Elisabeth Köll wore four layers of clothing to ward off the bone-chilling cold that seeped through the walls of the municipal archives in Nantong, China.

While the Case Western Reserve University business and social historian read 30,000 files from the Dasheng Cotton Mill, she would take breaks every half hour to flex her body to relieve the numbness-but she still suffered frostbite on her knuckles.

Her pain was not without gain. Huddled over the company's records, Köll discovered new information about the early roots of industrialization in China and the Eastern country's adaptation of the Western concept of the corporation.

According to Köll, the records revealed that the Chinese industrial firm is a combination of the family enterprise with aspects of the Western corporation, such as shareholders and boards of directors, but is controlled by family and social networks. The Chinese version also exhibits a lower standard of accountability compared to its Western counterpart, she said.

Findings from Köll's yearlong stay in China in 1995 and from subsequent visits have resulted in her first book "From Cotton Mill to Business Empire: The Emergence of Modern Enterprises in China," published this month by Harvard University's East Asian Monographs series.

The arrival of the book comes at another important milestone in Köll's career. In 2004, she will assume the helm, as president, of the 400-member Historical Society for 20th Century China during the society's biennial meeting in Vienna, Austria.

Köll, 38, becomes the first woman to preside over the international organization that joins together political, social, economic, cultural and gender historians interested in China from the late 19th century through contemporary times. The society, founded in 1983, is an affiliation of the American Historical Society. Köll received a W. P. Jones Grant from the university to travel to Vienna for the meeting.

In researching her new book, Köll traced the roots of Chinese business institutions into the late 19th and 20th centuries to understand the role of the corporation now and then. She examined Dasheng Cotton Mills as a case study.

Dasheng, known as one of China's leading enterprises from 1890-1950, employed 8,000 industrial workers-mostly women from farming families who earned supplemental incomes. Köll sought information about how an agrarian workforce transforms into industrial workers, how management organized people unfamiliar with the work discipline of the factory and how people managed these large enterprises.

Köll would travel eight hours by boat up the Yangtze River to reach the city of Nantong, where Zhang Jian founded the Dasheng enterprise and grew it into a conglomerate that encompassed businesses of steamships, bank, distillery, soap factory, land reclamation and agriculture.

She arrived just as China began to liberalize it policies about access to records, but it still took a dinner party and the distribution of gifts to pave the way for people there to accept her research project.

Many people in Nantong thought Köll would stay for a month. As her work stretched into a year, her life became interwoven into the lives of people in the region. The local curiosity spurred a documentary on Köll, called "One Day in the Search of Scholarship."

The video crew followed Köll from her research in the library to her calligraphy lessons and eventually to the kitchen of the gynecology department of the local hospital where Köll regularly ate her meals as a guest. She chose to eat in the kitchen to escape the scrutiny of curious people and to find individual fare rather than the large-size family meals served in local Chinese restaurants.

While Köll's first book rolls off the press, she already has started research for a new book that will examine how the building of Chinese railroads shaped the country's landscape and impacted its economic, social and cultural life.

Return to the online edition of the 12-11-03 Campus News.