Book Reviews / JESHO 51 (2008) 513-541 539

Michael MARMÉ . Suzhou: Where the Goods of All the Provinces Converge. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. 369 pp., maps, figures, and tables. Clothbound. ISBN: 0-8047-3112-8.

Th is book is about the history of Suzhou—located in the Lower Yangzi Delta, about 50 miles to the east of Shanghai—and its role as a Chinese “world city,” to use the terms of author Michael Marmé. Although Suzhou: Where the Goods of All the Provinces Converge focuses on the past of this metropolis, especially under the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), rather than the present, the author also addresses a few broader issues in his case study of Suzhou: how did the state and Chinese society interact in a commercial urban setting, and what was the role of the local elite in this process? Above all, can we discern and confirm the phenomenon of Smithean growth in the case of Suzhou long before the advent of the West? And if so, why did it not evolve into an industrial economy? Th e author has constructed a local history of Suzhou in which he describes how the city evolved into a center, or a hegemon, in a Chinese world system which was characterized by a hierarchical structure of macro- regions in terms of commercial and cultural activities, hence the term “world city” or a “Suzhou-centered world system” (pp. 3-5). By taking such an approach, Marmé continues the decades-long scholarly tradition of positioning Chinese social realities in a theoretically constructed spatial structure. Viewed in this light, Marmé’s use of the term “city” goes beyond its conventional connotations and includes a complex discourse of associ- ated issues. Since the 1960s we have seen an increase in English literature on China with such a spatial perspective and among these books some have focused on individual cities, such as Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Hankow, Quanzhou, Huizhou, Amoy, Canton, Hong Kong, Yangzhou, and so on. Th e publication of Marmé’s study, which is the first full monographic presentation on Suzhou, is therefore a welcome addition to the field. In order to reconstruct an evidence-based narrative of Suzhou, the author has consulted a wide range of materials, in particular modern lit- erature on the Lower Yangzi Delta and Suzhou. Apart from the standard historical sources and the local gazetteers, Marmé has further made good use of the literary and inscriptional materials that are available on this subject and is thus able to provide a succinct historical account of Suzhou. His reservations about using the voluminous genealogies of local families are justified as these are known to contain a considerable amount of fictitious information. However, readers who are interested in this topic

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2008 DOI: 10.1163/156852008X317860 540 Book Reviews / JESHO 51 (2008) 513-541 can consult a growing body of literature in anthropology and family stud- ies which has accumulated valid information from these tricky but inform- ative documents. Th e narrative commences with vivid observations on the remarkable prosperity of the city in late Ming times by famous contemporaries such as Matteo Ricci and includes an overview of the city and its hinterland at the height of its development. Th e author next takes his audience on a journey of some 2000 years to outline the historical background of Suzhou. How- ever, the main body of the book, six chapters in total, is devoted to the development of the city from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. Being a former stronghold of a major rival of the Hongwu Emperor, the founder of the Ming Dynasty, Suzhou experienced difficulties in adjusting to Ming politics and its agrarian orientation. Reform efforts by successive local administrations in the middle of the fifteenth century eventually transformed the city and made it a center of commerce and great wealth with imports from many other macro-regions across the empire. Th e local agriculture had moreover been transformed into a base of a booming tex- tile proto-industry in the Suzhou prefecture. Such developments thus confirm the workings of Smithean growth on traditional Chinese soil. However, government efforts alone cannot completely account for such a success in commercializing a highly populous preindustrial city. Apart from the officials, the local elite played an important role in the process of incorporating the city into Ming politics and of closing the gap between the rural villages and the nodal centers of the market networks. Selecting elite families such as the Wu, the Chen, and the Tang, Marmé analyzes their vital participation in the transformation process which was thus inex- tricably linked to the possible emergence of a Chinese world order cen- tered at Suzhou. But this commercial metropolis also thrived in a cultural sense and became a major center for the arts and high culture; this city was, for example, home to the flourishing School of Wu in literati painting. Th e author concludes his narrative by pointing to the increasing disparity between the poor and the rich in the first half of the sixteenth century when the city enjoyed the benefits of a full-blown proto-industrial eco- nomic growth, which was, however, not accompanied by a turn to capi- talism. According to Marmé, it was particularly this predicament that fueled the disaster of a devastating Wokou (Japanese) piracy in Suzhou in the middle of the century in which local involvement in the piracy was noticeable.