Encountering Chinese Networks: Western, Japanese, and Chinese Corporations in China, 1880–1937. By Sherman Cochran. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Pp. xii, 257. $40.00

Patterns of commercial development have varied widely across the world. At one end of the spectrum is the experience of premodern Europe, where commercial centers grew up in cities that were independent of the surrounding feudal political system. Over the centuries these commercial centers developed their own laws and other institutions that laid the foundation for the capitalist economic system based on the rule of law that exists today. In regions such as Southeast Asia and East Africa, by contrast, commerce was mostly a foreign import with citizens of the colonial power running the larger commercial enterprises and immigrants from China or South Asia owning and staffing the rest of the system. China fit neither of these patterns: over the centuries it developed a commercial system that was entirely Chinese, but was based on networks of traders who set many of their own rules and yet were in no sense independent of the governing bureaucracy whose power ultimately rested with the emperor. This system led to a level of commercial development that was marveled at by European visitors into the eighteenth century.