Market form : architecture and stock trading in Hong Kong

Abstract

Given both its fame and size within the global financial system, surprisingly few scholars have examined the history of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. As such, the institution’s history is largely self-narrated by promotional material like publications and exhibitions, and in the memoirs of exchange insiders and British colonial administrators. The Crown Colony of Hong Kong, established and developed since the middle of the nineteenth century on the political-economic foundations of British Liberalism, played a key role in the global rise of market-based governance, whereby the state upholds the juridical framework on which capitalist ownership of the means of production relies upon. Within this framework the stock exchange is the medium by which the majority of major corporations are owned. Given Hong Kong’s past and present role in China’s economy, this history is significant. To tell this history, the thesis focuses on the spaces in which stock trading has taken place and how they have changed over time. This approach infuses the story of the stock exchange with social practices and place-based discourses, typically eschewed by economic market analyses. By focusing on space, this thesis aims to contribute to a greater public understanding of the institution of stock trading within the political economy of Hong Kong. This architectural and urban history of stock trading brings forward new evidence about how British and Hong Kong Chinese interests negotiated the ways in which the stock market functions according to free-market principles. In essence, the spatial forms of stock trading in Hong Kong reflect high-level decisions about the economic form of the market: how it functions and how it does not, who can participate and who cannot, and its means of self-governance and its lack thereof. Spaces of stock trading are the most legible material evidence through which to understand the transference of market-based governance among the region’s elites, from the century and a half of British colonial rule to the contemporary Hong Kong Chinese administration. By documenting the history of these architectural spaces, and seeing how individuals and collectives within the market sought to build new exchanges and maintain old ones, the thesis shows, in part, how Chinese elites in Hong Kong accepted, utilized, and eventually came to maintain the region’s market society. This thesis is both the first history of stock trading architecture in Hong Kong, and the first extensive English-language account of Hong Kong’s stock exchange. It contributes to the expanding field that is the social study of finance, and more specifically, to the global genealogy of stock markets.