Ethnic Enterprise in America

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.