Brief Description
The first comprehensive study of China's economic development across 3,000 years of history to be published in English.
Learn More about the Book
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.
About the Author
Richard von Glahn is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he has taught Chinese and world history since 1987. His primary field of research is the economic history of premodern China, with a particular focus on the period 1000 1700. He has previously published three monographs in Chinese history, including Fountain of Fortune: Money and Monetary Policy in China, 1000 1700 (1996) and The Sinister Way: The Divine and the Demonic in Chinese Religious Culture (2004), several edited books, and a co-authored textbook in world history, Crossroads and Cultures: A History of the World (2012). The present book has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation. Von Glahn's current research focuses on monetary and commercial circulation in maritime East Asia from the eighth to the seventeenth centuries.
Review Quotes
1. "Richard von Glahn, one of the leading historians of China's middle period, has written the first truly comprehensive economic history of China in English. Giving due consideration to the role of geography, natural endowment, and a changing ideological, social and political landscape, Von Glahn's masterful synthesis is destined to become the go-to reference on the forces that shaped China's political economy from the Bronze Age to the end of the last dynasty."
Madeleine Zelin, Columbia University
2. "This book promises to be the most timely and ambitious scholarly attempt to construct a new historical narrative of the Chinese past that provides a reliable foundation to comprehend China today. What makes Professor von Glahn's new story cogent and path-breaking is the solid scholarship in theory and historiography that is always a hallmark of his works."
Billy Kee-long So, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
3. "In one volume, Richard von Glahn offers a coherent and erudite account of three millennia of Chinese economic history. Synthesizing a huge variety of source materials, the book contains both an impressive update and thought-provoking insights on the major debates and paradigms in Chinese economic history. A remarkable achievement and a must-read for scholars and students of the Chinese economy and economic history in general."
Debin Ma, London School of Economics and Political Science
