| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Lynda S. Bell. One Industry, Two Chinas: Silk Filatures and Peasant-Family Production in Wuxi County, 1865–1937. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1999. Pp. xvi, 290. $49.50.

Lynda S. Bell's monograph breaks new ground on a key industry in modern Chinese economic history in a number of important ways. It focuses on Wuxi, a leading silk-producing region not emphasized in earlier research on the silk industry. With access to a 1929 rural survey of the Wuxi silk industry undertaken by the Social Science Research Institute (SSRI) of the Academia Sinica, Bell is able to conduct microeconomic analysis, seldom possible with available data for modern China. Bell also addresses various substantive issues beyond the question of China's underdevelopment. 1

Bell's central premise is that "elites built on an evolving cultural repertoire in the local setting in Wuxi, enabling them to actively, and successfully, promote modern development" (p. 6). Rather than challenging the state by claiming autonomy or creating a new public sphere of bourgeois action (as William Rowe and others have argued), elites collaborated with the government to gain legitimacy and favorable state policies. Combining time-tested techniques (such as elite intermarriage, networking, and merchant guilds) with knowledge of new commercial and production methods acquired in Shanghai and abroad, Wuxi merchants and industrialists succeeded in establishing a thriving silk industry that joined modern factory production of raw silk with peasant-family production that supplied the raw materials. . . .

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