China In The 16th Century

In The Rise and Fall of a Public Debt Market in 16th-Century China, Wing-kin Puk explains the fate of Capitalism in late imperial China through the strange journey of a piece of paper: the Ming salt certificate.

Including 11 essays published over the last 15 years, this volume by Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giràldez concerns the origins and early development of globalization. It opens with their 1995 Silver Spoon essay and a theoretical essay published in 2002. Subsequent sections deal with Pacific Ocean exchanges, interconnections between the Spanish, Ottoman, Japanese and Chinese empires, and the necessity of multidisciplinary approaches to global history. The volume follows the evolution of the authors' thinking concerning the central role of China in the global silver trade, as well as interrelations among silver and non-silver markets. It concludes with an argument for incorporating the work of all academic disciplines when attempting to understand the history of globalization, advocating an inclusive historical data base which recognizes contextual realities and an inductive process of reasoning.

Originally published in 1974, this is a detailed study of the financial administration of the Chinese government during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), with particular attention to the sixteenth century, a topic about which very little has been published either in Chinese or any Western language. Professor Huang has worked through an enormous quantity and variety of source material - in particular the 133 substantial volumes of the Ming Veritable Records - and has compared the documents on financial matters with the entries in local gazetteers. The complicated workings of government finance present great difficulties to all specialists in Chinese financial and administrative history and in different branches of local Chinese history from the fifteenth century onwards. Professor Huang's study will provide all such researchers with an authoritative work of reference.