C. Patterson Giersch's new book Corporate Conquests: Business, the State, and the Origins of Ethnic Inequality in Southwest China joins excellent scholarship looking to recast Chinese imperial-cum-national history as a multiply centred affair. Following his excellent Asian Borderlands, this detailed and richly supported argument narrates Yunnan Province as a cultural and economic engine of things Chinese rather than its more common bit part as mere margin. Giersch focuses on local elites of the Yunnan–Burma frontier, which is to say the political luminaries, entrepreneurs, technocrats and merchants seeking to make exploitation of local resources and transborder trade profitable. Foregrounding the frontier through the activities of these local achievers within a nationalizing and globalizing economy demonstrates the prominent role played by Yunnanese business and locally eminent capitalists in the state-building projects of turn-of-the-20th-century China.

The book's story starts when entrepreneurs deploying new record-keeping and profit-sharing techniques began to build early-20th-century, disciplined corporations capable of trading across vast distances. Finding these successful trading firms to be ethnically varied, the author argues against stereotypes of minority peoples as incapable of modern commerce or hard work, and instead demonstrates their ability to adapt positively to modernity in ways that were not simply a matter of assimilation to the majority Confucian cultural practices. In Giersch's account, these corporations pioneered bold, innovative models of business practices, mechanization and development, which had long-lasting impact on China's ethnic and economic landscape. Giersch also traces how these corporations contributed to “assemblages” (p. 10) of historical moves that eventually eroded indigenous control over resources and opportunities, where the seeds of ethnic inequality and uneven development (p. 97) seen in the southwest today were planted decades before the communist takeover.

Part one examines the impact of corporate practices and trading networks on reshaping traditions, behaviours and relationships, with the first two chapters focusing on family and lineage to argue against the notion that patriarchal Chinese lineage was necessary for the development of any Chinese business. The example of Yongchangxiang (est. 1903) – a shareholding trading firm that eventually controlled approximately 110 billion yuan in assets by the early 1950s (p. 27) – shows that combined expertise, market knowledge and bookkeeping technologies rather than familial connections were reasons for its success. Counter to stereotypical understandings of Chinese business success, he argues that this corporate network, which connected Mandalay, Rangoon, Lhasa, Chongqing, Shanghai and Hong Kong, was in fact an outcome of the firm's emphasis on “performance over kinship” (p. 40), in which multi-ethnic kin of shareholders were all subject to performance evaluations. Giersch also argues that these figures were agents rather than victims of circumstance, and their attention to familial morality was agentive creation rather than inherited continuity (p. 63). Local businessmen turned to lineage institutions and Confucian ethics instrumentally as techniques for legitimation (p. 56) after their businesses had taken off. In other words, they “used their profits to create the lineage,” and not the other way around (p. 63).

Part two turns to the conquests of joint state–private mining and textile corporations in the interwar years. Examples of their success demonstrate the author's point that economic development was an “assemblage” of the titular “corporate conquests” made possible by their being largely unburdened by state oversight. This is a richly detailed argument, and here the reader sees something of why the Chinese state has been unable to conceive of frontier economic development as a partnership with minority communities. As China went from empire to nation state, a centre that had been accommodating its diverse communities became a central authority where cultural and ethnic difference became a target for control. Indeed, the final chapters outline local corporate decline as regulation strengthened and state institutions began to raid the markets and capacity of the Yunnanese corporations. Non-Han populations without a stake in business never benefited from state-led development, and the national security logics were increasingly deployed to justify expanding and deepening state power over ethnic communities considered to be to culturally backward. Giersch argues that these conditions are the origins of persistent ethnic inequality in southwestern China.

Situating this work from the perspective of present day “Open up the West” campaigns, we can begin to get a sense of why they have largely failed to be fair or inspire loyalty to Beijing. We have instead seen only increasing marginalization among ethnic minorities, which is a disappointment that has led some policy thinkers to see CCP approaches for political autonomy and social equality of minorities as such failures that a wholesale rethink is necessary. Though Giersch does not mention this, one may legitimately link this negative view of minority policy results to the now high-level movement for a “second generation minority policy,” where the goal of ethnic coexistence and harmony is replaced by one of assimilationist “melting pot.” (The current PRC government's brutal internment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, along with other forms of “Palestinization” elsewhere, are in part outcomes of this new assimilationist episteme.)

Giersch is an excellent writer and storyteller who narrates an engaging landscape of visionary figures. He occasionally speculates about potential alternatives to the way unequal development has unfolded in Yunnan with questions about what might have happened if indigenous communities had been able to pursue their own development. These are interesting problems that enlighten the reading a great deal. This well-researched book offers nuanced information and critical analysis about the rise and demise of private corporations in Yunnan, and their implications. I would have liked more theoretical sophistication in the thinking about ethnic differentiation and ethnogenesis, since I suspect the conditions of political economy and human variation at a time when the very concept of ethnicity was only barely starting to make itself felt would make for an interesting picture.