Irrigation, commercialization, and social change in nineteenth-century inner Mongolia

Abstract

This article examines the rise of an irrigation economy in Hetao along the Yellow River during the nineteenth century, and uses it as a case study to illustrate how the periphery played a major and hitherto overlooked role in the development of the Chinese economy, which confounds the conventional view of a Chinese path of development that replicated smallholder farming. I focus on a group of Han entrepreneurs known as land merchants (dishang) who combined capital and expertise in irrigation development, and introduced a new set of property regime and socio-technical arrangements that fundamentally changed the frontier society. By linking the changes in local society to regional and global processes, this study demonstrates the centrality of the periphery as not only a zone of possibility and experimentation, but more importantly, a contact zone that facilitated China's integration into a new global market system. © 2014 Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis.