Includes bibliographical references and index.

Front Matter -- Copyright page -- -- Preface / Cao Jin -- List of Figures -- List of Maps -- List of Tables -- Notes on Contributors -- Space and Setting -- Southwest China: Local Conditions and Economic Trajectories / Ulrich Theobald -- Newcomers in the Eighteenth-Century South-West Frontier: An Introduction to the 1784 Huguang Huiguan Records / Fei Huang -- Borders, Ethnicities, Brotherhoods, Provinces: Neglected Aspects of Qing Mining History / John E. Wills (†) Jr. -- Fuel for the Smelters: Copper Mining and Deforestation in Northeastern Yunnan during the High Qing, 1700 to 1850 / Nanny Kim -- Metal and Money -- Legal and Illegal Copper Markets in Eighteenth-Century Hankou / Roger Greatrex -- The Copper Market of Hankou and the Illegal Trade of Yunnan Copper during the Mid-Qing Period* / Yang Yuda -- The Chinese Way of Minting: Comparative Perspectives on Coin Production before Mechanisation / Cao Jin -- Trade and Transport -- Numerical Communication in Intercontinental Trade and Monetary Matters: Coins and Weights in China and East Asia in Merchants’ Pocketbooks and Commercial Guides (16th–19th Centuries) / Harald Witthöft -- The Story of the Mayangzi: Shipping and Technological Change in Qing China / Nanny Kim -- The Illegal Trade in Saltpetre in Southern China in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries / Roger Greatrex -- Sichuan as a Pivot: Provincial Politics and Gentry Power in Late Qing Railway Projects in Southwestern China / Elisabeth Kaske -- Yunnanese Transnational Business Firms in the Early Twentieth Century: Xizhou’s Yongchangxiang as a Case Study / C. Patterson Giersch.

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The book Southwest China in Regional and Global Perspectives (c. 1600-1911) is dedicated to important issues in society, trade, and local policy in the southwestern provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou and Sichuan during the late phase of the Qing period. It combines the methods of various disciplines to bring more light into the neglected history of a region that witnessed a faster population growth than any other region in China during that age. The contributions to the volume analyse conflicts and arrangements in immigrant societies, problems of environmental change, the economic significance of copper as the most important “export” product, topographical and legal obstacles in trade and transport, specific problems in inter-regional trade, and the roots of modern transnational enterprise.

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