The Silk Road trade, which involved mostly prestige goods, started from the Han dynasty, around the second century bce, under the protection of Han imperial expansion into Central Asia. The economy of the Han Empire was mainly based on agriculture. Taxes in the form of agricultural products – such as food grains, silk yarn and floss, and bast-weave cloths such as ramie and hemp – in addition to corvée labor provided the major revenue for the state. Although commerce flourished in cities and connected both rural and urban residents into a nationwide market, traders held the lowest status in the social hierarchy. The impetus for trade with foreign countries, therefore, was initiated by the Han ruling elite, who, like aristocrats in ancient regimes around the world, had always been looking for rare and expensive goods to mark their distinguished status. Meanwhile, the Han Empire engaged in warfare with pastoral nomads of the Central Asian steppe grasslands from the founding of the dynasty. The perennial wars with the Xiongnu nomad confederation extended the horizon of the Han rulers, north to the steppe and west to Central and South Asia, reaching as far as the Mediterranean.

Modern means of transportation and communication along water, rails, and roads had a profound impact on the economic and social development of China from the mid-nineteenth century onward. After the arrival of the steamship in the 1840s and the telegraph in the early 1860s, railroad construction began to emerge slowly at the close of the century, followed by bus and motor traffic bringing about macadamized city streets and highway expansion, with a modest level of air traffic taking off in the 1930s. This chapter addresses the structural changes in transportation and communication that characterized the transition from the last decades of the Qing empire (1644–1911) through the Republican period (1911–1949) to the early years of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

Metallic coinage, markets, and private merchants appeared in China during the Spring and Autumn era (771–453 bce), and they expanded rapidly during the Warring States era (453–221 bce). These periods were marked not only by rapid economic progress, but also by new conceptualizations of money, markets, and merchants. Both in times of political stability such as the Qin, Han, Sui, and Tang dynasties, and in times of political disunion such as the Warring States, the Three Kingdoms, the Jin, and the Northern and Southern Dynasties eras, money, markets, and merchants performed important economic and social roles. Which kinds of goods, then, served a monetary function from the Warring States to the Tang period? How did people use money, and how and where did they buy and sell commodities? What was the relationship between private merchants and governments? In this chapter, these issues will be examined using transmitted documentary records, archaeological materials, numismatic findings, and recently excavated texts.

For the Chinese, the nineteenth century was a period of waking up and realizing why the Middle Kingdom had fallen behind the West in economic growth. Not only had this large and once prosperous country fallen behind economically (with its apparent failure to industrialize), it also fell prey during the two Opium Wars to the same country that first embarked upon the Industrial Revolution – Britain. Consequently, a long period of autarky came to an end. While initially China was forced to open up only several “treaty ports” for trade and commerce, eventually the entire country was subjected to the influences of the West, and in spheres that went far beyond trade and commerce to also include industry, education, and even politics. By assembling data from a variety of previously untapped historical sources, this chapter attempts to analyze the Western influences that shaped the economic trajectories of late imperial China.

Support for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the late 1940s owed much to its willingness to “stand up” against external interference in Chinese affairs, whether by Japan, the USA, or any other colonial power. This nationalist agenda may have been the decisive factor in its victory during the civil war, and it continues to be a key driver of popular support for CCP rule.

The Great Migration ended in 1970 as manufacturing was replaced with electronic goods. Wages stagnated, and income inequality increased rapidly. This led to a new Gilded Age. Nixon replaced Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty with his War on Drugs. Blacks were opposed to Nixon’s Vietnam War, and he penalized them by incarcerating them. This, helped by state laws and President Reagan, led to mass incarceration – which became known as the New Jim Crow. Public education was reserved for suburban whites, while urban Blacks were in prison or attended underfunded schools. The Flint, Michigan, water crisis demonstrates the difficulty of urban Blacks as jobs and urban facilities disappeared. President Obama was the first Black president, elected in the financial crisis of 2008. The Supreme Court nullified the 1965 Voting Act as it had done with amendments in the 1880s. Obamacare was the most enduring achievements of Obama’s presidency.

In the preface to his seminal Studies on the Population of China, 1368–1953, Ping-ti Ho called his book “basically an essay in economic history” that “is not intended to be a demographic analysis, which must be undertaken by experts differently equipped than I.” Ho’s approach was endorsed by John K. Fairbank in his foreword to the book, because “statistics of the modern or would-be-modern type – census data and government statistical reports designed for the purpose – are unavailable for China in the Ming and Ch’ing periods.”1 For Ho and Fairbank, the research approach Ho took in his work belonged to population history, not historical demography. Whereas population history is a subfield of historical studies, using historical research methods to investigate population patterns in history, historical demography is a subfield of demography, mainly using research methods in modern demographic studies, in particular statistical analysis of data such as marriage, reproduction, death, and family structures, and investigates the relationship between fluctuations in these indicators and their social and environmental settings.

The United States is a nation of immigrants. Most immigrants came to America because they wanted to come, but African immigrants were forcibly brought to America by their captors. They differed from other immigrants because they were captives who could not choose their place of residence, and they became enslaved people in the colonies and early United States. This book brings those neglected immigrants into the mainstream of American economic history by describing what happened to them as the economy developed.

Monetary policy as we have seen started as a form of standardisation: ‘this amount of paper is worth this much shiny metal and always will be’ was the main linguistic directive of any monetary policymaker. Wider participation in the political decision-making process and a broader understanding of the problems caused by excessive business cycle volatility, particularly from the middle of the twentieth century, increased the onus on monetary policymaking to go further than merely setting standards. The move from a commodity currency to the fixed-but-adjustable exchange rate system of Bretton Woods, under which leading nations pegged their currency to the US dollar, may superficially not seem very important. Because, rather than fixing domestic currency value in terms of a block of shiny metal, it was now fixed in terms of some other reference currency, in this case the US dollar, which was itself fixed to the same shiny metal. However, a small advantage had been gained, we might say later that it was misused, but advantage there was; it was that the value of domestic currency could be changed relative to the reference currency and the domestic guardian of monetary standard could now also set the price of his or her currency externally to reflect and support adjustment to changing domestic conditions.

Intricate relations between people, animals, and plants were the basis of the entire imperial Chinese order no matter what dynasty was ostensibly in charge. Such relations were environmental in the sense that they formed interdependencies between species under diverse ecological conditions of climate and topography. The most significant environmental historical result of these relations for the eight centuries under study here was agriculture, the main source of China’s human-induced (or “anthropogenic”) ecological change. An extended, instructive example of the intricacies of farming’s requisite resource management comes from the Ming (1368–1644) town of Pingwang in the Yangzi delta, likely the most developed area of contemporary imperial agrarian practice.

Economic forecasters ought to be thankful for pollsters, otherwise they might look very bad indeed. The story that has frequently been repeated is that a recession was forecast in the event of a vote to leave the European Union and because there had been no recession, economic forecasters had let us down. This story is not quite right, for example, in May 2016 the National Institute Economic Review simply argued that growth would be broadly unaffected in 2016 by a vote to leave the European Union and was projected to be almost 1 percentage point lower than the baseline in 2017; a baseline which assumed that the United Kingdom would stay in the European Union. The accuracy of the central forecast for 2016 was reasonable and we all watched carefully to see what then happened.

The first half of the twentieth century witnessed the rise of the state sector of the Chinese economy. The rise of the state sector manifested in the development and expansion of central state enterprises and regional state enterprises and resulted from the ideology and policy of the developmental state. This chapter traces the emergence and evolution of the ideology and policy of the developmental state, describes the development and expansion of central state enterprises and regional state enterprises, and addresses the issue of change and continuity across the 1949 divide.

Reacting to a Black president, voters elected Donald Trump in 2016. He was a real estate entrepreneur who operated at the edge of the law on real estate. He tried to change laws to help him and skirted the edge of reality when he could not. He continued his business while in office and earned money from government operations. He also was a racist who encouraged rural white people to despise Blacks and try hard to hurt them. He tried and failed to repeal Obamacare. Following 2008, investment of all kinds diminished. Physical investment went down; financial investment became harmful to the economy; educational investment was decreased ,and social capital evaporated. When the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic struck, Trump refused to lead a government effort to deal with it, leading to more than 500,000 deaths and economic disaster. Trump ran for reelection on his 2016 program and lost his bid for reelection. President Biden attempted to reign in the pandemic and restore prosperity over continuing Republican opposition.

China has the largest education system in the world today. It educates more than 260 million people and employed 15 million teachers in 2015. Besides its social impact, educational development has often been argued to be one of the primary reasons behind China’s stunning economic growth after the economic reform implemented in 1978. It is therefore of paramount importance to understand how education evolved in Chinese history.