AAS-in-Asia, Seoul

Legal Customs & Business Practices in Asian Port Cities - Hong Kong, Canton, Shanghai (from the late 19th to early 20th century)

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel Proposal Application

Abstract

Over the last two hundred years, empires and diasporas functioned as powerful machine of globalisation, generating traffic in goods, peoples and ideas. This panel focuses on one of its important consequences in Asia – the exchange of legal and business ideas in the global cities of Canton, Hong Kong and Shanghai. Under colonial influence, these port cites were multi-cultural melting pots where itinerary traders congregated to do business. They became an expanding space of encounters between different peoples, goods, business practices, and legal customs. SHIROYAMA examines the real estate transactions records in the Shanghai and explores the institutional settings for real estate ownership and transactions among foreigners & Chinese in the city. MOTONO examines the records of the British court in Shanghai & reveals how British and Chinese legal specialists established the bankruptcy procedure for Chinese firms in liquidation. CHUNG examines the Sassoon & Kadoorie Archives & reveals how the itinerary Jewish traders made use of the British corporate laws (joint-stock company) to accumulate their wealth in the banking & real estate sectors in HK & Shanghai. TAM & NG examine shipping and custom laws of the Pearl River Delta & employ the GIS techniques to evaluate the shifting patterns of transportation networks in the region. The studies on port cities challenges the land-based, state-centered paradigms that had dominated scholarly thinking. By focusing on trade networks and nodal maritime centres of power (rather than on state structures), these studies reveal the openness of the region to cultural and material exchanges with distant lands.

Area of Study

• Interarea-Border Crossing-Diaspora

Session Organizer

• Po Yin - CHUNG, Hong Kong Baptist University

Chair

• Wingho Wong, Hong Kong University of Science & Technology

Individual Presentations

• Investing in Port City - Real Estate Transactions in Shanghai International Settlement in the mid19th to the early 20th Century - Tomoko Shiroyama, University of Tokyo

• Going Bankrupt in Port City - In search of "Bankruptcy Procedure Rule" for Chinese Partnership firms in Shanghai, 1919-1927 - Eiichi Motono, Waseda University

• Port Cities and Trading Diaspora -The Sassoon and Kadoorie Family Enterprise in Hong Kong and Shanghai, 1860-1950 - Po Yin - CHUNG, Hong Kong Baptist University

• Port City & Business Logistics - A Historical Review on the shifting patterns of transportation networks of the Pearl River Delta during the early 20th Century - Ka-chai Tam, Hong Kong Baptist University; K.Y. Adolf Ng, University of Manitoba

Discussant

• Shuk-wah Poon, Lingnan University