| As agents of social change, merchants and the commercial capital they represented have received mixed reviews. This theoretical ambivalence is reflected in the different positions held by Marx, Weber, Dobb, Sweezy, Wallerstein, and Kindleberger, to name but a few. Recent studies using the profiles of early industrialists in England suggest that the early industrialists were drawn primarily from the ranks of merchants and other members of the middle class. In the case of China, early works used modernization theory to explain the dominance of government-sponsored industries. Recent studies have gone beyond the use of such misplaced polarities and challenged assumptions about the backwardness of the Chinese merchants stemming from Max Weber's influential concept of the unique "Occidental" city.; This dissertation studies Tianjin's commercial capital and its role in the city's development and industrialization. Over the course of four centuries of economic cycles, political upheavals, and trade along the coast, along the Grand Canal, and with the interior, Tianjin gradually developed into the economic center of North China, with the city providing banking, transportation and insurance services for the entire region. Merchants, led by the salt merchants, became the leading citizens of this once humble guard station. Fortified by generations of inter-marriages and bureaucratic service, they set the tone of the city's cultural life, financed their own militia, fire brigades, and numerous local charities. It was, indeed, not a static, irrational, or "backward" society.; Yet despite their wealth, influence, and various household strategies to preserve their social and economic status, only a few merchant princes were able to take advantage of this expanding economy. While the city's commerce gradually expanded to encompass North China, the salt merchants of Tianjin were prevented from expanding because of state policies. The relationship of Tianjin's salt merchants with the state, their complex business organization, household economy, and strategies of social reproduction led them along a path different from English or European mercantile capitalists. Successive economic and political crises in late Imperial China such as the Taiping Rebellion, Boxer Uprising, and the Crash of 1911 also played a part in the downfall of many of these merchants. Single factor explanations of merchant "backwardness", or of the absence of a proper mentality or rationality are thus shown to be unsatisfactory and unconvincing. |
