Timothy Brook. The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China. Berkeley: University of California, 1998. xxv + 320 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, glossary, and index. $40.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-520-21091-3.

Reviewed for H-Business and EH.Net by Richard Lufrano , College of Staten Island

Timothy Brook's The Confusions of Pleasure began as a chapter for the Cambridge History of China surveying communication and commerce in Ming China (1368-1644). As the author writes, this straight-forward task appears to have expanded to examine the influence of economic change on social and cultural life. Instead of a chapter, the project became an independent book that now serves two related purposes. It provides an eloquently written and comprehensive account of commerce and communication in Ming China especially valuable for scholars working on related questions in other geographical areas. For the specialist, as well as others, the book makes a fundamental contribution by offering a more balanced view of how money and the market economy affected social hierarchy, elite status, and social mobility. Brook is careful to inform the reader at the beginning that he is not writing an economic history of the Ming, something he believes impossible at this stage of research. (The reader will nevertheless find much here that he/she would expect in an economic history.) Instead, he supplies an overview of the development of communications systems and commerce (thereby fulfilling his original assignment for the Cambridge History of China, although the publisher here is different) and its influence over the course of the dynasty. Many previous chapters in the Cambridge volumes emphasized facts and statistics over style; Brook provides the kind of comprehensive coverage that characterizes the Cambridge histories but also brings the period to life by viewing it through the eyes of contemporaries--visiting envoys from Persia, ship-wrecked travelers from Korea, and particularly members of the Chinese elite.

Brook, with the help of a gentry guide, divides the book into four parts--the first century, the middle century, the last century, and the dynasty's fall--while tracing "a coherent arc of change from ordered rural self-sufficiency in the early Ming to the decadence of urban-based commerce in the late" (pp. xvii). The account relies on an abundance of primary sources, the author's previous work, and the prominent work of scholars such as Craig Clunas, Valerie Hansen, Tanaka Masatoshi, Wei Qingyuan and Wu Chengming. The survey however is far from a cut and paste job. Brook, for example, challenges convention by showing that despite the efforts of the founding emperor early Ming China was not the agrarian paradise the emperor sought. State polices themselves, by providing for stability (leading to increased agricultural production) and ignoring commerce in the countryside, actually stimulated and encouraged the growth of commerce. The author periodically throughout the survey indicates areas where the development of commerce in China, so similar in many ways to that of Europe, also differed. His overall position is that European-style capitalism did not develop in China by the end of the Ming and he defines what did develop.

This is not to say that China 'failed' to generate capitalism. Rather, it created something else: an extensive market economy that used state communication networks to open links to local economies, organized rural and urban labor into consecutive production processes in certain regions without disrupting the rural household as the basic unit of production, reorganized patterns of consumption without entirely severing consumption from production, and knit itself slowly but surely to gentry society in ways that would erode the Confucian disdain for commerce and result in a powerful condominium of elite interests in the Qing (p. 201).

On a more micro-level, the survey supplies the nuts and bolts of communication and commerce---state communication networks, modes of transport, merchant routes, mail delivery, markets, monopolies and so on. The only surprise for the non-specialist is the lack of any discussion of banking during the Ming. The specialist will know that significant developments in Chinese banking came during the next dynasty but there should be some indication here that the banking system was relatively undeveloped.

Beyond the survey, Brook shows how these economic, commercial, and structural developments affected the cultural and social world. The accepted belief is that the increasing influence of commerce facilitated social mobility, weakened social ties based on deference and paternalism, blurred distinctions between the elite and others, and challenged gentry efforts to maintain social dominance. Indeed, our gentry guide, Zhang Tao, who lived near the end of the dynasty, lamented commerce's influence and its effect on social hierarchy. Brook, while not necessarily rejecting this understanding, suggests we are only looking at part of the picture; by the end of the dynasty, elite attitudes toward commerce had changed, an accommodation was reached between gentry and merchants, and social hierarchy and elite status after the mid-seventeenth chaos not only survived but was actually reconstructed and strengthened in the new dynasty, the Qing (1644-1912). Rather than reading the history of the Ming in the way Zhang Tao did--as commerce bringing on irreversible decline and dynastic collapse--the author urges us to examine how the burgeoning commercial economy provided material that was then incorporated into a more complex construction of elite status. By telling the stories of two gentry members during the Ming/Qing transition, he also shows that practical skills related to the commercial economy helped individual members of the gentry survive and shore up their own positions and as well as that of the elite itself. There is an implicit contrast here with the Yuan/Ming transition of the fourteenth century when few elite families were able to make the transition.

We already knew that gentry families in the late Ming turned to commercial activities to maintain their economic position. Brook, relying in part on Clunas as well as his own earlier work, shows us the range of more subtle ways gentry families used social capital related to the commercial economy to re-configure elite status and maintain their social position. In so doing he connects the two parts of the book. Commercial networks and printing, for example, made knowledge of varieties of rare plants and vegetables more widely available, and this knowledge was subsequently incorporated into the social capital needed to join the ranks of the elite: "To know which plants to appreciate was not neutral knowledge but part of what someone needed to command in order to share in the cultural world of elite life, where such things mattered. To discriminate between plums as better or worse was also a way of discriminating between social betters and everyone else" (p. 136). In another example, knowledge of commercial networks changed attitudes toward travel, previously thought morally dubious, into another "gentry project of cultural refinement" where a "craving for travel set the gentry traveler apart from the laboring merchant and the common sightseer" (pp. 181,182) In another case, Zhang Tao may have regretted the restless changing of sartorial fashion induced by the market economy but members of the elite used it to maintain social dominance. As soon as the lower orders mastered one style of dress the elite were on to the next.

Thus, at the same time most gentry were bemoaning the effects of the market economy, the bulk of them were eagerly accommodating themselves to the new situation, (hence the confusions of pleasure). This reconfigured elite status was more variegated and elusive than the elite status of the early Ming.

If the market economy provided so many beneficial and pleasurable opportunities, why did the gentry continue to decry it? Brook explains that the mid-Ming gentry in particular used this as a rhetorical strategy to escape from a predicament.

They were [the emperor's] obedient servants whose conduct conformed to Confucian principles. But with reference to the local context, they held no formal franchise. Their social mobility gave them an informal power, but that was hard to justify in terms of Confucian ideals of deference and obligation to the imperial order that the magistrate represented. At the same, the social forces that had propelled them into prominence we re throwing up more competitors from below (p. 140).

The rhetorical strategy was to "bewail the decay of the age and portray themselves as civilization's last great hope"(p. 140). These laments also signaled "a desire to identify and control anxieties a rising from a social nexus in which they have the most to gain, if perhaps potentially the most to lose" (p. 151).

Timothy Brook's argument about changing elite status is convincing and provides us with a more fine-tuned picture of late imperial culture and society. The establishment benefited from the market economy in complex ways; social capital and practical skills derived from the market economy allowed for greater continuity during the Ming/Qing transition than during the Yuan/Ming transition and helped reconstruct elite status and strengthen social hierarchy and the position of individual elite families. The author reinforces our long-held view of the great continuity between the Ming and Qing dynasties.

The older view of the influence of the market economy however must not be forgotten. Despite the greater complexity and elusiveness of elite status during the Qing, people below the elite still used wealth to struggle mightily to achieve that status; they did not give up hope of social mobility and tensions did not dissolve. Brook suggests that the gentry became more accepting of commerce from the middle century to the end of the Ming, indeed that the social personality of the gentry had changed. In many respects this acceptance of the realities of the commercial world is true of the Qing as well; even some anti-commerce conservatives accepted the premises of a market economy. Yet we can still hear laments on the ill effects of commerce every bit as severe as Zhang Tao's, especially during times of economic downturn in the mid-seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, and some elite writings still show "anxiety about the moral degeneracy of trade" throughout the dynasty. The causes that created the rhetorical strategy in the Ming after all had not disappeared, despite the gentry/merchant fusion and Gu Yanwu's and Feng Guifen's calls for constitutional changes in the role of the elite in local government.

Furthermore, we can wonder if the reconstruction of elite status continued under the peace and prosperity of the "long" eighteenth century, when commercial practices evolved, new commercial institutions appeared, the population exploded, and respectable careers outside the bureaucracy proliferated. In a related way, we can also ask how representative the two gentry members who managed successfully the Ming/Qing transition were. The author here is suggestive albeit perceptive and persuasive. Will broader studies show that other families survived in the same way? Or were more traditional strategies still central to survival?