Yulian Wu. Luxurious Networks

Huizhou merchants, comprising one of the most prosperous merchant groups in premodern China, were known for their intimate connections with officialdom and their characteristically Confucian-infused business ethics and activities. In Luxurious Networks: Salt Merchants, Status, and Statecraft in Eighteenth-Century China, Yulian Wu revisits these familiar topics, but through an innovative and interdisciplinary approach, from the vantage point of the dynamic interactions between material objects and salt merchants, who amassed great fortunes in urban centers such as Yangzhou and Hangzhou under the state’s salt-monopoly system. These merchants generally left very few written accounts, but they “expressed themselves by doing things” (7). The author, therefore, makes meticulous use of material objects, often luxurious ones, with which the salt merchants interacted. By weaving together insights from material studies, art history, and book history, and sources ranging from court and private documents to the author’s own extensive field work, the book lucidly reconstructs the social world of the merchants during the eighteenth century to reveal the role luxury items played in constructing merchant identity and in strengthening merchant social networks.

Aesthetics · Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · China · Economic history · Economics · Economy · History of China · Identity (music) · Market economy · Monopoly · State (computer science) · Weaving · Chinese history and philosophy · Engineering · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies