ENP-China Webinar

The ENP-China project initiates a series of webinars based on the research output of its members. These sessions aim at presenting work in progress and discussing the challenges of doing historical research with the expanding reservoir of digital resources and methods.

Date: 18 June 2020 at 9.30 am

Speaker: Christian Henriot (Aix-Marseille University/Irasia)

Topic: Excavating the social and political world of Shanghai manufacturers

Please click this URL to join. https://stanford.zoom.us/j/97402866469

Presentation: This presentation will explore how to reconstruct the social, economic, and political networks of Shanghai manufacturers in Republican Shanghai. It does not assume pre-existing relationships. Our study starts from a 1947 survey that revealed more than 10,000 industrial companies in the city. Due to the sheer size of this group of entrepreneurs, the presentation will focus on a sample of 500 individuals, namely the most important manufacturers in 1947. We excavated data from two different sets of sources: a large collection of Who’s whos and directories assembled by the Institute of Modern History in Taiwan, with the aim to collect all the known biographical information on the manufacturers; a massive corpus of press, including the Shenbao, North China Daily News, China Weekly Review, etc., with the aim to dig up all the social, political, and economic events to which these individuals participated. As a preliminary step, data mining was limited to the year of 1947 when our group of 500 manufacturers were the main players in the field.