By the turn of the twentieth century the absence of codified law governing private economic transactions was a key target of foreign and Chinese critiques of the imperial legal system. Expectations ran high that China's first legal transplant, the 1904 Company Law, would lead to unprecedented public investment in large-scale industrial projects. Their disappointment, and the continued dominance of small business in the Chinese marketplace, has been attributed to factors ranging from Chinese cultural aversion to impersonal investment to shortcomings in the law itself. This study shifts our attention to the indigenous practices that company law was meant to supplant, examining the diverse sources of Chinese shareholding practices and the rich menu of options they provided investors. Most importantly, it argues that by the late imperial period shares were well-established as abstract income producing assets that could be bought and sold, creating the possibility of partnership relationships that could be both impersonal and long-lived despite the absence in China of a formal company law. That this tradition did not lead to the emergence of an analogue to the corporation in the West raises new questions about the demand for such entities and the role of transplantation in suppressing indigenous solutions to business problems.

The rapid development of the Chinese economy over the past several decades has stimulated new interest in the institutions, practices, and social formations that supported the development of business in China before the intensification of pressure from Western traders to conform to “modern” practices in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This article aims to provide a foundation for understanding merchant practice as it developed during the important years of market expansion during the last Chinese dynasty and to dispel some of the enduring myths about the Chinese merchant, his relationship to family, community, and the state, and the ideological constraints on his activities. To that end I examine several aspects of late imperial merchant culture, beginning with the everyday practices that allowed business to flourish in the Qing, turning next to the large social formations through which long-distance merchants in particular identified and pursued their interests, and ending with some preliminary thoughts on the impact of the laissez-faire policies of the last dynasty and their implications for post-Imperial China.

This article, based on newly opened archives, explores the rights of tenants in the neighborhood of Chongqing during the late-eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Changes in tenancy arrangements are discussed within the context of Chongqing's role as the main transshipment center for rice and goods from Southwest China to the middle and lower Yangtze. By the 1820s there was a tendency toward the collection of fixed rents in kind. Rent deposits, a major source of liquid capital for landlords, became an almost universal feature of Baxian leases. High deposits encouraged subletting and multiple tenancy, but appear to have provided little security of tenure. The large collection of lawsuits in the Baxian Archives allows an examination of the treatment of tenants in the magistrates' court and of the rights of persons who had disposed of land by means of conditional sale (dianmai).