equipment from the bosses and worked under their supervision:

  The merchants exercised considerable control over the calendering industry without assuming any direct managerial responsibility . . . The whole organization resembled a modified putting-out system, wherein merchants entrusted raw material (cloth) to laborers through the intermediary of bosses.

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  Chinese Circulations

  Capital, Commodities, and Networks in Southeast Asia

  • Eric Tagliacozzo, Wen-chin Chang, Eric Tagliacozzo, Wen-chin Chang(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Duke University Press Books

    (Publisher)

  Introduction THE ARC OF HISTORICAL COMMERCIAL RELATIONS BETWEEN CHINA AND SOUTHEAST ASIA Wen-Chin Chang and Eric Tagliacozzo Theoretical Review Chinese Merchants have been trading down to Southeast Asia for centuries, sojourning—and sometimes settling—during the course of their voyages. These ventures have taken place by land and by sea, linking the wider orbit of the Chinese homeland with vast stretches of Southeast Asia in a broad, mer-cantile embrace. The present volume aims to examine these contacts, trans-actions, and transmissions over what the great French historian Fernand Braudel called the longue durée . Despite the presence of several foundational volumes by Wang Gungwu and others, which have charted the directions of this field of study over the past several decades, the field of Chinese trade in Southeast Asia has become so large and so complex that a syncretic book on its parameters seems long overdue.1 We hope to build on past achieve-ments and outline the scope, diversity, and complexity of Chinese trade interactions over a vast geography and an equally broad temporal spectrum. Because the languages, archives, and sources needed to master a task such as this are beyond the grasp of any one person, we hope that this book will make a signal contribution to the field, in summarizing where our knowl-edge now stands and where future directions of research may wish to go. The idea of networks as being crucial to the linking of human societies has received much attention in the past several decades. Philip Curtin was among the first to point this out in his broad and wide-ranging study Cross-Cultural Trade in World History .2 In that book, he linked the Phoenicians of Mediterranean antiquity, the Hanseatic merchants of the early-modern Bal-tic, and Bugis traders of modern Indonesia in a single, coherent narrative, showing how merchant diasporas could be analyzed with theoretical rigor 2 WEN-CHIN CHANG AND ERIC TAGLIACOZZO over the centuries.

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  The Salt Merchants of Tianjin

  State-Making and Civil Society in Late Imperial China

  • Man Bun Kwan(Author)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • University of Hawaii Press

    (Publisher)

  73 4. MERCHANT CULTURE Tianjin’s urban culture offered another field of negotiation between state and society. For much of China’s history, the scholar-official was the career of choice. Whether in or out of office, scholar-officials con-sidered righting public morals and customs (yifeng yixu) part of their social responsibility. In this process, Confucianism as a moral philos-ophy and state orthodoxy became a form of cultural capital. 1 Confer-ring on themselves the privilege of deciding a hierarchy of culture from “high” to “low,” literati-officials deemed poetry, collections of paintings, books, and antiques as respectable, but gaily colored cloth-ing, “lewd” customs, and extravagant spending were lowly forms to be tolerated or even banned if necessary. In this cultural and social order, “rural” and “urban” lost their analytical value (for those who subscribe to the state orthodoxy at least). 2 Merchants ranked lowest behind literati-scholars (shi), farmers (nong), and artisans (gong), and their literati affectations were considered pretentious if not a threat to high culture. 3 Such was the power of this cultural hegemony that while a few in-tellectuals of late imperial China far ahead of their times advocated the pursuit of profit as a worthy and morally fulfilling goal, the gap between intellectual history and social history lingered until the late nineteenth century (if not beyond). 4 Just as successful British indus-trial entrepreneurs found the appeal of country-house living, or “fall-ing into the establishment,” irresistible, their Chinese contemporaries too succumbed to the pressure of social conformity. This orthodoxy explains why Yangzhou’s salt merchants failed to develop into a full-fledged capitalist system: they squandered their wealth in a vain- 74 Merchant Culture glorious attempt to acquire books, art, and other affectations of the truly cultured.

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