ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the reader to the book’s thesis, theory, and broader implication. By demonstrating the expansionist role played by Shanxi piaohao in transforming China’s market, trade, finance, and families during the nineteenth century, the book seeks to understand piaohao on their own terms, most notably as products of China’s hinterland capitalism. In a striking departure for a work of economic history, the book also focuses on noncapitalist histories of piaohao’s merchant families, which are not purely rational economic beings as social science and economics scholarship often assume. Challenging narratives of Chinese financial institutions in late imperial China that often fall prey into a Eurocentric binary of the East as noncapitalist and the West as capitalist, the book’s broader implication lies in its effort to transcend the existing binary oppositions—coast versus hinterland, state versus market, and institutions versus families—in understanding China’s transition from an agrarian empire to a modern nation-state in the age of Western imperialism. The chapter’s first section contextualizes merchant- and financial-capitalism in Shanxi Province against the backdrop of ever-changing domestic and global dynamics from the fifteenth to the early twentieth century. The second section elaborates the book’s analytical frameworks, consisting of Chinese hinterland capitalism as both a local and universal history of the global capital, an anti-binary tripartite analysis of the political economy of piaohao’s interaction with the Qing state, and lifeworlds and futures of piaohao as families evolving from but constantly interrupting the singular capitalist future of piaohao as impersonal institutions. The chapter concludes with a storyline of the book and a chapter outline.
