This is the first of the projected two-volume magnum opus by Joseph McDermott, a scholar who has labored for decades in the fields of Chinese social history. It is cause for celebration, and a book that every student of late imperial China needs to come to grips with in some way.

Historians of late imperial China often fantasize about what it would be like to have at their disposal a near-infinite array of data from which to construct their arguments, feeling jealous of their social scientist colleagues who study contemporary China, and even of other historians who study the early modern West. McDermott, as it happens, was confronted with just such an embarrassment of riches for his longue durée history of a Chinese locality: the so-called “Huizhou sources” (Huizhou wenshu), an estimated 500,000 official and private documents housed in more than fifty collections worldwide, but organized and cross-referenced by a number of scholars over the past few decades into a single coherent trove. McDermott solves the problem of negotiating this morass by largely concentrating on a few, extraordinarily rich documents—most notably successive editions of a highly detailed record of a well-endowed landed trust held by the Cheng lineage—and by reducing the chaos of possible narratives into a single coherent and highly interesting story.

The story is this. In the Song and Yuan, kinship groups existed in Huizhou local society, but they enjoyed nothing like the dominance they would later hold. They shared power with other types of organizations, such as local cults and Buddhist temples. The latter, in fact, often hosted such functions as ancestral sacrifice that would subsequently become core elements of lineage hegemony. The military and demographic disasters of the Yuan-Ming transition, coupled with the hostile policies toward Buddhism and popular religion of the new Ming regime, tipped the balance of local social power decisively toward the patrilineage, which amassed large amounts of agricultural land and devised new institutions for collectively managing this, first the landed estate (yizhuang) and eventually the ancestral hall (sitang). The struggle of these institutions to hold on to and manage their collective wealth, under conditions of rapid population growth, declining per capita cultivated acreage, and structural economic change, comprises the central conflict of McDermott's narrative.

This account of lineage history in Huizhou invites comparison with two other recent books that trace analogous processes in other localities of South China. Studying Guangzhou's Pearl River delta, David Faure argues that the familiar institution of the powerful property-holding (through ancestral trusts) lineage was a development of a specific three-century era beginning with the Ming Jiajing reign (1522–66). Prior to that time, the major property-holding institution was the household, administered and taxed directly by the state, while ritual functions of local community were, as in Huizhou, largely in the hands of Buddhist temples. Over the Ming-Qing period, stimulated in large part by agricultural commercialization, the roles of land management, economic development, ritual leadership, and interface with the imperial state passed into the hands of expansive, increasingly formalized, and corporatized lineages.Footnote ⁴

In Michael Szonyi's study of Fuzhou, the social dominance of kinship organizations seems to have appeared earlier than it did in Huizhou and Guangzhou, but the lineage's appeal and function transformed over time. Its earliest utility was to document genealogically (and usually falsely) the members' descent from centuries-old migrants from North China, and hence ethnic superiority to “Dan” and “She” neighbors. With the Ming imposition of more stringent fiscal demands, lineage records allowed demonstration of compliance and hence the exemption of most kinsmen from military conscription. Later, building grand ancestral halls allowed the commercial nouveaux-riche to promote themselves into a cultural elite to which they otherwise had little claim. Finally, the appropriation by lineages of leadership in community-wide religious festivals, part of their dramatic turn from a posture of status exclusion to one of neighborly inclusion, helped smooth over increasingly intense class tensions.Footnote ⁵

Each of these localities has a different story to tell, but together they help contribute to a coherent social history of late imperial south China. A common theme is the rise of the patrilineage as a vehicle of local power from at least the mid-Ming onward, at the expense of other communal organizations and of the administrative state. Do we see over the same period what Shigeta Atsushi long ago identified as the “rise of the gentry” displacing the state as the dominant force in local society? The answer would seem contingent on how we define “gentry.” One of the least convincing of McDermott's arguments, in my view, is that over the later Ming, control over lineage property was gradually assumed by a so-called “Culture Group” of examination degree-holders versus other types of elites; what we can safely conclude from the evidence of all three localities, I think, is instead the gradual accommodation, indeed mutual infiltration, of elites based on commercial wealth with those based on literati status. Finally, the histories of Huizhou, Guangzhou, and Fuzhou all show the remarkable capacity of highly complex organizations based ostensibly on common descent to mobilize capital and supply entrepreneurship for economic development.

If you asked a nonspecialist social historian of China what made Huizhou distinctive, I suspect you would hear three things: the preponderance of forestry in the local economy, the disproportionate presence of bondservant labor, and the prefecture's role as home to the late empire's premier mercantile diaspora. In this book, McDermott makes reference to the second and third of these, but in less detail than the reader might expect. Where he really shines is in his fascinating analysis of the management and development of the forested hillsides that comprised the backbone of Huizhou's local economy.

The comparison is apt with Madeleine Zelin's study of the production and marketing of salt from Zigong, Sichuan. In nineteenth-century Zigong, economic enterprises of astounding sophistication were developed to accumulate capital, share risk, and achieve “vertical integration” in the salt business, in the absence of effective banking and insurance institutions and of corporate law, through the contracting of complex partnerships among lineage trusts (tang).Footnote ⁶ In Ming Huizhou's timber industry, in a period when the lineage trust was still only in its early stages of development, McDermott shows that elaborate schemes to distribute risk, achieve investment diversification, and invite broader participation in the trade had already been developed; secondary markets flourished in “portions” (fen), “shares” (gu), and what McDermott somewhat boldly terms “futures,” in timber lands, tenancy rights, and even individual trees.

In his second volume, McDermott promises to reveal to us exactly how this impressive home industry directly contributed to the gestation and support of Huizhou's famous empire-wide commercial diaspora, in commodities well beyond timber. It is a cliffhanger, to be sure.