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Source publication
This book is the first Western monograph on Shanxi piaohao – private financiers from the Chinese hinterland – in the economic and business history of late imperial China, forming the original theory of Chinese hinterland capitalism.
Deepening the existing understanding of capitalist dynamics at work in the families and financial institutions of la...
Citations
China's cattle trade before 1949 is effectively invisible to historians. With no geographic center, few dominant firms, and little government oversight, cattle trade left behind no clear archive of sources, leaving scholars to the mercy of conjecture and episodic evidence. Combining insights from business and social history, we focused our attention on trade intermediation as the key to understanding the operations of a diffuse trade system. In the absence of a top–down archive, we composited hundreds of local sources on intermediation in cattle trade and remotely interviewed 80 former brokers. These sources revealed large numbers of individuated trade routes, which we break into three types: persistent supply, specialized demand, and resource circulation. Each type of trade called for distinct forms of intermediation with relatively little overlap between specialized networks. This recreation of China's cattle trade reveals a sophisticated market for animal labor that calls into question the direct causal link between imperialist resource extraction and rural immiseration, and suggests the utility of applying tools and perspectives of social history to other sorts of decentered commercial systems.
Objective/Context: The purpose of this article is first to contextualize the concept of the "Global South." Then, we offer an overview of classical and new historiographies of capitalism(s) of the "Global South." We focus on works that examine the period between roughly the 10th and 19th centuries, and further explain how we understand and periodize capitalism. Lastly, we introduce the contributions to this special issue. Methodology: This review is based on a holistic and non-Eurocentric Marxian approach, emphasizing the importance of both internal and external factors, global entanglements and uneven development when studying regional dynamics. We also underline the relevance of both connections and comparisons in understanding and analyzing the genesis and rise of global capitalism(s). In other words, we highlight mul-tifaceted forces at work that may be conceived of in terms of a global dialectical conjuncture. Originality: This is one of the few existing articles that pulls together and briefly outlines the different existing trends in writing the histories of capitalism(s) in the "Global South" before the advent of the 20th century. We discuss developments in China, India, the "Islamicate" world, Latin America, the relationship between modern plantation slavery and capitalism as well the "Great Divergence" debate. In doing so, we identify a "global turn" in recent historiographies of capitalism(s). Conclusions: We suggest that the prevalent binary narratives-either embracing or rejecting the (pre-)capitalist nature of societies, commercial practices and production sites in the "Global South"-do not do justice to the complexity of historical dynamics. Furthermore, many studies lack nuances and do not adequately consider multilinear processes, entanglements between the local and global and shifting multipolar centers of development. More often than not, academics also neglect spatio-temporal specificities, transitional periods between-or the hybrid coexistence of-different modes of production, that is, developments which should neither be reduced to predominantly capitalist nor pre-capitalist relations, processes and structures. We also argue that a return to the concept of totality helps to transcend the oversimplified assumptions and analyses of dominant historical accounts.
Provincializing Empire explores the global history of Japanese expansion through a regional lens. It rethinks the nation-centered geography and chronology of empire by uncovering the pivotal role of expeditionary merchants from Ōmi (present-day Shiga Prefecture) and their modern successors. Tracing their lives from the early modern era, and writing them into the global histories of empire, diaspora, and capitalism, Jun Uchida offers an innovative analysis of expansion through a story previously untold: how the nation’s provincials built on their traditions to create a transpacific diaspora that stretched from Seoul to Vancouver, while helping shape the modern world of transoceanic exchange.
