Luxurious Networks: Salt Merchants, Status, and Statecraft in Eighteenth-Century China by Yulian Wu (review)

How did objects shape Qing history, and how might studying objects inform the historian's craft? Drawing from art history, history of science, and new materialisms in critical theory, historians are showing how an object's materiality can inflect its production and circulation, how things provoke physical and affective responses in people, and how objects have a resulting power to act as agents in their own right.¹ We must account for the animate and inanimate alike, then, in history, for both people and things are dynamic actors within mutually constituted networks.² Learning to work with both textual and material sources thus pays scholarly dividends; it reveals the tacit limits of conventional, textual archives.

Inspired by this outlook, Luxurious Networks: Salt Merchants, Status, and Statecraft in Eighteenth-Century China uncovers the "hidden history" (p. 3) that luxury objects in particular tell about Huizhou salt merchants in the high Qing period; it is a focused and illuminating analysis of the social roles and connections forged by the men who collected, exchanged, or otherwise interacted with luxury objects. Qing scholars often wrote of merchants as social inferiors, and modern historians have followed suit, imagining merchants to be perpetually engaged in a "status negotiation" with scholarly elites (pp. 3, 12). Luxurious Networks takes the "status negotiation" paradigm to task, showing instead that a study of material things reveals multiple roles that merchants played as they navigated the Qing court, the Jiangnan marketplace, and their home villages in Huizhou.

The book uses a rich array of sources, including palace memorials from the First Historical Archives of China, gazetteers, genealogies, and oral interviews conducted in the salt merchants' home villages. Like studies of ancient history that take inspiration from archaeology, however, Luxurious Networks resists privileging the textual over the material. Merchants, Wu argues, did not express themselves through texts; literati (shi 士) did. Rather, "merchants expressed themselves by doing things" (p. 7). Studying how merchants commissioned and consumed material objects, in turn, offers powerful insights into otherwise obscure subjectivities.³

Because salt was an imperial monopoly, the status of salt merchants was inseparable from the power of the court. Huizhou salt merchants first rose to prominence in the fifteenth century, when the Ming court licensed them to conduct salt trade in exchange for payments of silver.⁴ Later, in 1617, the Ming court institutionalized Huizhou merchants' power through a "hereditary franchise system" (gangfa 綱法), which fixed the number of licensed merchants in a given territory (pp. 32–33). The early Qing court adopted this hereditary franchise system after 1644, and Huizhou merchants maintained control over the empire's most lucrative salt markets: Liangzhe 兩浙 in Zhejiang and Jiangsu as well as Lianghuai 兩淮 in Hubei, Hunan, Henan, Anhui, and Jiangxi. Lianghuai in particular generated up to half of all salt revenue for the empire alone (pp. 33–37). The Huizhou merchants who controlled the Lianghuai trade, centered on Yangzhou, were thus especially important to the Qing court.

To understand salt merchants and their things, then, Wu begins with the relationships Huizhou merchants cultivated with the court. Qing rule, she argues, was like a trellis: "while the Manchu emperors and their officials ostensibly enforced their power through formal bureaucratic institutions, the complicated personal networks—growing like vines inside the system—allowed both the Manchu court and Jiangnan salt merchants to negotiate and pursue their own agendas" (p. 16). Two innovations formed the system's lattice. The first, institutionalized by the Kangxi 康熙 (r. 1661–1722) court, was the use of bondservants and bannermen as salt administrators (yanzheng 鹽政), which empowered the inner court to manage the salt trade (p. 38). The second was the use of salt merchants themselves to oversee production within a three-tier administration of merchant chiefs (dazong 大總 or shouzong 首總), head merchants (zongshang 總商), and small transport chiefs (sanshang 散商) (pp. 16, 48).

Salt merchants were ideal agents of the state: their "wealth, broad social...