The Cambridge Economic History of China

"These two colossal volumes cover much of the recorded history of China, from about 1000 BC to the present. Dutch economic history may be understudied, Chinese economic history is much more so. Chinese economic history is important, not only because China has historically been one of the world’s largest and most powerful states, but also because, up to the late Middle Ages, it had experienced precocious economic development, responsible for many key innovations that only surfaced in Europe centuries later. In these two volumes, Ma and von Glahn put together a massive collection of essays on thematic topics throughout the economic history of China. As an early modern economic historian, I’m most interested in the first volume. There are some really fascinating essays, for example on the early development of Chinese fiscal capacity. While Western Europe had barely experienced any state formation, China was already building a fairly advanced state that collected quite a lot of taxes. The volume is influenced by the legacy of Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence , which argues that because of ecological bottlenecks, China was unable to experience the breakthrough to industrialization that Europe did at the end of the early modern period. So the latter part—maybe two-thirds of the first volume—summarizes the research inspired by and evaluating that book, and looking at how China’s advanced market economy interacted with its agrarian institutions and its ecological resources. Pomeranz himself authors an excellent chapter on Chinese agriculture, detailing the transformation of the country’s crop mix toward cotton, tobacco, and maize; irrigation and crop rotations; and the factors contributing to stagnation during the eighteenth century. The second volume is looking primarily at economic development surrounding the Opium Wars and the advent of Western adventurism into China, then moving on into the Communist period and, finally, its post-1978 economic transition into modern economic growth and semi-capitalist institutions. It’s animated by two fundamental questions: first, about the results (positive and/or negative) of European influence on China; and second, about the causes and nature of China’s late-20th-century growth miracle. This book is the most comprehensive survey of China’s economic history ever written and by poring through all of it, you’d be pretty close to becoming an expert. Part of our best books of 2022 series."