Congratulations to our Teaching Staff Awarded Research Fund

We would like to extend our congratulations to Prof. LUK Chi Hung on securing a grant from the Direct Grant for Research 2023-24 (1st round) for his research on “The Scholarly Making of Littoral Minority – Citizens: Social Surveys on the Dan in Republican China” [Details …].

Recapping the Public Lectures on History and Business in China 2023-24 Delivered by Prof. François GIPOULOUX on 6 March and 7 March 2024

With the support of the Eminence History Department Fund of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the Department invited Prof. François GIPOULOUX, Director of Research (Emeritus) of the National Center for Scientific Research, as the keynote speaker to deliver two public lectures for “The Public Lectures on History and Business in China 2023-24”.

The first lecture was held on 6 March at the Hong Kong Central Library and moderated by Prof. PUK Wing Kin, with the theme “Maritime China in the 16th-18th Century: Economic and Geopolitical Stakes”. The speaker elaborated that from the 16th to the 18th centuries, the Yellow Sea and the South China Sea formed a vast sea area that flourished outside the jurisdiction of the empire, with multiple port cities (Nagasaki, Guangzhou, Macau, Sakai City, Manila, Batavia) claimed to be the center of wealth and knowledge accumulation. The influence of this sea area will expand or contract according to the strength of the commercial networks that crisscross it. The conditions under which maritime trade took place—tributary trade and long-term prohibitions on maritime activity—led to a long-standing coexistence of merchants, smugglers, and pirates. From the perspective of comparative history and maritime history, the speaker borrowed Fernand Braudel’s classic study on the Mediterranean to propose the theory of “Asian Mediterranean”. What is the “Mediterranean” pattern of exchanges between those port cities in Asia? The speaker emphasized that since the Ming and Qing Dynasties, maritime trade had been a highly profitable but risky and capital-intensive industry. Maritime trade in the 16th to 18th centuries was characterized by merchants’ ability to transform products imported from distant places into foreign items suitable for the domestic market. This evolution in the composition of foreign trade represented a break with the Song Dynasty model, in which foreign trade was almost entirely associated with luxury goods.

The second lecture was held on 7 March at Cho Yiu Conference Hall in CUHK and moderated by Prof. David FAURE, with the theme “Elusive Capital: Financial Institutions and Investment Outcomes in Late Imperial China”. Starting from the divergence of Chinese and Western business history, the speaker used the concept of “elusive capital” to raise questions about the particularity of Chinese business history in the Ming and Qing Dynasties. Collecting savings and making them available to entrepreneurs in the form of long-term capital has traditionally been the task of banks. In the late Middle Ages in Europe, due to the popularization of the use of bills of exchange, the universalization of credit strongly stimulated the development of commercial capitalism. China’s need for credit did not appear to arise in the same way—credit was mobilized through more complex institutional channels. How did it circulate? Where did capital markets develop credit instruments that allow for the widespread exchange of information and the diffusion of financial innovation? If only few of the Chinese financial institutions handling these operations in the sense of the term used in the banks of European Middle Ages, did they still perform their functions as bank, even partially? The speaker focused on analyzing Chinese financial institutions and investment results. Due to the fragmentation of financial institutions and high interest rates, the issue of capital hedging eventually came up.

World History Seminar (2023-24)

Organisers: Centre for Comparative and Public History, Department of History, CUHK
Enquiry: 3943 8541

Workshops for the First-Year RPg Students 2023-24

For enquiry, please call 3943 7448.

For teachers and students who have information to share with the Department, please email your articles in both Chinese and English to chanfiona@cuhk.edu.hk by 4:00pm every Monday.