The Great Qing Empire (1644–1912) was the most populous political entity that had yet existed on the landmass that we now refer to as “China,” and its economy was possibly one of the most developed. But by the first several decades of the nineteenth century, the Jiaqing and early Daoguang reigns, there had emerged a general consensus among elites both in and out of government that the empire was facing a multifaceted and potentially catastrophic crisis of the economy, polity, and society. By this point the Qing had already begun to be significantly incorporated into the early modern world economy, although it had not yet experienced, as it very shortly would, military conflict with the West and the invasion by Western agents of economic and cultural change that would follow in its wake.

Reconstruction ended in 1876 as railroads, mining, and agriculture grew. Robber Barons emerged as the leaders of these activities became rich. The Supreme Court in the 1880s eliminated the constitutional amendments passed during Reconstruction to help Blacks by either rejecting them or reinterpreting them. Jim Crow laws were passed in many Southern states after 1896 depriving Blacks of the vote and leading to a decline in Black education. I describe the movie, Birth of a Nation, to show the attitude of white people at the time of World War I toward Blacks and Reconstruction. Those views have been shown since to be totally false.

The first part of my conclusion recalls the journey of African Americans from the formation of the United States to the present as discussed in previous chapters. The second part of my conclusion looks forward to improve education for Black students. Learning from research in education since Brown v. Board of Education and from dramatic wealth differences between white and Black graduates at different levels, a variety of efforts have been made to improve Black education. There are political hurdles to spending money on Black education and conflicts with the effects of mass incarceration. The possibility of educational success for all Americans, like the health of all Americans in the pandemic, may remain illusive.

By the mid-eighteenth century, the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) was the dominant power within Asia. Its political system and institutions of state building were founded on structures inherited from previous Chinese dynasties as well as on the social and cultural codes of interaction among polities across Central Eurasia, East Asia, and Southeast Asia. Foreign trade between China and other countries within and outside Asia was a calculated matter of political strategy and economic gain. In the decades leading up to the First Opium War of 1839 to 1842, China’s stance with respect to the Sino-Western trade became increasingly at odds with British ambitions in Asia. The growing tensions stemmed from abiding differences in the political economy of not just two nations, but two empires. The overseas influence of the British Empire took on a forceful new impetus with the British Industrial Revolution, and, over the nineteenth century, technological improvements in transport continued to power Western expansion in global trade.

Without doubt, money and monetary policymaking has evolved significantly. The original function of money was to allow trade with a standardised unit of account. A monetary policy would originally have implied simply some arrangement of institutional practice so that the right amount of commodity-based money could be used to facilitate the level of trade. It is probably the case, as is still the case in many parts of the world, that large amounts of trade stood outside the monetary system and relied on barter or non-pecuniary grace and favours. Even standardisation was and remains no easy matter as it is no simple task to set the correct relative prices between various types of monies and goods, ensure the absence of counterfeiting, or clipping, and decide on how to get the right amount of money into circulation. We continue to debate whether notes should be limited in denomination and whether monetary policy will have to be rethought once all money is electronic, which is now part of the very near future.

One of the interesting canards, perhaps as a result of the inflationary episodes of the 1970s and 1980s, was that price stability rapidly developed into a sufficient statistic to judge whether a macroeconomic equilibrium had been achieved. In both the public arena and the policy sphere, the continuing attainment of low and stable rates of inflation seemed to suggest that monetary policy had not only functioned well but perhaps had discovered the key ‘to end boom and bust’. Indeed, the then chancellor, Gordon Brown, summed up the view well, which was very much the overall consensus at the time, in a speech to the British Chamber of Commerce in 2000:

The rural economy will predominate in almost any preindustrial society – perhaps particularly so in China. No barriers comparable to medieval Europe’s guild rules made large sectors into urban monopolies; and though China was probably the world’s most urbanized large society c. 1200, and perhaps still as urban as Europe in the late 1600s, much of its elite lived in the countryside rather than in cities or fortified castles (especially between roughly 1100 and 1550). Moreover, the property systems prevailing in China’s most commercialized areas created incentives for most nonelite families to remain in the countryside, transferring labor not needed for farming to handicrafts without moving to town. The result was a highly diversified rural economy and cities that, though often quite large, were much smaller than the rural surplus could have supported.

For over two millennia, China has sustained the largest single human society on the planet through the development of one of the most sophisticated agrarian systems in history. Even until quite recent, agriculture occupied a central place in the Chinese economy, commanding a dominant 60 to 70 percent of the total economy throughout. Agricultural institutions define the Chinese economic system and agricultural production drove long-run economic change or growth in China. Agriculture was at the center of the Great Divergence debate. Agricultural harvest or failures sometimes spelled the rise and fall of dynasties throughout history. Moving to the modern era, Chinese agriculture became the scapegoat for China’s modernization failure and was regarded as the incubator for Communist revolution. However, given its overriding importance, research on modern Chinese agriculture has been surprisingly understudied for the last few decades.

Reconstruction followed the Civil War and Lincoln’s assassination. Under President Andrew Johnson, presidential reconstruction was favorable to the defeated slaveowners. When Johnson was impeached and then defeated in the polls, Radical Republicans in Congress took over Reconstruction. They were not radical enough to give freedmen 40 acres and a mule, and their efforts to reform Southern state governments were only temporary. President Grant tried to help freedmen, but Republicans transferred their interest from the violent South to the expanding West.