Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Preface
- Introduction
- I FINANCIAL INTERMEDIARIES IN EUROPE
- II FINANCIAL INTERMEDIARIES IN THE AMERICAS
- III OTHER FORMS OF INTERMEDIATION
- 7 Intermediaries in the U.S. Market for Technology, 1870–1920
- 8 Beyond Chinatown: Overseas Chinese Intermediaries on the Multiethnic North-American Pacific Coast in the Age of Financial Capital
- 9 Finance and Capital Accumulation in a Planned Economy: The Agricultural Surplus Hypothesis and Soviet Economic Development, 1928–1939
- 10 Was Adherence to the Gold Standard a “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval” during the Interwar Period?
- Afterword: About Lance Davis
- Index
8 - Beyond Chinatown: Overseas Chinese Intermediaries on the Multiethnic North-American Pacific Coast in the Age of Financial Capital
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Preface
- Introduction
- I FINANCIAL INTERMEDIARIES IN EUROPE
- II FINANCIAL INTERMEDIARIES IN THE AMERICAS
- III OTHER FORMS OF INTERMEDIATION
- 7 Intermediaries in the U.S. Market for Technology, 1870–1920
- 8 Beyond Chinatown: Overseas Chinese Intermediaries on the Multiethnic North-American Pacific Coast in the Age of Financial Capital
- 9 Finance and Capital Accumulation in a Planned Economy: The Agricultural Surplus Hypothesis and Soviet Economic Development, 1928–1939
- 10 Was Adherence to the Gold Standard a “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval” during the Interwar Period?
- Afterword: About Lance Davis
- Index
Summary
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.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Finance, Intermediaries, and Economic Development , pp. 247 - 271Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003