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Brokers as Entrepreneurs in Presocialist China

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Susan Mann
Susan Mann
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Cruz
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Extract

Brokers or middlemen have been called a key element in preindustrial economic development, facilitating the exchange of goods within the domestic economy and opening rural production systems to foreign markets. Though Chinese society historically boasted a vigorous brokerage system, many studies of Chinese brokers have viewed them as obstacles to the development of entrepreneurship and capitalist transformation. China's brokers were limited, it is argued, by larger structural constraints—the bonds of custom and community, a preindustrial mode of production, a particular form of state organization and ideology—that inhibited entrepreneurial activities. This view is best reflected in the writings of Marxist historians who claim that brokers in China's presocialist society were an integral part of a feudal system in which landlords and the state dominated the peasant/worker economy, preventing the flowering of the “capitalist sprouts” shooting forth from China's towns and villages.

Type
Culture, Technology, and Power
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 26 , Issue 4 , October 1984 , pp. 614 - 636
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1984

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