Honorable Merchants

In light of East Asia's current economic success, it has become increasingly clear that Confucian social thought, long assumed in Western scholarship to be a major stumbling block to economic development, can, under the proper circumstances, have exactly the opposite effect. Lufrano's study is the most sustained and sophisticated of recent reevaluations of Confucianism's role in the rapid commercial development in the late Ming to mid-Qing period. It will be of great interest and value to scholars in the growing field of Chinese business history and should be welcomed by those interested in the Confucian roots of Pacific Rim business practice.

This volume explores the concept of the honest merchant, taking a broad perspective and covering a wide range of aspects. It looks at the different types of “honest merchant” conceptions originating from different cultures and literary traditions. The book covers Japanese, Islamic, Scandinavian, Russian, German, Spanish, as well as other aspects, and studies different disciplinary backgrounds of the honest merchant, such as philosophical, economic, neuroethical, sociological and literary ones. The concept of the honest merchant has a long tradition in business ethics. In the Hanseatic League and in medieval Italy, the ideal of the honest businessman was taught since the late Middle Ages. It originated during a time when travelling merchants were often regarded with a sceptical eye. The honest merchants of their time however held clear principles in their business and took responsibility for their community. In later times, the religious notions of the concept lost their pivotal place to reason and morality. This book goes beyond the tradition of discussing business ethics in association with concepts from the Hanseatic League and medieval Italy, and puts the central concept of business ethics in a much greater perspective.

This volume explores the concept of the honest merchant, taking a broad perspective and covering a wide range of aspects. It looks at the different types of "honest merchant" conceptions originating from different cultures and literary traditions. The book covers Japanese, Islamic, Scandinavian, Russian, German, Spanish, as well as other aspects, and studies different disciplinary backgrounds of the honest merchant, such as philosophical, economic, neuroethical, sociological and literary ones. The concept of the honest merchant has a long tradition in business ethics. In the Hanseatic League and in medieval Italy, the ideal of the honest businessman was taught since the late Middle Ages. It originated during a time when travelling merchants were often regarded with a sceptical eye. The honest merchants of their time however held clear principles in their business and took responsibility for their community. In later times, the religious notions of the concept lost their pivotal place to reason and morality. This book goes beyond the tradition of discussing business ethics in association with concepts from the Hanseatic League and medieval Italy, and puts the central concept of business ethics in a much greater perspective.

From the thirteenth century onward, Italian merchants were ubiquitous in the economic activities of the Iberian Peninsula, largely underwriting the success of Iberian expansion and imperial ambitions. They took part in the incursions into North Africa and contributed to the conquest of the Canary Islands and the Caribbean. Italian merchants also became enmeshed in the administration of empire, serving as aldermen and notaries in the Spanish bureaucracy, which necessitated proving their nobility (hidalgu a) and purity of blood (limpieza de sangre). They participated in civic and religious processions, joined and established confraternities, supported and requested burial in local religious institutions through generous bequests. All of this contributed to their integration into Iberian communities while reinforcing Genoese identity. Historians, sociologists, and anthropologists have studied the hybrid identities of foreign merchants for decades. Much of this scholarship has demonstrated Genoese ability to integrate into their host communities but has described this as a process of assimilation that displaced Genoese identity. The cases in this dissertation contribute nuance to these long-standing debates about hybridity and the extension of multiple identities and communal membership across time and space. Looking outward from the Iberian Peninsula, these cases played out across larger Mediterranean and Atlantic contexts, since these merchants were extensively involved in the processes of medieval and early modern European expansions, from North Africa to the Canary Islands, the Caribbean, Mexico, and beyond. Notarial and inquisition records, petitions for nobility (hidalgu a) and purity of blood (limpieza de sangre), literary narratives, polemical treatises, and funerary monuments demonstrate how Genoese merchant families integrated themselves into Iberian communities while maintaining their foreign connections. Examining both merchants residing in Seville and their relatives across the Atlantic, this dissertation shows how they capitalized on an approach that mobilized their diasporic identity and ties to carve a space within Iberian society. This is what I call ambiguous integration. Their approach to integration had many parallels in the culture of the Mediterranean and Atlantic, but over time it became increasingly difficult to mobilize as a sixteenth-century anti-foreigner discourse associated these merchants with greed, deception, and an effeminacy not unrelated to their identification as "white moors" (moros blancos). As a result, many families dissimulated and even renounced this foreign identity and ties from the end of the sixteenth century forward.

What impact did the cultural origins and religious backgrounds of the merchants in the early modern period have on their business activities? How did these people manage to integrate themselves into the foreign societies within which they lived and worked? In this book Jorun Poettering examines the circumstances of the merchants who traded between Hamburg and Portugal in the seventeenth century. Her study offers new insights into the history of migration and intercultural encounter as world became more interconnected.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Winner of the 2022 Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences Merchants of Virtue explores the question of what it meant to be Hindu in precolonial South Asia. Divya Cherian presents a fine-grained study of everyday life and local politics in the kingdom of Marwar in eighteenth-century western India to uncover how merchants enforced their caste ideals of vegetarianism and bodily austerity as universal markers of Hindu identity. Using legal strategies and alliances with elites, these merchants successfully remade the category of “Hindu,” setting it in contrast to “Untouchable” in a process that reconfigured Hinduism in caste terms. In a history pertinent to understanding India today, Cherian establishes the centrality of caste to the early-modern Hindu self and to its imagination of inadmissible others.

This book explores the vital role of merchants within early modern China. Unlike European merchants, their Sino-colleagues have long been regarded as certain social pariahs after pre-Qin period, despite the fortune they made. The key mission of this monograph is to investigate whether the standing of merchants in the Ming Empire has been improved compared with their predecessors. Generally, their status is reflected in state-merchant relationship and their role in the market, which can be found in miscellaneous economic activities such as market monopoly, commercial taxation, international trade, and consumption. This book aims to be of relevance to students and researchers interested in early modern history, eastern commerce, Ming merchants, and contemporary global affairs.