China’s rise as the world’s second-largest economy surely is the most dramatic development in the global economy since the year 2000. But China’s prominence in the global economy is hardly new. Since 500 BCE, a burgeoning market economy and the establishment of an enduring imperial state has fostered precocious economic growth. Moreover, contrary to the view that China’s economy withered under the dual constraints of Western colonialism and Chinese tradition after 1800, recent scholarship has identified the onset of modern economic growth in response to new incentive structures, investment opportunities, ideas, and technology, laying the foundation for the post-1978 economic miracle. China’s combination of market-led growth under the firm hand of the state has produced a model of economic development that challenges conventional theories of capitalism and economic growth. The spectacular growth of the contemporary Chinese economy has also spurred deeper investigation into the Chinese economy – long a neglected field of study, at least in the Western academy. Scholarship on Chinese economic history has now developed to the stage where a Cambridge History devoted to the subject is appropriate and feasible. These volumes, a collaborative effort by nearly fifty scholars, bring together the fruits of pioneering Western, Japanese, and Chinese scholarship in all dimensions of economic history, past and present.

Early studies of the Chinese economy focused on China’s distinctive philosophical and political traditions.Footnote ¹ In his published 1911 Columbia Ph.D. thesis, The Economic Principles of Confucius and His School), Ch’en Huan-chang sought to introduce the basic concepts and practices of Chinese political economy, highlighting the pre-eminence of the Confucian tradition.Footnote ² Of course, Ch’en was writing at the moment of the dissolution of the Chinese empire and the apogee of the modern world-system defined by industrial capitalism and Western political hegemony. Already in Ch’en’s book – and for long afterwards – the study of Chinese economic history was fixated on the question of the apparent lack of economic progress throughout two millennia of imperial history. Many of the answers proposed by Ch’en – Confucian disdain for moneymaking, a rigid and inert social structure, overpopulation, and isolation from the outer world – recurred in subsequent works.

The fall of the Qing empire in 1911 – and with it, the end of China’s imperial past – inspired hope for China’s rapid transformation into a modern, progressive nation. But the failure of Republican institutions to thrive in the wake of the empire’s demise gave rise to doubts about China’s ability to “learn from the West.” Some intellectuals advocated wholesale repudiation of Chinese cultural traditions and embrace of Western culture as defined by cosmopolitanism, Enlightenment values, Republican government, scientific reasoning, and capitalist economic institutions. Others sought to reinvigorate China’s “national essence” by reviving authentic Chinese values that had been attenuated by Western spiritual pollution and Manchu overlordship. The Japanese scholar Naitō Konan, writing in 1914, envisioned a future in which Japan supplanted China as the ascendant center of a reinvigorated “oriental culture” that would eclipse the spiritually vacuous materialism of the West. Naitō advanced the novel thesis that East Asia’s “modern age” had actually begun centuries earlier, in the transition from the Tang (618–907) to Song (960–1279) dynasties. This Tang–Song transition had witnessed the triumph of autocratic monarchy over aristocratic rule and engendered a vibrant commoner culture liberated from feudal domination. But China’s incipient modernity proved premature; after the Song dynasty, China’s “modern age” degenerated into senility, and in contemporary times the dynamic center of oriental culture had shifted to Japan.Footnote ³

The emergence of history as an academic profession in China and Japan during the 1920s was accompanied by skepticism toward received historical traditions and more critical empiricism in historical methodology. But by the late 1920s historical scholarship in China became enveloped by disputes over the trajectory of Chinese history from antiquity to the present, most notably the so-called Social History Debate, which dwelled primarily on questions of feudalism and capitalism in China. Marxism and the Russian Revolution loomed large over these controversies. Left-wing scholars and writers were keen to demonstrate that China’s historical experience conformed to the universal categories of historical development as defined by Western philosophers. In his Study of China’s Ancient Society (1930), Guo Moruo was the first to apply to Chinese history the five-stage theory of human history (from primitive communism to socialism) formulated by Soviet Marxist scholars.Footnote ⁴ Guo argued that the onset of the Iron Age in China in the first millennium BCE inaugurated feudal relations of production that endured even under the centralized bureaucratic empires.

The anomalous character and persistence of Chinese “feudalism” – which bore little resemblance to the fragmented political order of medieval Europe – posed a vexing problem. Some historians in China sought to resolve this incongruity by espousing an economic definition of feudalism based on the antagonism between the landowning class and the peasantry, and thus postulated a feudal epoch that stretched from the ancient Zhou era throughout imperial history and continued even during the post-1911 Republican era. In Europe, Max Weber had traced the apparent stagnation of Chinese historical development to the special character of the imperial bureaucratic state, which Marxist scholars reformulated as a distinctive species of “bureaucratic feudalism.” Drawing on the theories of both Marx and Weber, Karl Wittfogel, a leading figure in the Frankfurt school of Marxism, proposed that the Chinese imperial state was founded on an “Asiatic mode of production” which hindered the dynamic forces of class struggle that motivated historical change.Footnote ⁵ Although Soviet Marxists firmly repudiated the idea of an Asiatic mode of production, it gained considerable currency among some Chinese and many Japanese scholars in the 1930s. Characterizing China as the archetype of an “oriental society” trapped in the Asiatic mode of production provided a succinct explanation for the immobility of Chinese history, and for Japanese historians reinforced Japan’s singular role in both “escaping from Asia” and leading it toward modernity.

To be sure, other scholars distanced themselves from these theoretical debates and focused instead on empirical study and honing analytical methods of economic history. In China, this trend coalesced around the journal Food and Money Semi-monthly (Shihuo banyuekan 食貨半月刊), inaugurated in 1934 by Tao Xisheng, which featured contributions by Tao, Ju Qingyuan, He Ziquan, Quan Hansheng, and others. The “Food and Money” group (the name derived from the title given to chapters on fiscal administration in traditional dynastic histories) sought to balance economic theories (both Marxist and non-Marxist) with empirical evidence and rigorous methodology.Footnote ⁶ Much of their scholarship centered on the early imperial era, especially the Tang dynasty.Footnote ⁷ The 1930s also witnessed a profusion of pathbreaking Japanese scholarship on Chinese economic history, likewise centered on the Tang–Song dynasties, led by Katō Shigeshi,Footnote ⁸ Hino Kaisaburō,Footnote ⁹ Sogabe Shizuo,Footnote ¹⁰ and Miyazaki Ichisada.Footnote ¹¹ The inspiration for these studies can be traced back to Naitō’s hypothesis of the Tang–Song transition as the beginning of “East Asia’s modern age,” as Miyazaki – Naitō’s successor as professor of Chinese history at Kyoto University – entitled his influential synthesis.Footnote ¹² The priority of the Tang also can be seen in the first European-language monograph explicitly devoted to Chinese economic history, the Hungarian-born scholar Étienne Balazs’s 1932 doctoral thesis for Berlin University on the economic history of the Tang dynasty.Footnote ¹³ Although Balazs championed empirical research over both theoretical formulations and narrowly construed philological study, his scholarship was explicitly couched in the Weberian project of comparative study within universal categories of historical development and contributed to the conception of China as – in his words – a “permanently bureaucratic state” that obstructed the emergence of an independent merchant class and, by extension, capitalism.Footnote ¹⁴

The prewar generation also pioneered the use of quantitative data for the study of Chinese economic history. Particularly noteworthy in this regard were the contributions of Quan Hansheng, the forerunner in the study of price history, international trade, and national revenue (initially focused on the Song, and later extended to the Ming–Qing periods as well), and Liang Fangzhong, who published a pathbreaking essay on Ming population, land, and taxation statistics in 1935 and a landmark study of the sixteenth-century Single-Whip tax reform in 1936.Footnote ¹⁵ In addition, scholars such as Chen Hansheng and Fei Xiaotong, trained in economics and anthropology in the US and the UK respectively, published monographs on the contemporary rural economy based on extensive field research that became foundational studies.Footnote ¹⁶ During the Japanese occupation of China in the 1930s–1940s a legion of Japanese scholars, operating under the auspices of the Investigation Department of the South Manchuria Railway (Mantetsu Chōsabu, founded in 1907), compiled hundreds of reports on the Chinese economy that have been extensively mined by later scholars.Footnote ¹⁷ The pronounced influence of Keynesian economics among young Chinese economists also produced the first efforts to compile national income data and measure GDP in the late 1940s, efforts that would be jettisoned along with non-Marxist economics after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.Footnote ¹⁸

In the postwar era, Japanese scholarship on Chinese economic history was especially robust. The ascendancy of Marxist analysis in the Japanese academy – an explicit repudiation of the prewar imperialist project – established a new paradigm for interpreting Chinese economic history. Rejecting both the thesis of “oriental stagnation” and Naitō Konan’s ideas about China’s precocious modernity, economic and legal historians such as Sudō Yoshiyuki and Niida Noboru portrayed the Tang–Song transformation as the formative phase of a feudal society based on the subordination of serfs to a landlord class.Footnote ¹⁹ These servile relations were reproduced by the patriarchal social institutions of family, lineage, and guild that inhibited the emergence of the “rational” legal and economic institutions which the great German sociologists denoted by the term Gesellschaft (impersonal social relations). The density of patriarchal communal social relations (Gemeinschaft, rendered in Japanese as kyōdōtai 共同体) in Chinese society precluded the formation of an independent bourgeoisie and the transition to capitalism. More importantly, these studies – and a plethora of non-Marxist scholarship as well – generated a wealth of new empirical research on Chinese economic history, including a growing body of work centered on the Ming–Qing period and the twentieth century.

In China, of course, orthodox Marxist historiography prevailed after 1949. However, numerous studies attesting to the vitality of the market economy in the late Ming dynasty gave rise to the idea that the “sprouts of capitalism” (zibenzhuyi mengya 資本主義萌芽) had begun to emerge by the late sixteenth century, if not earlier.Footnote ²⁰ Shang Yue became the most prominent exponent of the controversial thesis that an incipient bourgeoisie had formed in the late Ming period and China thus was already beginning the transition to capitalism before it was derailed by the Manchu conquest of the Ming in 1644.Footnote ²¹ Japanese historians quickly joined this debate. Scholars who focused on the urban economy and merchants, such as Fu Yiling and Tanaka Masatoshi, tended to underscore the potential for indigenous capitalist transformation.Footnote ²² Historians who concentrated on relations of production in the agrarian economy and handicraft industries, such as Nishijima Sadao, were far more skeptical.Footnote ²³ However, by 1960 Shang Yue’s thesis on the “sprouts of capitalism” was deemed heretical within the Chinese academic establishment.

Although Shang Yue’s contention that China was on the verge of a breakthrough to capitalism before the Opium War was repudiated, most scholars assented to the proposition that rising commodity production in the Ming–Qing era attested to an “advanced” form of feudalism in China, challenging the idea that the Western European historical experience exclusively defined the archetype of the feudal economy. According to this line of thought, the intrusion of foreign imperialism in the nineteenth century and China’s subjugation as a “semi-colony” warped the development of Chinese capitalism, precluding the formation of an autonomous national bourgeoisie and instead fostering state-led “bureaucratic capitalism.” Thus China remained a “semi-feudal, semi-colonial” society until the Communist Party initiated a proletarian revolution beginning in the 1930s. Notwithstanding the ideological bent of PRC scholarship in this era, a vast array of source materials, statistical series, and valuable monographic studies were published that stimulated research both within China and abroad.Footnote ²⁴

By contrast, in the immediate postwar era economic history was a virtually untouched subject in Western scholarship on China, which was deeply adverse to the Marxist cast of the Chinese and Japanese studies mentioned above. In an essay on the state of the field at the dawn of the 1960s, American scholar Albert Feuerwerker dourly observed that

Feuerwerker’s citations belie these grim conclusions to some extent; for example, he mentions Peng Xinwei’s Chinese Monetary History, a magisterial survey that remains unsurpassed to this day.Footnote ²⁶ Mention also should be made of the numerous publications during these years by Lien-sheng Yang, perhaps the first scholar to write a Ph.D. thesis at a US university (Harvard, 1946) on Chinese economic history.Footnote ²⁷ Regrettably, the ideological struggles that convulsed China during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s–1970s shuttered the universities, inflicted enormous personal hardship on many scholars, and effectively suspended serious scholarship.

In any event, the decade of the 1960s would prove to be a watershed in Western scholarship on Chinese economic history. The rise of social science research and its application to historical study provided the catalyst for a series of landmark studies that would shape Western scholarship on Chinese economic history for a generation: Ping-ti Ho’s incisive dissection of historical population statistics;Footnote ²⁸ Albert Feuerwerker’s study of state-led industrialization efforts in the late nineteenth century;Footnote ²⁹ the meticulous reconstruction of Tang fiscal administration by Denis Twitchett, which amply demonstrated the value of Japanese scholarship;Footnote ³⁰ Robert Hartwell’s provocative findings on the precocious development of the coal and iron industries in Song China;Footnote ³¹ the insights of economic geography applied by G. William Skinner to generate a new paradigm of market structure and marketing systems in China;Footnote ³² the application of quantitative analysis to agricultural production pioneered by Dwight Perkins;Footnote ³³ Ramon Myers’s revisionist analysis, drawing on quantitative data from the Mantetsu surveys, of economic performance in rural China in the Republican period;Footnote ³⁴ Shiba Yoshinobu’s empirically rich and analytically sophisticated tour de force on commerce and merchant enterprise in the Song, which became accessible to a wider audience through Mark Elvin’s abbreviated translation;Footnote ³⁵ crowned by Elvin’s own theoretically innovative paradigm of the course of economic development in China across the imperial era, another work deeply informed by Japanese scholarship.Footnote ³⁶

By the 1970s, then, Western scholarship on Chinese economic history had achieved a new level of maturity. The wealth of new empirical studies since then has fostered vigorous, indeed contentious, debate on issues such as the impact of Western and Japanese imperialism, the nature of the peasant economy, regional systems and market networks, and what has come to be called the “Great Divergence” debate. In particular, the past three decades have seen significant revisionist scholarship on Chinese economic performance in the tumultuous nineteenth and twentieth centuries following the intrusion of Western imperialism in the post-Opium War era. Contrary to the once dominant pessimistic interpretation of a Chinese economy withering under the dual constraints of Western colonialism and Chinese tradition, the new scholarship has identified the onset of modern economic growth in this era – at least in some crucial regions and sectors – as a powerful response to new incentive structures and investment opportunities, as well as the inflow of new ideas and technology, laying the foundation for China’s economic takeoff in the post-1978 reform era. Within China, perhaps the most significant development is the publication of the three edited volumes of the History of Chinese Capitalist Development in 1983.Footnote ³⁷ Under the leadership of one of the coeditors, Wu Chengming of the Chinese Academy of Social Science, these three volumes, although framed within a Marxist framework, brought together a generation of devoted senior and junior scholars to provide a comprehensive economic history of modern China from the early modern era to 1950. Wu, himself an economist who received a master’s degree from Columbia University in the 1940s but was banished during China’s Cultural Revolution era, emerged as an intellectual leader in economic history within China throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

Although much of the new scholarship on Chinese economic history has focused on the post-1800 period, for which quantitative data are much more abundant, there have been significant advances in the study of China’s premodern economy, particularly for the ancient period. Important new data generated from archaeological research in China, ranging from textual and artifactual evidence to urban morphology and settlement studies, have yielded fresh insights into social and economic livelihood in ancient China and enable us to trace the course of economic change with much greater temporal and geographic precision. Although Western scholarship on China’s premodern economic history remains modest, quantitatively speaking, compared to the prodigious output of Chinese and Japanese scholars, Western historians have done pioneering work in many aspects of the premodern economy, including environmental history; demography; legal institutions and economic organization; kinship, gender, and the household economy; political economy; and economic sociology.

These scholarly developments have coincided with the unfettering of Chinese scholarship from shopworn Marxist–Leninist ideological blinders since the early 1980s and an enormous surge in new scholarship on Chinese economic history within China. With the opening of new archives and the improvement of the academic infrastructure in China, new generations of Chinese scholars have begun to make important methodological and theoretical contributions to the study of Chinese economic history ranging from agriculture and demography to finance and law. The rapidly growing presence of Chinese scholars within the global economic history community (as seen, for example, at meetings such as the triennial World Economic History Congress) also testifies to the rising impact of Chinese economic history within the profession internationally.

A significant shift in the scholarly landscape has been the gradual rebalancing of the community working on Chinese economic history. Twenty years ago, the few scholars working on economic history were largely based outside China. The last decade has seen the steady growth of a young generation of researchers who returned to China having gained training in quantitative and economic approaches from North American and European Ph.D. programs. In conjunction with the rising stock of foreign-trained Ph.D.s in economic history, universities in China and Hong Kong now produce a steady stream of Ph.D.s trained in quantitative economic history, many of whom are making careers in China. The sheer quantity of the new scholarship on Chinese economic history since the 1970s defies adequate summary in this brief essay, but it will be cited copiously throughout these volumes. In addition, synthetic surveys of Chinese economic history have now begun to appear.Footnote ³⁸ Along with these surveys are two commissioned special journal issues devoted entirely to Chinese economic history.Footnote ³⁹

The Cambridge Economic History of China is divided chronologically into two volumes, with the first volume devoted to the period before 1800 and the second volume to the period from 1800 to the present. Each volume is further subdivided into two broad chronological sections, but within these divisions the chapters are organized topically rather than chronologically. Part I of Volume I (in six chapters) covers the period from 1000 BCE to 1000 CE, with Part II (in twelve chapters) devoted to the period from 1000 to 1800. The unequal portions assigned to the pre-1000 and 1000–1800 periods reflect differences in the depth and breadth of the scholarship at this point in time. The usual periodization of Chinese history posits a sharp break between the middle imperial period of 750–1500 (often subsumed under the Tang–Song transition rubric discussed above) and the 1500–1800 era (whether this period should be defined as China’s “early modern” era remains controversial). The scholarship usually reflects this divide as well. However, given the topical structure of the volume, we believe that the 1000–1800 period should be treated as an integral whole.

Volume II similarly is divided into two broad chronological parts that are subdivided into thematic chapters. Part I covers the period from 1800 to 1950, encompassing the last century of the Qing dynasty and the Republican era (1911–1949), in fourteen chapters. Part II, in seven chapters, examines the dramatic transformations of the Chinese economy since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

As the first attempt in the Cambridge History series to focus on Chinese economic history, our two volumes will remedy a large lacuna in the discipline of economic history and respond to the increasing demand from both specialists and the general public for a comprehensive introduction to the subject. These volumes will provide an authoritative survey incorporating up-to-date research at the frontiers of knowledge, including quantitative data that are accessible to a general economic history audience, as well as addressing some of the most important current debates in Chinese and global economic history. We also hope that these volumes will serve both as a standard reference and as a resource for teaching.