SOCIO-ECONOMIC HISTORY

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This paper, based on primary sources concerning the cotton industry in Tsingtao(Qingdao) from the 1920s to the 1930s, deals with one of the representative cases of the relationships between Chinese and foreign enterprises in China. In that city, when Japanese cotton industrialists rushed to Tsingtao after World War I, the famous bureaucratic enterpreneur Zhou Xuexi also built the Huaxin cotton mill. It is easy to document that competition between Huaxin and the Japanese cotton mills was keen. But the relationship was not one of competition alone. Huaxin and the Japanese cotton mills followed different strategies in both production and marketing. Huaxin produced higher count yarns which went mainly to the other treaty ports, while most of the Japanese mills produced coarser yarns sold in the rural textile centers in Shandong. Sometimes the Japanese mills and Huaxin cooperated with each other. For example, the Japanese mills supplied new cotton seeds to the Chinese side led by Huaxin in the first phase of the movement to improve the quality of the cotton grown in China. This cooperation, however, did not continue because the Chinese side eventually decided to use a different kind of cotton seed promoted by the Nationalist Government. This paper joins the on-going discussions on the role of foreign capital in Chinese economic development. Some of the findings of this study coincide with the conclusions of Sherman Cochran's stydy of the Chinese tobacco industry. Another question considered concerns factors allowing Huaxin to compete with the Japanese mills and to enlarge its business during the 1920s and 1930s. This paper concludes that (1) Huaxin could get good cotton by direct purchase, (2) it actively introduced new technology, and (3) that the managerial skills of Huaxin's operators, including marketing techniques, were important factors.

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This paper is focused on the transition of the management of B.A.T. (British American Tobacco Co., Ltd.) in a tobacco-growing district, Shangdong province. In the former studies, it was said to be a process of establishing semifeudal, semi-colonial system. And the peasantry of that area were considered to have become oppressed by both B.A.T. and local feudal merchants. But with this way of analysis, we are likely to overlook the reation from the local peasants, and tend to assume that B.A.T. achieved its aim of making the local market under its control without any difficulty. According to my reserch on A.B.T., it made great efforts to establish the influential status in the local economy, and also took various means to acquire tobacco-growing peasants. For instance, B.A.T. tried to ensure the constant supply of the material by handing the purchasing tikets to the peasants in a tobacco planting season. But because the peasants sold their products to any company which offered them the best price, it did not work at all. So B.A.T. started to keep their price better than other companies afterwards. Thus big companys like B.A.T. could not penetrate into the local economic system. They could just extend thir power under the careful consideration of the peasants' reaction. By making a survey of B.A.T.'s management, we can see how a big international company changed its strategy to regional reactions. It also means that this process shows us the peculiarity of this region. And we can get another practical image of the so-called semi-colonial system, not its generalised image.

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In the 17th and 18th centuries, among the thirteen colonies of Britith America, the southern colonies especially played an important role in the old colonial system. They were producing staples such as tobacco, rice , etc., utilizing white indentured servants first, then black slaves. Slaves however time after time tried to escape from the yoke of the plantation system, and this paper deals with them or runaway slaves. For examining them as a whole, runaway slave advertisements in newspapers are the most suitable materials in existence. We take a quantitative method to analyze a lot of advertisements collected from colonial newspapers in Maryland and Georgia(Annapolis Maryland Gazette and Savannah Georgia Gazette) from the 1740s through the 1760s. They give us precious information on several aspects of runaways. Based on the information, we can tell the typical, average character of runaway slaves and their flights as follows. They were male and country-born blacks, mulattoes(in Maryland) or foreign-born blacks(in Georgia). Their average age was 26/27. In the busy farming season of spring, summer or fall, they tried to escape alone or in small groups. Some of them were able to speak English, able to cope with skilled works, but some were not. For the capture of these runaways, in about a month after their flights, planters advertised in a newspaper with the statement of reward that is, to some degree, fixed from custom, but also varied in accordance with the time after the flights and the attributes of runaways. Their number however kept growing during the period. One of the most interesting facts found in this analysis is that the character of runaway slaves in Maryland and Georgia was quite similar except thir racial composition. This fact tells us the general robustness of the slave-worked plantation system.

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