Guest Lecture
The Making of Merchants – War, Local Government, and Commercial Organization in Chongqing from 1750 to 1950
Wednesday, June 8, 2016 · 12:15 pm ·  Oec 1.162
Prof. Maura Dykstra
Caltech Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences

This lecture explores the formation, development, and expansion of merchant groups in the inland commercial center of Chongqing from the Qianlong period to the end of the Republican era. It demonstrates how Sichuan’s profile as a military base provided an urgent demand and special conditions for commercial organization at the local level. It illustrates how provincial and local institutions created an opportunity for the emergence of merchant groups whose relationship to the state grew both closer and more complicated over time. In conclusion, this paper argues that the wartime mobilization of merchant groups in the 1930s and 1940s was the climax of two centuries of local state-building.

Picture: 渝城图section4, kindly provided by the speaker