The Social Sources of Migration and Enterprise: Italian Peasants and Chinese Migrants in Prato

Abstract

This article begins with an analysis of small-firm economies in Italy and China and then compares and contrasts the migrations of Italian peasants and Wenzhou Chinese to Prato, a historic center of textile production in northern Italy. The purpose of our analysis is not to argue that, despite many differences, the rural to urban migration of Italian peasants and the international migration of Wenzhou Chinese are fundamentally the same. Instead, through an analysis of similarities and differences into the organizational nature of these two migrations, we can better understand the crucial historical differences between the two cases, differences that give us insight into the more complex questions about the place of Italian and Chinese family firms in the global economy of the twenty-first century.