The contrast, then, of the success of this group of merchants with a political dynasty in decline and with many educated men feeling that their learning and values were threatened by the ascendance of these merchants and a great number of other late Ming changes provides a suitable beginning to a book concerned in part with the trouble Huizhou merchants had in gaining public, official, and social recognition of their changed place in the Chinese economy by the end of the Ming.

Chapter 6 provides three case studies of how Huizhou merchant organizations used their lineage and commercial resources to explain how Huizhou merchant lineages might succeed and fall in the world of Ming business. It explores the development of different types and sizes of commercial organization in response to the organizational needs and business opportunities these “house firms,” while also examining the impact of kinship organizations and relationships on their operation as “house firms.” With a greater emphasis on lineage branches and even segments rather than just lineages per se, it shows how a small lineage could launch itself successfully into the commercial world with the aid of kinship organizations larger than the simple nuclear household. Descent-line ties mattered greatly but manipulation of these ties for commercial goals was not at all unusual, even leading to attempts to create extensive non-lineage alliances with purported kinsmen bearing just same surname and fictive descent lies.

The Introduction sets the broader socioeconomic and political setting for this volume’s analysis of the rise of the Huizhou merchants as a powerful economic force outside Huizhou during the second half of the Ming. It underlines the widespread sense of social disorder in villages and towns and political confusion at the court and in the provinces at a time also of increased tension along China’s borders.

Chapter 3 will examine Huizhou merchants’ efforts to penetrate major market sites in the Yangzi Valley and along the Grand Canal. It will introduce the problems they encountered, such as brigandry when traveling and local protectionism when marketing, and then consider various merchant countermeasures. Ranging from secret security arrangements and bribery to new financial instruments and hired protection or clientage, these merchant responses appear not to have involved any serious effort to forge public or political institutions that would protect merchant interests. Quite likely, the diversity of Huizhou merchant interests obstructed any collective effort leading to one policy or solution. While its shippers may have desired government protection, Huizhou pawnbrokers strove to thwart all government intrusion (the first tax specifically on pawnbrokering dates from 1623). As their credit operations became increasingly enmeshed in commercial deals, pawnbrokers’ profits and secrecy aroused greater criticism, as did the activities of Huizhou merchants in general in the later half of the Ming.

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.

Since the profits from pawnbrokers’ loans fell into relatively few hands, many Huizhou merchants came to rely on commercial partnerships, the formal and informal, to expand their pool of investment capital and the operation of their businesses. Chapter 5 investigates in detail the development of three distinct varieties of these partnerships for both Ming and Qing merchants in general and for Huizhou merchants in particular. Attention is paid to the distinctive principles of each of these types of commercial partnership, which seem to have grown out of specific regional conditions in China and the commercial needs of its itinerant merchants both before and during the Ming. In addition, this chapter explains the Huizhou merchants’ solutions to such common problems of business governance as bankruptcy and a merchant’s access to his committed investments during the contracted period of investment