SOAS, University of London (The School of Oriental and African Studies)

Commercial Capitalism and the Ancestral Hall in Late Imperial China

Abstract

This lecture will discuss how ancestral halls functioned as credit associations and proto-banks and thereby consolidated lineage power over rival rural institutions from the sixteenth century onward.

Speaker Biography

Joseph McDermott has taught Chinese history in the US, Japan, and the UK for the last thirty years. His writings on pre-modern China have ranged from economic history (for the forthcoming volume of the Cambridge History of the Song, Part II) and book history (A Social History of the Chinese Book) to ritual (State and Court Ritual in China) and art history (among other essays, on the use of lenses for painting and crafts in late imperial times). His most recent study is The Makings of Capitalism in Rural China, a book-length study of the famous Huizhou Merchants successful throughout central and south China from 1500 to 1800.