Ethnic Enterprise in America: Business and Welfare among Chinese, Japanese, and BlacksEthnic Enterprise in America by Ivan H. Light offers a groundbreaking sociological study of how immigrant and minority communities mobilize cultural traditions, mutual aid, and voluntary associations to build business enterprises. Focusing on Chinese, Japanese, and Black Americans, Light examines why some groups were able to create resilient networks of small proprietorships while others struggled against systemic exclusion. Through vivid case studies of Chinatowns, kenjinkai, and West Indian rotating credit associations, the book shows how institutions of trust, kinship, and collective finance shaped entrepreneurial opportunity in the United States. At once comparative and historical, Ethnic Enterprise in America probes the interplay between discrimination, cultural continuity, and economic adaptation. Light argues that the absence of traditions such as rotating credit systems among American-born Blacks exacerbated their dependence on fragile banks, while immigrant groups preserved cooperative practices that sustained enterprise under hostile conditions. Engaging questions of race, capitalism, and social organization, this book illuminates the paradoxical relationship between exclusion and creativity, and it remains a touchstone for scholars of ethnic economies, urban sociology, and American inequality. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1972. Many titles in the Voices Revived program are also newly available as ebooks, offered at a discounted price to support wider access to scholarly work. |
Contents
Rotating Credit Associations | 19 |
Rotating Credit and Banking | 45 |
Kenjin and Kinsmen | 62 |
Immigrant Brotherhood in Chinatown | 81 |
Urban League and Business League | 101 |
Other editions - View all
Ethnic Enterprise in America: Business and Welfare Among Chinese, Japanese ... Ivan Light Limited preview - 2022 |
Ethnic Enterprise in America: Business and Welfare Among Chinese, Japanese ... Ivan Light Limited preview - 2022 |
Common terms and phrases
African agricultural American anese Angeles ascriptive Business League Chicago Chinatown Chinese and Japanese Chinese Six Companies church beneficial churches and fraternal cities clan commercial competition cooperation cultural customers district associations Divine's economic employment esusu ethnic honor Father Divine foreign-born whites Franklin Frazier fraternal orders fraternally sponsored Frazier Fukuoka ghetto Gunnar Myrdal Harlem Hence institutions JACL Japanese immigrants kenjin kenjinkai labor laundry Los Angeles lower class blacks Max Weber membership migrants moral community mutual aid National Urban League native-born Negro banks Negro business Negro Insurance officials operated organization Oriental participation percent persons population prefectural club Press recruits relief religious retail rotating credit associations San Francisco sect Six Companies slaves small business Social Solidarity Society tanomoshi tended tong trade guilds traditional United Urban League urban North village voluntary associations W. E. B. Du Bois welfare West Indian white merchants York Yoruba