Book Review

Asia

The role of merchants in later imperial China has long attracted the attention of historians of China. Previous generations of scholars, writing in the shadow of an Eurocentric historiography, were often prone to view, either explicitly or implicitly, the historical trajectory of the Chinese merchants through the prism of the emergence of the European bourgeoisie, and to ask why the former did not develop along the same path as the latter. More recent scholarship has generally steered away from such overt Eurocentric biases. In this thoroughly researched volume, Man Bun Kwan continues this trend by locating the story of the Tianjin salt merchants of the late Qing within the specific political, economic, social, and cultural context of the city.

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Kwan's survey traverses different spheres of the merchants' activities. In an illuminating chapter entitled "The Household and the Law," Kwan explores, for instance, the ambiguous lines between informal mediation and formal legal proceedings when it came to commercial and property disputes, joining and contributing to the recent outpouring of literature on Qing legal practices. His depiction of the merchants' other spheres of activity, such as their provision of extensive social services and their expanding political role in the waning years of the dynasty, will no doubt remind readers familiar with other late Qing Chinese cities of similar developments elsewhere. Kwan's objective is in part to demonstrate that the dynamics of change in Tianjin were quite distinctive and are not easily reducible to any sweeping theory on the nature of political and social transformation. Even if Kwan at times seems overeager to distinguish Tianjin from, say, Shanghai or Canton, his rich and detailed data make a persuasive case.

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