

Commerce in Culture
The Sibao Book Trade in the Qing and Republican Periods
Harvard University Press books are not shipped directly to India due to regional distribution arrangements. Buy from your local bookstore, Amazon.co.in, or Flipkart.com.
This book is not shipped directly to country due to regional distribution arrangements.
Pre-order for this book isn't available yet on our website.
This book is currently out of stock.
Dropdown items
ISBN 9780674024496
Publication date: 04/30/2007
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.
Praise
-
Cynthia Brokaw took excellent advantage of the opportunities for fieldwork that became possible in the late 1990s, and she shows what an enterprising historian can do in China by talking, listening, looking, and collecting.
Author
- Cynthia J. Brokaw is Chen Family Professor of China Studies and Professor of History at Brown University.
Book Details
- 673 pages
- 6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
- Harvard University Asia Center
Recommendations
-
-
The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought
Wang Hui, Michael Gibbs Hill -
The Global in the Local
Xin Zhang -
Never Turn Back
Julian Gewirtz -
Haunted by Chaos
Sulmaan Wasif Khan