Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Ethnic Enterprise in America: Business and Welfare Among Chinese, Japanese, and Blacks

Ethnic Enterprise in America: Business and Welfare Among Chinese, Japanese, and Blacks

Light, Ivan

Hardcover

General Racism & Ethnic StudiesGeneral World History

ISBN10: 0520365054
ISBN13: 9780520365056
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: Jan 1 1972
Pages: 236
Weight: 0.93
Height: 0.69 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
Ethnic 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.

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