The Religious Ethic and Mercantile Spirit in Early Modern China by Ying-shih Yü (review)

Abstract

Ying-shih Yü’s  study of the impact of Chinese religions on the economic behavior of the merchant class during the Ming and Qing dynasties (–), Zhongguo jinshi zongjiao lunli yu shangren jingshen, translated here as The Religious Ethic and Mercantile Spirit in Early Modern China, is an indisputable classic in early modern Chinese history. Although it has exerted tremendous influence since its original release more than three decades ago, the book hitherto has been inaccessible to the English-language reader. This translation thus represents a welcome, albeit belated, effort to introduce this work to the Western scholarly community. The central agenda of Yü’s book is to investigate the relationship between the traditional religious ethic and the indigenously developed commercial activities prior to the importation of modern Western capitalism into China since the late nineteenth century. In the process of addressing the inquiry, Yü tackles head-on two then-dominant theories. The first is Marxist historiography, which insists that capitalism is an essential stage of Chinese historical development and that the underlying economic infrastructure determines political and cultural superstructures, not vice versa. This theory rules out a priori that any cultural factor such as religious teachings could exert any influence over economic development. In contrast to the rigid economic determinist theory of Marxism, Weberian-influenced historians do not assume that the development of Chinese history mirrored the West’s. In addition, they propose a more nuanced interpretation by arguing that the rise of modern capitalism in the West cannot be explained solely by a set of economic factors as Marxist scholars have insisted. Max Weber maintains that cultural factors played an intrinsic role in propelling (or thwarting) such transformation. Given that modern capitalism first developed in the West, Weber insists that indigenous cultural elements in non-Western societies such as early modern China were responsible for the failure to develop a capitalist economy in those societies. As a prominent intellectual historian, Yü unsurprisingly finds the Weberian approach more convincing than the Marxist one. Nevertheless, he disagrees with Weber’s conclusion that traditional Chinese culture was always antithetical to capitalism. Instead, Yü argues that early modern China witnessed the emergence of a new “inter-worldly” religious ethos, which facilitated, rather than undermined, commercial activities. In this regard, this line of intellectual development was akin Reviews 