Studies of capital have expanded beyond examinations of traditional forms - land, labor, and physical capital – to considerations of human capital, and most recently, social capital. Social capital, which Michael Woolcock recently defined as a broad term encompassing “the information, trust, and norms of reciprocity inhering in one's social networks,” has become an important contemporary measure of the well-being of individual nations. The concept of social capital is an integral aspect of the field of new economic sociology. Its potential to broaden our understanding of the historical interactions between economic and social relations and institutions suggests its relevance also to the field of economic history. Important contributions to the social capital literature, for example, include Naomi Lamoreaux's examination of insider lending in New England banks in the nineteenth century and Avner Greif's studies of reputation and coalitions in medieval trade. Here, I discuss the complex comprador-like role of the overseas Chinese merchant–contractor on the Pacific Coast of North America in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, and I review the business strategies of two Vancouver Chinatown merchant–contractors involved in the (ostensibly) Japanese-owned salt-herring industry in British Columbia. The overseas Chinese are often cited as a prime example of “middleman minorities.” In social capital terms, middlemen minorities are those domestic and immigrant minority groups that when faced with adversities have been able to create and exploit disbursed sets of linkages reaching beyond their own communities to tie into the larger economy.