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5844The Maritime Silk Road started back in the Warring States period and grew into the main conduit for China and countries along the South Pacific and the Indian Ocean to trade with each other. For the initial centuries, Chinese merchants were a dominating group on these emerging routes. After the seventh century, the dominant-trader group position turned over several times, first from the Chinese merchants to the Arabs, then from the Arabs to the Portuguese, and later from the Portuguese to the Dutch. For the Europeans, the firearms advantage clearly played an important role in their successive takeovers. But, perhaps a more important and enduring reason lies in their financing and risk-sharing methods, that is, who could better solve the intertemporal commitment problem in a way that allowed them to raise larger scales of funding from, and spread the high ocean-trade risks across, a large number of investors. The Chinese, Islamic, Catholic and Protestant civilizations each offered different cultural and social resources to address this challenge, whose strength and weakness will be compared and contrasted in this paper to draw lessons for business people today.
/ Journals / Foreign Economics & Management
Foreign Economics & Management
LiZengquan, Editor-in-Chief
ZhengChunrong, Vice Executive Editor-in-Chief
YinHuifang HeXiaogang LiuJianguo, Vice Editor-in-Chief
Competition among Civilizations on the Maritime Silk Road and Lessons for Today
Foreign Economics & Management Vol. 43, Issue 06, pp. 3 - 26 (2021) DOI:10.16538/j.cnki.fem.20210419.101
Summary
References
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Chen Zhiwu. Competition among Civilizations on the Maritime Silk Road and Lessons for Today[J]. Foreign Economics & Management, 2021, 43(6): 3-26.
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