Lecture Outline

As part of her current book project, Prof. Köll discusses informal financial institutions, especially pawnshops, as an institutional lens to explore the trajectory of informal finance in China from the 19th century to the present. Although pawnshops in China never transitioned into Western-style banking institutions, they displayed many characteristics of such banks. Offering a comparative perspective, the talk anchors credit access and pawnbroking in the context of Greater China but also addresses differences and similarities with informal financial institutions in East and Southeast Asia as well as Europe and North America.

Biography

Elisabeth Köll pursued her undergraduate education at the University of Bonn in Germany and at Fudan University, Shanghai. She received her Ph.D. in Chinese Business History from Oxford University where she was a Rhodes Scholar. Based on prior teaching experience in the setting of a history department as well as a business school, Elisabeth’s course portfolio includes courses on Chinese business, economic, and social history as well as on doing business in contemporary China.

Trained as a historian of modern China, Köll specializes in the business and socioeconomic history from the mid-19th century to the late 20th century, with a particular focus on the role and transformation of institutions in China’s evolution from empire into a modern nation-state. Her first monograph From Cotton Mill to Business Empire: The Emergence of Regional Enterprises in Modern China (Harvard East Asian monograph series, 2003) analyzes the history of industrial textile production at the Dasheng mills, one of China’s first incorporated enterprises, the firm’s managerial and financial evolution, and its impact on the regional economy, society, and politics.

Her book Railroads and the Transformation of China (Harvard University Press, 2019) uses the Chinese railroad system as a prism to explore the development of railroads as business and administrative institutions in China from the late nineteenth century to the 1980s. Examining the social, economic, cultural, and political functions of railroads, Köll’s study addresses questions of how and to what extent railroads affected China’s development throughout the twentieth century, and conversely, how China’s development shaped the railroad itself as a bureaucratic and economic system.

Köll’s current research project on “Pawnbroking and Informal Finance in Modern China” explores China’s role in the global history of informal finance and the different paths of transitioning to modern banking institutions. She is also writing a book for a general audience with the working title “An American Salesman in China: Business and Society in the Globalizing Economy of the 1920s”. Based on the archival collection of a former cigarette sales agent in North China, this study will present China’s business environment prior to WWII and discuss the opportunities, challenges, and competition from the perspective of Chinese and Western firms. Together with Elisabeth Kaske she edited the recently published volume Age of Exploration: How Chinese Scientists and Administrators Discovered China (De Gruyter, 2024).

Selected Publications:

• With Elisabeth Kaske (eds.), Age of Exploration: How Chinese Scientists and Administrators Discovered China (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2024).
• Tielu yu Zhongguo zhuanxing (Chinese translation of Railroads and the Transformation of China by Jin Yi) (Nanjing: Jiangsu renmin chubanshe, 2023), with new preface.
• “Transportation and Communication Infrastructure,” in The Cambridge Economic History of China, vol. II, 1850-1950, ed. Debin Ma and Richard von Glahn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).
• Railroads and the Transformation of China (Cambridge/MA.: Harvard University Press, 2019).
• “The Making of the Civil Engineer in China: Railroad Companies, Knowledge Transfer, and Professional Management,” in Knowledge Acts in Modern China: Ideas, Institutions, and Identities, ed. Robert J. Culp, Eddy U and Wen-hsin Yeh (Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 2016).
• “Professional Managers at Political Crossroads: Hsia Pin-fang at the Bank of China in New York and London, 1939-1951,” in The Capitalist Dilemma in China’s Communist Revolution, ed. Sherman Cochran (Ithaca/Cornell: Cornell East Asia Series, 2014).
• With David Faure, “Insurance in China: The Introduction and Indigenisation of the Industry,” in World Insurance: The Evolution of a Global Risk Network, ed. Peter Borscheid and Niels Viggo Haueter (Cambridge University Press, 2012).
• “A Fine Balance: Chinese Entrepreneurs and Entrepreneurship in Historical Perspective,” in The PRC at 60—An International Assessment, ed. William C. Kirby (Harvard University, East Asia Center, 2011).
• With William N. Goetzmann, “Paying in Paper: A Government Voucher from the Southern Song,” in The Origins of Value: The Financial Innovations That Created Modern Capital Markets, ed. William N. Goetzmann and K. Geert Rouwenhorst (Oxford University Press, 2005).
• With William N. Goetzmann, “The History of Corporate Ownership in China: State Patronage, Company Legislation, and the Issue of Control,” in A History of Corporate Governance around the World: Family Business Groups to Professional Managers, ed. Randall K. Morck (The University of Chicago Press, National Bureau of Economic Research series, 2005).
• From Cotton Mill to Business Empire: The Emergence of Regional Enterprises in Modern China. (Harvard University Press, 2003).

Lecture Outline

Pawnshops were an important institution in China’s informal financial sector impacting the lives of urban and rural customers on all rungs of the socio-economic ladder. Prof. Köll will introduce the practical and financial side of running a pawnshop business, the customers and their collateral goods, the role of owners and investors and their ties with local society and its business community. Based on historical evidence from pawnshops in Hong Kong and China before World War II, the talk discusses the role of credit access via pawnshops in the larger context of business and economic development at the time and the implications for the nature of the informal financial sector we encounter today.

Biography

Elisabeth Köll pursued her undergraduate education at the University of Bonn in Germany and at Fudan University, Shanghai. She received her Ph.D. in Chinese Business History from Oxford University where she was a Rhodes Scholar. Based on prior teaching experience in the setting of a history department as well as a business school, Elisabeth’s course portfolio includes courses on Chinese business, economic, and social history as well as on doing business in contemporary China.

Trained as a historian of modern China, Köll specializes in the business and socioeconomic history from the mid-19th century to the late 20th century, with a particular focus on the role and transformation of institutions in China’s evolution from empire into a modern nation-state. Her first monograph From Cotton Mill to Business Empire: The Emergence of Regional Enterprises in Modern China (Harvard East Asian monograph series, 2003) analyzes the history of industrial textile production at the Dasheng mills, one of China’s first incorporated enterprises, the firm’s managerial and financial evolution, and its impact on the regional economy, society, and politics.

Her book Railroads and the Transformation of China (Harvard University Press, 2019) uses the Chinese railroad system as a prism to explore the development of railroads as business and administrative institutions in China from the late nineteenth century to the 1980s. Examining the social, economic, cultural, and political functions of railroads, Köll’s study addresses questions of how and to what extent railroads affected China’s development throughout the twentieth century, and conversely, how China’s development shaped the railroad itself as a bureaucratic and economic system.

Köll’s current research project on “Pawnbroking and Informal Finance in Modern China” explores China’s role in the global history of informal finance and the different paths of transitioning to modern banking institutions. She is also writing a book for a general audience with the working title “An American Salesman in China: Business and Society in the Globalizing Economy of the 1920s”. Based on the archival collection of a former cigarette sales agent in North China, this study will present China’s business environment prior to WWII and discuss the opportunities, challenges, and competition from the perspective of Chinese and Western firms. Together with Elisabeth Kaske she edited the recently published volume Age of Exploration: How Chinese Scientists and Administrators Discovered China (De Gruyter, 2024).

Selected Publications:

• With Elisabeth Kaske (eds.), Age of Exploration: How Chinese Scientists and Administrators Discovered China (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2024).
• Tielu yu Zhongguo zhuanxing (Chinese translation of Railroads and the Transformation of China by Jin Yi) (Nanjing: Jiangsu renmin chubanshe, 2023), with new preface.
• “Transportation and Communication Infrastructure,” in The Cambridge Economic History of China, vol. II, 1850-1950, ed. Debin Ma and Richard von Glahn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).
• Railroads and the Transformation of China (Cambridge/MA.: Harvard University Press, 2019).
• “The Making of the Civil Engineer in China: Railroad Companies, Knowledge Transfer, and Professional Management,” in Knowledge Acts in Modern China: Ideas, Institutions, and Identities, ed. Robert J. Culp, Eddy U and Wen-hsin Yeh (Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 2016).
• “Professional Managers at Political Crossroads: Hsia Pin-fang at the Bank of China in New York and London, 1939-1951,” in The Capitalist Dilemma in China’s Communist Revolution, ed. Sherman Cochran (Ithaca/Cornell: Cornell East Asia Series, 2014).
• With David Faure, “Insurance in China: The Introduction and Indigenisation of the Industry,” in World Insurance: The Evolution of a Global Risk Network, ed. Peter Borscheid and Niels Viggo Haueter (Cambridge University Press, 2012).
• “A Fine Balance: Chinese Entrepreneurs and Entrepreneurship in Historical Perspective,” in The PRC at 60—An International Assessment, ed. William C. Kirby (Harvard University, East Asia Center, 2011).
• With William N. Goetzmann, “Paying in Paper: A Government Voucher from the Southern Song,” in The Origins of Value: The Financial Innovations That Created Modern Capital Markets, ed. William N. Goetzmann and K. Geert Rouwenhorst (Oxford University Press, 2005).
• With William N. Goetzmann, “The History of Corporate Ownership in China: State Patronage, Company Legislation, and the Issue of Control,” in A History of Corporate Governance around the World: Family Business Groups to Professional Managers, ed. Randall K. Morck (The University of Chicago Press, National Bureau of Economic Research series, 2005).
• From Cotton Mill to Business Empire: The Emergence of Regional Enterprises in Modern China. (Harvard University Press, 2003).