Drawing treasured information from the Huizhou wenshu, Joseph P. McDermott has developed two volumes of analysis titled The Making of a New Rural Order in South China to reconstruct the social and economic transformations of Huizhou from 900 to 1700. While the first volume examined the evolution of lineages in rural Huizhou from the Song to the Ming,Footnote 1 the present volume focuses on the strategies that Huizhou merchants, their families, and lineage organizations deployed to conduct business from 1500 to 1700, exploring how the Huizhou merchants, one of the most powerful regional mercantile groups in late imperial China, “established a set of rural and urban institutions that linked their lineages and villages to urban markets” (p. 6). These institutions—ancestral halls, local-place associations, lineage-based commercial partnerships, and family firms—not only provided stable venues and resources for Huizhou merchants to conduct businesses in the politically unstable sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but also shaped the commercial and financial world of South China.
Chapter 1 provides a broad picture of China's market changes from the late eleventh to the sixteenth century and a summary of the new characteristics that Huizhou merchants developed in the Ming. The subsequent five chapters analyze the institutions and strategies that Huizhou merchants deployed to enable their commercial ascent. Focusing on the financing of the construction and operation of ancestral halls, chapter 2 reveals how lineage organizers employed various methods to collect funds from local villagers to build and maintain ancestral halls, and how some lineage organizers transformed the collected capital into profit-making loans, turning this ancestor worshipping institution into “a proto-bank” (p. 111).
Chapter 3 examines the institutional protections that merchants relied on to counter raids, theft, corrupt brokers, and local protectionism in their business world. While well-connected merchants carefully managed relationships with the government by cultivating networks with officials and embedding business within government administration, less powerful merchants collaborated with other merchants of similar background through local institutions such as inns or temples (p. 192).
Chapter 4 further discusses state-merchant connections by exploring Huizhou merchants’ deep involvement in the Ming salt monopoly. In addition to the salt trade, these merchants also profited by transforming salt certificate transactions into a financial instrument to their advantage. While a few merchants reaped great profits from the salt monopoly, many Huizhou merchants focused on managing pawnshops and developed their influence in commercial centers. By examining merchants’ participation in these two largely different financial institutions, this chapter reveals their exceptional range of involvement in the Ming economy and the “exceptional diversity of occupations within their own ranks” (p. 251).
Chapter 5 traces the evolution of three types of commercial partnerships that Huizhou merchants adopted: commenda (weituo, fuben), agency (jingshang), and joint-share (heben, hegu), explaining how commercial partnerships became deeply intertwined with Huizhou lineage organizations. This lineage-based partnership made joint-share the dominant model in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. While this chapter describes the rules and principles of Huizhou commercial partnerships, chapter 6 uses case studies of three lineages to explore the “‘microeconomic processes’ by which Huizhou's business organizations were formed and managed” (p. 313). McDermott adopts an overarching concept of the house firm (hao, tang) to examine Huizhou merchants’ multiple uses of kinship ties in business and the crucial role that small family units—defined by kinship relations in the traditional Confucian mourning rites (wufu)—played in forming these house firms.
Departing from previous scholarship focused on the “macroeconomic performance” of late imperial Chinese economy, the present volume adds to our understanding of Ming economic life by providing an in-depth analysis of Huizhou merchants’ economic activities at the local level.Footnote 2 To reconstruct this microeconomic history, this book examines the “actual operation of certain Chinese institutions.”Footnote 3 This approach reveals a fruitful discovery of the extensive involvement of Huizhou lineages in the economic lives of their residents, from wealthy merchants to peddlers and capital-constrained commoners. For instance, an inquiry into the financial management of ancestral halls in Ming Huizhou reveals a hidden function as a credit association that collected and redistributed capital from local villagers. As this detailed account of Huizhou merchants’ commercial activities engages with the extensive scholarship of Ming economy, it also enriches our understanding of these merchants’ economic performance in the Qing. For example, the Huizhou merchant's service as Libationers (jijiu)—the head of the salt trade association—in the Ming (chapter 3) generates inquiries about the trajectory of the dynamic merchant-government relations developed in the subsequent Qing Empire.
While this book demonstrates the interwoven connections between kinship and business operations, one wonders what role(s) gender relations played in the Huizhou merchants’ world. As McDermott has noted the important role that marriage alliances played in forming house firms (pp. 346, 353), how did marriage impact business operations such as collecting capital, building networks, or sharing resources? As chapter 6 reveals how paternal kinship ties formed the foundation of Huizhou merchants’ business operation, how did maternal kinship ties such as mother-son or uncle-nephew relationships influence business management? Nonetheless, this book provides a comprehensive and thoroughly researched analysis of the economic and social lives of Huizhou merchants and the interconnections between lineage organizations and business institutions in Ming China.
This book will certainly be of interest to historians of merchant culture, business history, and rural studies of imperial China. Scholars who are interested in merchants and the economy would also find it valuable to compare Huizhou merchants with other regional mercantile groups in China, as well as to other regions in the world.
