The Premodern Chinese Economy

Covering the time span from the Shang to the Qing Periods (1520BC - 1911AD), Gang Deng examines important factors in the decline of the Chinese economy from medieval sophistication to modern underdevelopment. These factors include: * resource endowments * socio-economic structure * property rights * state and bureaucracy * ideology and values * geo-political environment * internal rebellions * external invasions and conquests The Premodern Chinese Economy is a comprehensive analysis of China's economic history and provides essential background to the study of this country's modern struggle for growth and development. Deng's emphasis on comparative analysis offers new insights into the concept of underdevelopment and theories of transitional economics. This will become a major reference work in the fields of Chinese studies, economic history and development studies.

This concise 1999 introduction focuses on China's transition to economic modernisation.

An insightful account of the remarkable transition of the Chinese economy from impoverished backwater to economic powerhouse.

This volume comprises twelve papers written by Chinese scholars on various aspects of the history of ancient Chinese economic thought. The contributions are preceded by an introduction which gives an overview of the development of the subject of history of economic thought in China, and which also provides an historical context to the individuals who constitute the major "schools" of ancient Chinese economic thought. The authors of the papers are leading scholars who have dominated this research area since the founding of New China in 1949, while the broad range of topics covered by the contributions includes questions of methodology, detailed and sometimes controversial interpretations of texts and "schools", and the international influence and modern relevance of ancient Chinese thought. A recurrent theme is that ancient Chinese thought has at least as much to offer to the historian as ancient Western thought. As the first such volume of papers to be translated into English, this collection provides a unique opportunity for non-Chinese readers to sample the way in which Chinese historians of economics have attempted to understand their own intellectual heritage. This book will be relevant to scholars interested in the history of economic thought, economic history and Chinese studies.

The book provides a unique examination of the relationship between the state and market in China's economic development over several centuries. Its analysis is situated in the wider context of debates about technical progress in the pre-modern world, about the impact of western imperialism, about the role of the state in the economic development of poor countries and in the transition of former communist countries away from Stalinist systems of political economy.

China's extraordinary rise as an economic powerhouse in the past two decades poses a challenge to many long-held assumptions about the relationship between political institutions and economic development. Economic prosperity also was vitally important to the longevity of the Chinese Empire throughout the preindustrial era. Before the eighteenth century, China's economy shared some of the features, such as highly productive agriculture and sophisticated markets, found in the most advanced regions of Europe. But in many respects, from the central importance of irrigated rice farming to family structure, property rights, the status of merchants, the monetary system, and the imperial state's fiscal and economic policies, China's preindustrial economy diverged from the Western path of development. In this comprehensive but accessible study, Richard von Glahn examines the institutional foundations, continuities and discontinuities in China's economic development over three millennia, from the Bronze Age to the early twentieth century.

A satisfactory comprehensive history of the social and economic development of pre-modern China, the largest country in the world in terms of population, and with a documentary record covering three millennia, is still far from possible. The present work is only an attempt to disengage the major themes that seem to be of relevance to our understanding of China today. In particular, this volume studies three questions. Why did the Chinese Empire stay together when the Roman Empire, and every other empire of antiquity of the middle ages, ultimately collapsed? What were the causes of the medieval revolution which made the Chinese economy after about 1100 the most advanced in the world? And why did China after about 1350 fail to maintain her earlier pace of technological advance while still, in many respects, advancing economically? The three sections of the book deal with these problems in turn but the division of a subject matter is to some extent only one of convenience. These topics are so interrelated that, in the last analysis, none of them can be considered in isolation from the others.