Luxurious Networks: Salt Merchants, Status, and Statecraft in Eighteenth-Century China by Yulian Wu (review)

Abstract

How did objects shape Qing history, and how might studying objects inform the historian’s craft? Drawing from art history, history of science, and new materialisms in critical theory, historians are showing how an object’s materiality can inflect its production and circulation, how things provoke physical and affective responses in people, and how objects have a resulting power to act as agents in their own right.1 We must account for the animate and inanimate alike, then, in history, for both people and things are dynamic actors within mutually constituted networks.2 Learning to work with both textual and material sources thus pays scholarly dividends; it reveals the tacit limits of conventional, textual archives. Inspired by this outlook, Luxurious Networks: Salt Merchants, Status, and Statecraft in Eighteenth-Century China uncovers the “hidden history” (p. 3) that luxury objects in particular tell about Huizhou salt merchants in the high Qing period; it is a focused and illuminating analysis of the social roles and connections forged by the men who collected, exchanged, or otherwise interacted with luxury objects. Qing scholars often wrote of merchants as social inferiors, and modern his-