ABSTRACT
Hong Kong was a small city-state whose economy was traditionally reliant on tertiary trades, such as shipping and financial services. It industrialized in the twentieth century, as did other parts of China, where a large proportion of world production of consumer goods (such as clothing, footwear and electronics) is now located. Although there are parallels between industrialization in Hong Kong and the current process of structural change in contemporary China, these can only be drawn imprecisely because historians have not had the necessary raw materials: written sources documenting Hong Kong’s industrial past. Published time-series data is limited and unreliable, and, as shown here, fails to reveal an important feature of industrialization in Hong Kong: the existence, alongside factories, of numerous small workshops. New macro and survey data derived from archival sources allows a partial and patchy reconstruction of a more realistic (that is, dualistic) industrial landscape. These findings set up a larger project on ‘Industrialization and Institutional Change in Hong Kong’ (funded by the Leverhulme Trust), which sets out to analyse how businesses were affected by, and helped shape, legal and customary frameworks regulating industrial employment, the use of intellectual property rights, and access to overseas markets.
