The rise of Shanxi merchants : empire, institutions, and social change in Qing China, 1688-1850
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation traces the rise of Shanxi merchants during the Qing era (1644- 1911). During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, merchants from Shanxi Province in north China formed an unprecedented, expansive business network that not only controlled long-distance trade between China proper, Mongolia, and Russia, but also created an empire-wide banking system in China for the first time. Given these accomplishments, Shanxi merchants have become synonymous with traditional Chinese entrepreneurship. My research considers how Shanxi merchants rose to prominence and why they became so successful. I argue that the history of Shanxi merchants has to be understood in the context of the political economy of the Qing imperial project. During the first half of the eighteenth century, thanks to its rapid expansion, the Manchu empire engulfed the Mongolian steppe and Xinjiang, which resulted in the opening of the nomadic market for Chinese traders for the first time in history. The activities of Shanxi merchants helped to integrate these frontier regions with China proper. These merchants developed a series of institutions based on the time-honored local traditions of north China, which were then adapted to suit the socio-economic conditions on the frontier. These institutional innovations included the creation of new forms of native-place organizations, trade guilds, new firm structures, and new banking systems. Shanxi merchants' institutional innovations had profound impacts on late imperial Chinese society. On the one hand, these new institutions on the frontier pioneered a series of changes in China proper during the nineteenth century. On the other hand, Shanxi merchants used these institutions to create a new social order with mercantile power at its helm, which was radically different from the orthodox Confucian order backed by imperial ideology. For this reason, I argue that understanding Shanxi merchants' history also challenges dominant perceptions of the spatial economy of the Qing Empire. As this study reveals, the remote and landlocked northern frontier of the empire was not a backwater but a center of economic dynamism, a source of enormous wealth, and an incubator of new institutions, organizations, and values. Drawing insights from the "New Qing History" scholarship and institutional economics, this dissertation builds on a wide range of primary sources, including Chinese-language archival materials from both Inner Mongolia and the Mongolian People's Republic, local business documents made available to me by private collectors in Shanxi, stele inscriptions collected by Japanese investigators during the first half of the twentieth century, as well as gazetteers, genealogies, and oral history interview records from Shanxi and Inner Mongolia.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2017 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Qiao, Zhijian |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of History. |
| Primary advisor | Sommer, Matthew Harvey, 1961- |
| Thesis advisor | Sommer, Matthew Harvey, 1961- |
| Thesis advisor | Greif, Avner, 1955- |
| Thesis advisor | Lewis, Mark |
| Thesis advisor | Wigen, Kären, 1958- |
| Advisor | Greif, Avner, 1955- |
| Advisor | Lewis, Mark |
| Advisor | Wigen, Kären, 1958- |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Zhijian Qiao. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of History. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2017. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2017 by Zhijian Qiao
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