From the late nineteenth- to the mid-twentieth century, changing technologies and growing transregional ties provided unprecedented opportunities for the entrepreneurially minded in China and Southeast Asia. The Business of Culture examines the rise of Chinese “cultural entrepreneurs,” businesspeople who risked financial well-being and reputation by investing in multiple cultural enterprises in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rich in biographical detail, the interlinked case studies featured in this volume introduce three distinct archetypes: the cultural personality, the tycoon, and the collective enterprise. These portraits reveal how changes in social and economic conditions created the fertile soil for business success; conditions that are similar to those emerging in China today.

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Christopher Rea is an associate professor of Asian studies at the University of British Columbia. Nicolai Volland is an assistant professor of Asian studies and comparative literature at Pennsylvania State University.

Contributors: Chua Ai Lin, Robert Culp, Grace Fong, Michael Gibbs Hill, Eugenia Lean, Christopher A. Reed, Sin Yee Theng, Wang Gungwu, and Sai-Shing Yung

This collection of essays represents a new period in the historiography of China, and the vantage point, that of capitalist China revived and flourishing, fits well with the analyses presented in the volume. Indeed, as Rea’s theoretical chapter on the concept of cultural entrepreneurship notes, this offers a new approach to "pluralism and mobility in the cultural sphere" (27) beyond the categories imposed by a political analysis.

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