Commerce And Culture

"Sibao today is a cluster of impoverished villages in the mountains of western Fujian. Yet from the late seventeenth through the early twentieth century, it was home to a flourishing publishing industry. Through itinerant booksellers and branch bookshops managed by Sibao natives, this industry supplied much of south China with cheap educational texts, household guides, medical handbooks, and fortune-telling manuals.It is precisely the ordinariness of Sibao imprints that make them valuable for the study of commercial publishing, the text-production process, and the geographical and social expansion of book culture in Chinese society. In a study with important implications for cultural and economic history, Cynthia Brokaw describes rural, lower-level publishing and bookselling operations at the end of the imperial period. Commerce in Culture traces how the poverty and isolation of Sibao necessitated a bare-bones approach to publishing and bookselling and how the Hakka identity of the Sibao publishers shaped the configuration of their distribution networks and even the nature of their publications.Sibao’s industry reveals two major trends in print culture: the geographical extension of commercial woodblock publishing to hinterlands previously untouched by commercial book culture and the related social penetration of texts to lower-status levels of the population."

Art and business are often described as worlds apart, even diametric opposites. And yet, these realms are close cousins in creative industries where firms bring cultural goods to market, attaching price tags to music, paintings, theater, literature, film, and fashion. Building on theories of value construction and cultural production, Culture and Commerce details the processes by which artistic worth is decoded, translated, and converted to economic value. Mukti Khaire introduces readers to three industry players: creators, producers (who bring to market and distribute cultural goods), and intermediaries (who critique and rave about them). Case studies of firms from Chanel and Penguin to tastemakers like the Pritzker Prize and The Sundance Institute illuminate how these professionals construct a vital value chain. Highlighting the role of "pioneer entrepreneurs"—who carve out space for radical, new product categories—Khaire illustrates how creative professionals influence our sense of value, shifting consumer behavior and our culture in deep, surprising ways.

This volume presents a collection of interrelated essays by international scholars working on the relationship between commerce and culture from c. 1750 to the early-twentieth century. Considerable attention has recently been focused on the importance of social networks and business culture in reducing transaction costs, both in the pre-industrial period and during the nineteenth century, and these essays underline the centrality of this across a broad international setting. As such the volume provides an important addition to the available literature in this field and will attract a wide readership amongst business, cultural, maritime, economic, social and urban historians, as well as historical anthropologists, sociologists and other social scientists whose research embraces a longer-term perspective.

While historians have explored the impact on workers of changes in American business, the broader impact on other cultural forms, and vice versa, has not been widely studied. This anthology contributes to the debate at the intersection of business history and the study of cultural forms, ranging from material to visual culture to literature.

There is substantial interest in research in developing countries, especially in the use, implementation and development of information technology and systems. Many researchers have been moving toward an understanding of indigenous social and cultural structures and how they influence the use and development of information systems. E-Commerce and Cultural Values addresses these issues and brings together scholars to share their expertise on different aspects of the social side of e-Commerce and information systems and how they impact the cultural values of a society.

Commerce in Culture is an innovative study of how states have responded to the globalization of the film sector. Concerned with more than film content or substance, the book exposes the ongoing political and economic struggles that shape cultural production and trade in the world. The historical focus is on Hollywood's engagement with rivals and partners in two leading developing countries, Egypt and Mexico, beginning with the birth of their national film industries in the late 1920s. State and market institutions evolved differently in each context, acting like national prisms to mediate international competition and produce distinctive results. As filmmaking has become a dynamic focal point in the new economy, Commerce in Culture reveals a vital but neglected part of the global terrain.

A look at the cultural, or intercultural, exchange that took place in the Silk Roads and the role this has played in the shaping of cultures and civilizations.

The Ming dynasty was the last great Chinese dynasty before the Manchu conquest in 1644. During that time, China, not Europe, was the center of the world: the European voyages of exploration were searching not just for new lands but also for new trade routes to the Far East. In this book, Timothy Brook eloquently narrates the changing landscape of life over the three centuries of the Ming (1368-1644), when China was transformed from a closely administered agrarian realm into a place of commercial profits and intense competition for status. The Confusions of Pleasure marks a significant departure from the conventional ways in which Chinese history has been written. Rather than recounting the Ming dynasty in a series of political events and philosophical achievements, it narrates this longue durée in terms of the habits and strains of everyday life. Peppered with stories of real people and their negotiations of a rapidly changing world, this book provides a new way of seeing the Ming dynasty that not only contributes to the scholarly understanding of the period but also provides an entertaining and accessible introduction to Chinese history for anyone.