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The Confusion.c of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China. By TIMOTHY BROOK. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1998. xxv, 320 pp. $40.00.
Historians of China have long recognized the mid- to late Ming as an era of basic economic change, sometimes seen as the empire's "second commercial revolution." Such factors as rapid population growth, a new organization of textile production and the spread of cotton cloth as the staple fabric worn by the bulk of the population, an increased (though still relatively modest) degree of local and regional product specialization, intensified overseas exchange, inflows of bullion, luxury consumption demand on the part of a growing wealthy class, government programs to provision large numbers of troops on the northern frontiers (kaizhongfa), and an accompanying relaxation of government restrictions on occupational mobility have all been well documented, and their contribution to economic restructuring fairly well recognized. But we have also perceived, not always so clearly, evidences of basic cultural change during this same era, and assumed, quite reasonably, that the two processes were closely linked. The trick has been to show precisely how these links operated. Despite pioneering efforts by Cynthia Brokaw, Richard von Glahn, Angela Leung, and others, we are still a long way from a satisfying, comprehensive explanation. This excellent and highly readable book, by a scholar who has thought about the question for many years, is an attempt to offer just thar.
Its success is considerable but, perhaps inevitably at this stage of research, only partial. Unsurprisingly, the areas in which Brook has established himself...