Contract and Property in Early Modern China

Contract and Property in Early Modern China

Author: Madeleine Zelin

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2004-02-18

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13: 0804766940

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Providing a new perspective on economic and legal institutions, particularly on contract and property, in Qing and Republican history, this volume provides case studies to explicate how these institutions worked, while situating them firmly in their broader social context.


The Merchants of Zigong

The Merchants of Zigong

Author: Madeleine Zelin

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 440

ISBN-13: 9780231135962

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From its dramatic expansion in the early nineteenth century to its decline in the late 1930s, salt production in Zigong was one of the largest and only indigenous large-scale industries in China. Madeleine Zelin's history details the novel ways in which Zigong merchants mobilized capital through financial-industrial networks and spurred growth by developing new technologies, capturing markets, and building integrated business organizations. She provides new insight into the forces and institutions that shaped Chinese economic and social development (independent of Western or Japanese influence) and challenges long-held beliefs that social structure, state extraction, the absence of modern banking, and cultural bias against business precluded industrial development in China.


Public Goods Provision in the Early Modern Economy

Public Goods Provision in the Early Modern Economy

Author: Masayuki Tanimoto

Publisher: University of California Press

Published: 2018-12-04

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 0520303652

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At publication date, a free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Scholarly discussions on economic development in history, specifically those linked to industrialization or modern economic growth, have paid great attention to the formation and development of the market economy as a set of institutions able to augment people’s welfare. The role of specific nonmarket practices for promoting the economic development and welfare has been a distinct concern, typically involving discussion of the state’s economic policies. How have societies tackled those issues that the market did not? To what extent did those solutions reflect the structure of an economy? Public Goods Provision in the Early Modern Economy explores these questions by investigating efforts made for the provision of "public goods" in early modern economies from the perspective of Japanese socioeconomic history during Tokugawa era (1603–1868), and by comparing those cases with others from Europe and China’s economic history. The contributors focus on three areas of inquiry—early modern era welfare policies for the poor, infrastructure, and forest management—to provide both a unique perspective on Japanese public finance at local levels and a vantage point outside of Europe to encourage a more global view of early modern political economies that shaped subsequent modern transformations.


Trading Networks in Early Modern East Asia

Trading Networks in Early Modern East Asia

Author: Angela Schottenhammer

Publisher: Otto Harrassowitz Verlag

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 9783447062275

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The present volume, composed of six contributions by different scholars, seeks to show the intensity of exchange relations and trading networks in the early modern to late imperial "East Asian 'Mediterranean'", arguing that these exchange relations and trading networks already had their roots and origins in the tenth to thirteenth centuries at the latest. In this context, the first two contributions discuss local society and socio-economic changes within local Chinese society during the Song to Ming periods - while the other four contributions concentrate on aspects of commercial exchange and administration during the Qing period. Two contributions in particular analyze the indirect and direct importance respectively of religion for social life and commercial activities as a basic precondition for success in non-religious affairs. One chapter investigates Sino-Ryukyuan trade relations during the Kangxi reign (1662-1722), another one Sino-Taiwanese trade relations in late imperial China, while one chapter is in particular dedicated to an analysis of the characteristics and developments within the maritime trade administration of the Manchu Qing (1644-1911) government, with emphasis on hitherto rather neglected aspects, for example institutional-administrative details, including questions such as if Manchus or Han Chinese were responsible for the administration of trade.


The Economy of Lower Yangzi Delta in Late Imperial China

The Economy of Lower Yangzi Delta in Late Imperial China

Author: Billy Kee Long So

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 0415508967

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This book explores aspects of this vibrant market economy in late imperial China, and by presenting a reconstructed narrative of economic development in the early modern Jiangnan, provides new perspectives on established theories of Chinese economic development. Further, by examining economic values alongside social structures, this book produces a historically comprehensive account of the contemporary Chinese economy which engenders a deeper and broader understanding of China's current economic success.


The Chinese Cornerstone of Modern Banking

The Chinese Cornerstone of Modern Banking

Author: Frederic Delano Grant, Jr.

Publisher: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers

Published: 2014-09-25

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13: 9004276564

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Modern bank insurance is traced to its roots in The Chinese Cornerstone of Modern Banking: The Canton Guaranty System and the Origins of Bank Deposit Insurance 1780-1933. Frederic Delano Grant, Jr. provides new understandings of the Canton System, collective responsibility for debt at Canton, and the history of deposit insurance. The Canton Guaranty System inspired radical reform in New York in 1829 – the ancestor of all modern deposit insurance. Yet it was never the success imagined, and soon failed. In the Opium War, the Chinese government as implicit guarantor was forced to pay its debts in full on 23 July 1843. The afflictions of the Chinese system, including moral hazard, too big to fail, and unenforced laws, remain familiar today.


The Making of the Modern Chinese State

The Making of the Modern Chinese State

Author: Humphrey Ko

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-12-08

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 9811026602

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This text addresses the corporate causes of the collapse of the Qing Dynasty and the emergence of modern Republican China. Weaving together political, legal and business histories, it focuses on the key relationship between China, cement and corporations, and demonstrates how the particular circumstances of cement manufacturing in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China serve to illuminate key aspects of Chinese political economy and illustrate the importance of legal frameworks in the emergence of industrial enterprises. Examining the centrality of legal personality in China’s historical story, seen from the angle of cement manufacturing corporations, it offers an alternative historical perspective on the making of the modern Chinese States and delves into the involvement of larger-than-life historical figures of modern China such as Yuan Shikai, Chiang Kai-shek and the revolutionary and the father of modern China, Sun Yat-sen, in the unfolding of these events.


The Laws and Economics of Confucianism

The Laws and Economics of Confucianism

Author: Taisu Zhang

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-10-12

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 1107141117

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Zhang argues that property institutions in preindustrial China and England were a cause of China's lagging development in preindustrial times.


Social Order through Contracts

Social Order through Contracts

Author: Jian Qu

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-02-04

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 9813349476

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This book is the first Western-language monograph on the study of the Qingshui River manuscripts. By examining over 3,000 contracts and other manuscripts, this book offers constructive insights into the long-standing question of how and why a society in late imperial China could maintain a well-functioning social system with few laws but many contracts, i.e., Hobbesian “words without sword.” Three interrelated questions, what contracts were, how and why they worked, are explained successively. Thus, this book presents a non-stereotypical “contract society” in southwest China, arguing that the social order which provides predictability and regularity for economic prosperity could be formed and maintained through contracts even under the condition of relatively weak influence of governmental and legal authorities. This book benefits readers who are interested in law, society, and history. While presenting the socio-legal landscape of a frontier area in late imperial China for historians, this book provides a novel and empirical interpretation of the supposedly well-known contract device for legal researchers, thereby proposing materials for an integrated theoretical explanatory framework of contracts in general. By employing the innovative theory of blockchain in its key argumentation, the book offers a creative interpretation of historical and social phenomena.


Fieldwork in Modern Chinese History

Fieldwork in Modern Chinese History

Author: Thomas David DuBois

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-11-19

Total Pages: 339

ISBN-13: 1000734684

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This book explores how fieldwork has been used to research Chinese history in the past and new ways that others might use in it the future. It introduces the previous generations of scholars who ventured out of the archive to conduct local investigations in Chinese cities, villages, farms and temples. It goes on to present the techniques of historical fieldwork, providing guidance on how to integrate oral history into research plans and archival research, conduct interviews, and locate sources in the field. Chapters by established researchers relate these techniques to specific types of fieldwork, including religion, the imperial past, natural environments and agriculture. Combining the past and the future of the craft, the book provides a rich resource for scholars coming new to fieldwork in the history of China.