On April 13, 2018, Madeleine Zelin, the Dean Lung Professor of Chinese Studies at Columbia University, spoke about the customary and legal context for late imperial Chinese business practice at the Fordham Workshop on Business Organization in History, a program sponsored by the Fordham Corporate Law Center.
A pioneering scholar of the study of Chinese legal and economic history, Professor Zelin has written such books as The Merchants of Zigong: Industrial Enterprise in Early Modern China (Columbia University Press, 2005), a study of the indigenous roots of Chinese economic culture and business practice that was awarded the 2006 Allan Sharlin Memorial Prize of the Social Science History Association, the 2006 Fairbank Prize of the Association for Asian Studies and the 2007 Humanities Book Prize of the International Convention on Asian Studies. Her current research focuses on discursive, juridical and economic aspects of commercial law reform in the late Qing and early Republican period. Professor Zelin has been on the Columbia faculty since 1979.
