The study of kinship systems and the role and functions of lineages had very much been an anthropological discipline, but historians have put these constructs to somewhat different purposes. The history of South China is impossible to consider or to write without a historical map of its lineages, as eminent historian Joseph P. McDermott shows in his comprehensive study of rural Huizhou, Anhui. The Making of a New Rural Order in South China is a brilliant example of how such work is done as history writing. The book is the first of two volumes that explore the role of village institutions in Huizhou's social and economic life between the tenth and the eighteenth century. We know from earlier studies by historians such as David Faure and Michael Szonyi that lineages were not highly regulated and uniform, and that the development of lineages went through long-term negotiations and contestations in local societies. Corresponding to this line of argument, McDermott suggests that Huizhou lineages did not grow and flourish effortlessly but faced conflicts over centuries. His longue durée study together with his masterful application of newly unearthed archives complement earlier studies that had only predicted the origins and early developments of lineages.

We did not learn from other scholarship that it was non-kinship institutions that prevailed in Huizhou villages during the Tang, Song, and Yuan dynasties. Lineages that were later to dominate late imperial and even Republican rural China were weak and unworthy of serious attention (pp. 44, 96). No ancestral halls were mentioned in the 1411 Qimen county gazetteer but 56 were listed in 1600. After 1520 there were over 6,000 halls constructed in the six counties of Huizhou (p. 179). McDermott believes that only after neo-Confucian ideology began to play an influential role in villages, did rural elites advocate the establishment of lineages that provided benefits and services unavailable to non-kinsmen living in the same village (p. 107). Lineages then competed with dominant religious institutions over the rights to graves, fields, and temples. Only longue durée enables the study of the complex intra-village institutional relations that passed through stages of cooperation and fighting over a span of six centuries.

Another unique and pioneering point found in the book, and which I think is the most controversial of this volume—and probably the next—is one of the roles played by lineages. While conventionally we understood that their role was mainly religious and charity related, McDermott tells us that these organizations were actively participating in large-scale financial and commercial activities. The reason is that when the population expanded, they faced land shortages, and being unable to meet the ever-growing number of members' demands over land, they had to search for more commercial uses for ancestral properties (pp. 244–25). Since timber made up most of Huizhou's economy, some lineages took on mountain land trusts that engaged in profitable timber trade which eventually developed into a futures market beyond the control of the government. And by the mid- and late-Ming dynasty, ancestral halls engaged in moneylending through credit associations.

McDermott claims in his introductory chapter that previous kinship studies had been looking in the wrong place. They had paid attention to lineages' ostensible rather than actual operations that were not normally linked to economic life (p. 6). However, the validity of this claim is doubtful, as the author attempts to generalize the lack of discussion of economic-related issues in previous historical studies of village institutions. In the first place, Huizhou's geographical environment, natural resources, and migration experiences were very different from those of Fujian and Guangdong, for instance. In Anhui, massive timber production and a flourishing timber market enabled a futures market to develop. In Guangdong, especially the Pearl River Delta area, the rice and silk trade made up most of its local economy and was mostly dominated by merchants living outside the villages. Guangdong lineages owned little land, which probably explains why large-scale rice trade controlled by a few huge lineages was not possible. Furthermore, since the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Cantonese and Fujianese worked overseas and their remittances and donations made up most of the income in some villages, possibly reducing the desire by the local people to invest in other sectors of the economy. Given these differences, it is plausible that previous studies, especially those on Guangdong and Fujian lineages, did not overlook their economic role, but rather found it not important and not worth mentioning. A problem related to these cross-provincial variations in South China is the ambiguity of the word “South China” in the title of the book.

One crucial point is not clearly presented in the book. The author states that the demise of much of Huizhou's landed elite in the early Ming dynasty and the pervasive militarization of the remaining population provided the setting for a high concentration of land ownership by outsiders (p. 175). However, we do not know what the actual land ownership situation was before outside landowners appeared in Huizhou. We do not know whether the original settlers were evicted from their lands or whether there were no landowners at all. This unresolved issue might well contribute a crucial explanation to the weakness, or in some villages, the non-existence of kinship organizations before the Ming dynasty. It could have been the case that there were no rich and powerful families dominating the economy of the villages and as a result, forming kinship organizations was difficult, thereby giving room for village worship associations and Buddhist temples to dominate the rural areas.

Parallel to the rich archival collection that produced such solid research, this book reveals the related problem of archival selection. Like any other serious and responsible historian who wishes to deliver as much information and inspiration to readers as possible, the author must have found it most difficult to exclude archival materials, resulting in a substantial amount of unnecessary detail found here and there. Too much narrative is given to the internal competition in the lineage's ranks and conflicts over management of the trust's resources and revenue (p. 236). Anyone who has read previous historical and anthropological research on South China lineages would expect that these institutions faced resource and governance problems, and understand how they had to explore new resources of revenue, such as moneylending, and utilize ancestral rites and other ceremonies to tighten ties among members. We also know that these “problems of resource shortage and kinship governance continued to exist, some for a century and a half after its founding” (p. 138). Lineage members seizing and selling their own trust's property; seizing taxes and rents; and the efforts made to solve these problems (p. 322) are all not surprisingly new and do not need repetitious description.

These problems are minor compared to the contribution this book has made to the study of Chinese lineage history. It does not only tell us how lineages came into existence but how people who participated in the making of lineages went through long and strenuous struggles and more importantly, how over time the complex interplay of moral values, intra-village power relations, war, government policies, and the availability of natural resources came to play their roles in the making of lineages.