The Transition Of Hunan's Commercial Practices In The Late Qing Period

This paper want to investigate the transition of commercial practices of Hunan province in the period of late Qing Dynasty on the basis of analyzing "Hunan Commercial Practices Report" and absorbing the available research achievements of the academic circle. After the 1860s, Hunan's commercial practices began the transition from feudalization to modernization. The first chapter will discuss the combination of the commercial culture and folk culture by analyzing the related materials of "Hunan Commercial Practices Report", and explore the evolutionary praocess of Hunan's commercial language and words, the tendency of merchants' superstitious practices' alteration, especially the modernization of the commercial language and words and superstitious practices, and brief the influence of the alteration of the customs on the local commerce.The second chapter will take the "Hunan Commercial Practices Report" as main materials and reveal the develpomental rules and evolutionary features of the commercial codes, management customs, and merchants' mentality by discussing analyzing the decilne of the feudalism guild system's, the old-style commerce tansforming to new-style commerce, the internally-oriented management trsnsiting to externally-oriented management, the ordering and normalization of the commercial behaviors etc. from the perspective of commercial revolution.However, Hunan's commercial practices still preserved many bad customs and entrenched problems, such as the obstinacy of the broker-house, the confusion of measurement system, the lack of normalization of weights and measures. So, it was not strange that Hunan's commercial practices in the late Qing period lingered around the edge of modernization and feudlization.