The Making of a New Rural Order in South China: I. Village, Land, and Lineage in Huizhou, 900-1600.

• Author: Liu, Yonghua
• Position: Book review

The Making of a New Rural Order in South China: /. Village, Land, and Lineage in Huizhou, 9001600. By JOSEPH P. MCDERMOTT. Cambridge: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2013. Pp. xvi + 466. $99.00 (cloth).

Among a handful of regional merchant groups active in late imperial China, the one from Huizhou, a mountainous prefecture in southeastern China, was by far the most successful. "A town could not be called a town without Huizhou merchants," as a popular saying goes. From the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, Huizhou merchants not only dominated the lucrative business of salt distribution, they also managed nation-wide chain pawnshops and were active in the distribution of, among other things, tea and timber. What made Huizhou merchants so successful? Based on decades of reading Huizhou sources, the extremely rich and precious historical records that provide historians "front-row seats 'inside the belly of the whale'" (p. 309), Joseph P. McDermott provides a careful examination of the economic and social history of late imperial Huizhou and gives a stimulating interpretation to the problem in his new book.

Although the problem will be addressed more systematically in the second volume, which is still under preparation, the first volume gives readers an unambiguous answer. The secret of Huizhou merchants' success lies, as the author points out, not in financial or commercial institutions, but in social institutions that facilitated the flow and pooling of capital and "that are not normally linked to economic life in our understanding of Chinese history" (p. 6). Among the institutions, the ancestral hall was by far the most important, because it often served as a credit association that provided loans to people in need. Therefore, the "local roots of the success of the merchant houses of Huizhou lineages" lay in "a previously elite classical institution that, from the mid-Ming, proved remarkably popular and successful when it assumed some of the basic functions we associate with a bank" (p. 432).

A problem of economic history thus becomes one of social history: how "the previously elite classical institution," the lineage, came to dominate Huizhou society. The six chapters of the book take pains to trace the rise of the lineage and especially the difficulties it encountered along its march to domination. More concretely, the book's first three chapters reconstruct the evolution of four types of Huizhou village institutions from the Song to the...