 Consumption: Two Pairs of Thought Involving MerchantsTengda Hua ()
Chapter Chapter 6 in Merchants, Market and Monarchy, 2021, pp 175-210 from Palgrave Macmillan Abstract: Abstract This chapter and Chapter 7 will focus on the relative position of merchants among the four occupations from the perspective of economic thought. The first thing that cannot be avoided is the debate over two core issues in ancient Chinese economic thought: righteousness vs. profits, and thrift vs. luxury. The debate over righteousness and profits reveals the scholars’ views on the role of merchants, and the argumentation of righteousness and profits leads to an important issue in the history of economic thought: usury activities involving merchants. The issue of luxury and frugality was related to the rationality of the luxury life of merchants (what do scholars and commoners in society think about this), and this is particularly prominent in the mid-to-late period when commerce was booming. These two pairs of views are our essential prerequisites for judging whether the order of scholars, peasants, artisans, and merchants was still sound in the Ming Empire and the merchants’ predicament, especially when compared with Western merchants. Keywords: Righteousness; Profit; Usury; Luxury; Frugality (search for similar items in EconPapers) There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it. Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:pshchp:978-3-030-77189-8_6 Ordering information: This item can be ordered from DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-77189-8_6 Access Statistics for this chapter More chapters in Palgrave Studies in the History of Economic Thought from Palgrave Macmillan |
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