Front cover image for Contract and property in early modern China

Contract and property in early modern China

The role of contract in early modern Chinese economic life, when acknowledged at all, is usually presented as a minor one. This volume demonstrates that contract actually played a critical role in the everyday structure of many kinds of relationships and transactions; contracts are, moreover, of enormous value to present-day scholars as transcriptions of the fine details of day-to-day economic activity. Offering a new perspective on economic and legal institutions, particularly the closely related institutions of contract and property, in Qing and Republican China, the papers in this volume spell out how these institutions worked in specific social contexts. Drawing on recent research in far-flung archives, the contributors take as givens both the embeddedness of contract in Chinese social and economic discourse and its role in the spread of commodification. Two papers deal with broad issues: Zelin's argues for a distinctively Chinese heritage of strong property rights, and Ocko's examines the usefulness of American legal scholarship as a comparative analytic framework
eBook, English, 2004
Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif., 2004
Electronic books
1 online resource (vi, 398 pages)
9781417519408, 9780804766944, 1417519401, 0804766940
55848279
A critique of rights of property in pre-war China / Madeleine Zelin
Writs of passage in late imperial China : the documentation of practical understandings in Minong, Taiwan / Myron L. Cohen
Litigation, legitimacy, and lethal violence : why county courts failed to prevent violent disputes over property in eighteenth-century China / Thomas Buoye
Property, taxes, and state protection of rights / Anne Osborne
The status of contracts in nineteenth-century Chinese courts / Mark Allee
The missing metaphor : applying Western legal scholarship the study of contract and property in early modern China / Jonathan Ocko
Supplemental payment in urban property contracts in mid to late Qing Shanghai / Feng Shaoting
Managing multiple ownership at the Zigong Salt Yard / Madeleine Zelin
Custom, the code, and legal practice : the contracts of Changlu salt merchants in late imperial China / Man Bun Kwan
Companies in debt : financial arrangements in the textile industry in the lower Yangzi Delta, 1895-1937 / Tomoko Shiroyama
Contracting business partnerships in late Qing and Republican China : paradigms and patterns / Robert Gardella
Electronic reproduction, [Place of publication not identified], HathiTrust Digital Library, 2010
English