International Trade: Merchants’ Predicament and Opportunities

Abstract

In fifteenth to seventeenth-century China, the maritime merchants formed more formal organization, either a military-commercial group, which suppressed their competitors and scattered merchants, or trading diaspora that settled in Southeast Asia, where the Chinese merchants enjoyed a relatively higher status. Moreover, the Chinese merchants established mutually beneficial relationships (although fragile) with local governments, while the central government, most of the time, spared no effort to stop merchants from trading overseas. Nevertheless, the economic thoughts regarding foreign trade and merchants’ role in it became more positive and had more supporters among scholars. Even though their main purpose was still to increase state revenues or improve people's welfare, these thoughts and the active role of merchants in reality did reinforce each other, enabling the Ming merchants to more or less show their strength and importance in the foreign trade.