Review by Choice Review
The remote southwestern periphery of Sichuan province in the late 19th and early 20th centuries would hardly seem a prime location for long-term, highly sophisticated organizational and technical innovations in a premodern Asian economy. Zelin's outstanding study stunningly demonstrates the opposite, thereby challenging conventional wisdom respecting the comparative historical development of Chinese business firms, the financial systems supporting them, and the role of both law and politics in China's early modern economic system. The entrepreneurs, workforce, and imposing array of wells, furnaces, and bamboo pipes involved in extractive brine salt production in the urban area of Zigong constituted China's largest indigenous industrial center in the early 1900s. Zelin (Columbia Univ.) richly details merchants' use of lineage estates, contracts, and financial-industrial networks to mobilize capital, form integrated business organizations, capture markets, and develop new technologies. If Zigong's rise owed much to local initiatives, its decline by the late 1930s owed even more to protracted political instability and the weakness of supportive political and infrastructural institutions. A model of analytical clarity and exacting scholarship, this book will become essential reading for Sinologists, but also for anyone concerned with global economic and business history over the last two centuries. Summing Up: Essential. Academic (upper-division undergraduate and up), research, and professional library collections. R. P. Gardella United States Merchant Marine Academy
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
