Accounting and finance

A perennial feature of the economic and business history literature on modern East Asia is the variegated roles centralized states have played in supporting (or failing to support) trade and industry, roles often viewed as distinct from those played by governments in market economies elsewhere. Our panel explores this evolving relationship between state, market, and society in and across four East Asian regions in four separate eras, each defined by increasing regional and global economic integration.

Hotels, and before them taverns and inns, have always been businesses that promoted the public good: housing and feeding strangers, offering locals opportunities for leisure and networking, hosting community events. Hotelkeepers have traditionally been community leaders, often politicians, and once a president of the United States. In the 1930s, a time of great skepticism about the profit motive, hotelkeepers again found ways to survive hard time and serve the public good. Sometimes they were forced to by their workers.