7 - Conclusion

Summary

As the Conclusion of this volume, Chapter 7 returns to seventeenth-century Huizhou and discusses its political and economic traumas during decades of dynastic transition and economic chaos. It reveals how Huizhou’s merchant lineages and their house firms suffered severe mid-century challenges from persistent disorder and recession but recovered enough to retain dominance over other “village quartet” institutions like village worship associations and Buddhist establishments. The strongest and most persistent resistance to their power came from popular cults, which in their many guises survived harsh attacks from orthodox Confucian scholars and thus remained the lineage’s strongest type of rival in Huizhou until the Communist era. Like most of the other chapters in this volume, this chapter provides strong evidence that Huizhou merchants’ commercial and financial operations can be fruitfully studied from within an analytical framework of family and state institutions. In fact, research on late imperial China’s financial and commercial institutions can best proceed if we discard artificially sharp distinctions, such as public and private, state and society, and even state and family, and instead research the actual dynamics of these institutions controlled by lineages and merchants intent on pursuing profit and power in villages and markets.