Borderlands Business: Merchant Firms and Modernity in Southwest China, 1800–1920

Nineteenth-century southwesterners experienced such rending changes that some Yunnanese developed new institutions to adapt. The cause of change was commercialization, which brought both opportunity and danger. To seize the opportunities, Yunnanese formed shareholding trading firms with "imported" Chinese management techniques. It became common in some towns to invest in or work for business firms, where acquaintances and kin were reconfigured as partners and employees. As certain towns enjoyed commercial prosperity, some believed that mobility and consumption were a threat, and it was at this time that Yunnanese merchants turned to the new discourses and institutions of filiality and lineage to cope with these crises of modernity.