A Study On The Business Risks Of Ming Dynasty Merchants

In the middle and late Ming Dynasty,along with the rapid development and prosperity of commerce and the expansion of urban residents,in order to meet the spiritual and cultural needs of the people at that time,a large number of note-taking novels featuring the social bottom-level group came into being.As a group among them,merchants are also the most concentrated and portrayed by the Ming Dynasty novels.The Ming Dynasty essay records a large number of content related to merchants,such as marriage,family,consumption,and business activities of businessmen.This article focuses on the contents of the Ming Dynasty notebook novels concerning merchants and takes a perspective from the perspective of economic history to discuss and study the business risks of merchants.This article mainly has three parts.The first part mainly describes the composition of the merchants of the Ming Dynasty and their different modes of operation.The scale of merchant groups in the Ming Dynasty gradually expanded,including three major groups that inherited the ancestral heritage,abandoned Confucianism,small craftsmen,and urban residents.According to the differences in capital,concept,and business content among businessmen,the selected business methods are also different,and different business methods are invariably subject to the impact of business risks.The second part analyzes the business risks of the Ming Dynasty merchants from the note novels.The risks encountered by businessmen in Ming Dynasty in business activities are mainly constituted by external risks and internal risks.External risks consist of five aspects: natural risk,crush risk,road risk,market risk,and vicious competition risk.Internal risks include cooperative risk and capital risk.These risks directly or indirectly affect business activities,and at the same time Reflected some problems in the Ming society.Through the classification and classification of thebusiness risks of the business people in the note novels,it helps to have an intuitive and comprehensive understanding of the business risks of Ming Dynasty businessmen.The last part is to explore the measures taken by Ming Dynasty businessmen to deal with risks.Businessmen are aware of the existence of risks and the losses they bring in their business activities and have adopted a series of measures to deal with them.These measures are: risk aversion,risk dispersion and risk reduction.Risk aversion is a simpler way to deal with risk measures,but it is also a kind of negative behavior.After all,when a businessman completely avoids risks,he also means giving up part of the economic benefits.The decentralized risk has a higher requirement on the capital and business quality of businessmen and does not apply to most of the businessmen.The reduction of risk is a common measure taken by groups of merchants.All in all,these measures have certain limitations,but we can get information about the Ming Dynasty businessmen's management and management activities.