| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Timothy Brook. The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1998. Pp. xxv, 320. $40.00.

Reading this book brings lots of pleasure, a little confusion, and much gratitude to Timothy Brook for so artfully disguising economic history. Brook himself denies that it is possible as yet to write an economic history of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). He aims, instead, to write a "cultural history of a place that commerce was remaking" (p. xvi). Displaying well his talent for humanizing historical issues, Brook frames this work with the somewhat extreme contention of a late Ming scholar-official, Zhang Tao (fl. 1607), that the Ming dynasty had gone through three "seasons" of life and had entered its fourth, tracing, in Brook's words, an "arc of change from ordered rural self-sufficiency . . . to the decadence of urban-based commerce" (p. xvii). Draconian restrictions on merchants would be necessary, Zhang opined, to stave off death. With Zhang's seasonal history of the Ming as his counterpart in dialogue, Brook has written "from inside the Ming world," hoping to understand how "[c]ommerce (personified in the evil figure of the lord of silver) [became] fingered as the culprit that reduced a once settled China to an anarchic motion where commerce set people traveling, imaginations soaring, and taboos tumbling" (p. 8). . . .

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