TY - BOOK ID - 77860738 TI - Contract and property in early modern China AU - Zelin, Madeleine AU - Ocko, Jonathan K AU - Gardella, Robert PY - 2004 SN - 9781417519401 0804766940 1417519401 9781417519408 0804746397 9780804746397 9780804766944 PB - Stanford, Calif. Stanford University Press DB - UniCat KW - Contracts KW - Right of property KW - Ownership of property KW - Private ownership of property, Right of KW - Private property, Right of KW - Property, Right of KW - Property rights KW - Right of private ownership of property KW - Right of private property KW - Right to property KW - Civil rights KW - Property KW - Agreements KW - Contract law KW - Contractual limitations KW - Limitations, Contractual KW - Commercial law KW - Legal instruments KW - Obligations (Law) KW - Juristic acts KW - Liberty of contract KW - Third parties (Law) KW - History. KW - Law and legislation KW - S08/0300 KW - S10/0440 KW - History KW - China: Law and legislation--General works and codices: general and before 1949 KW - China: Economics, industry and commerce--Real estate KW - History of Asia KW - anno 1800-1999 KW - anno 1700-1799 KW - China UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:77860738 AB - The role of contract in early modern Chinese economic life, when acknowledged at all, is usually presented as a minor one. This volume demonstrates that contract actually played a critical role in the everyday structure of many kinds of relationships and transactions; contracts are, moreover, of enormous value to present-day scholars as transcriptions of the fine details of day-to-day economic activity. Offering a new perspective on economic and legal institutions, particularly the closely related institutions of contract and property, in Qing and Republican China, the papers in this volume spell out how these institutions worked in specific social contexts. Drawing on recent research in far-flung archives, the contributors take as givens both the embeddedness of contract in Chinese social and economic discourse and its role in the spread of commodification. Two papers deal with broad issues: Zelin's argues for a distinctively Chinese heritage of strong property rights, and Ocko's examines the usefulness of American legal scholarship as a comparative analytic framework. ER -