A Century of Student Movements in China: The Mountain Movers, 1919–2019 ed. by Xiaobing Li and Qiang Fang (review)

Abstract

transmitting the firm’s assets, skills, and managerial control down to future generations. McDermott’s detailed case studies of each type of house firm yields precious insights into the nature of commercial enterprise virtually unequalled in any study of premodern Chinese business history (apart, I would say, from Madeleine Zelin’s exemplary The Merchants of Zigong). Deeply informative as this study is, McDermott refrains from any comprehensive assessment of the place of the Huizhou merchants in Chinese social and economic history. The book’s conclusion really is more of an epilogue, and dwells mostly on the village institutions that are the subject of volume 1. Ultimately McDermott underscores the limitations of Huizhou merchant enterprise rather than its transformative potential, an economic environment fraught with obstacles, tribulations, and insecurity, a sociopolitical world rife with perfidy and predation. Yet the prodigious wealth of the Huizhou merchants and the social distinction they amassed suggests that the institutional innovations showcased in this book should be judged remarkably successful on their own terms.