State transformation, reforms and economic performance in China, 1840–1910.

The period immediately after the Opium War (1840–42) marked the first stage of state transformation and economic reforms in modern China. During this period, the age-old socio-political and socio-economic structures and equilibria ended and new structures gradually took shape. Despite political hiccups, including the erosion of China’s sovereignty, the market worked its own way out and modern growth began.

A critical survey of recent research in Chinese economic history.

China is a resilient dinosaur. In contrast with so many other great empires in Eurasia – the Egyptian, Roman, Byzantine, Arabian, Ottoman and Tsarist-Soviet – China has the longest history. The Empire kept expanding until the mid-nineteenth century when it practically reached the physical limits for a predominantly agrarian economy. The size and wealth of the Chinese economy, the variety of its produce and the degree of commercialisation and urbanisation made China one of the most popular international trading destinations from Roman times. With the rise of the opium trade in the early nineteenth century, however, the Chinese economy has been severely impoverished at least in relative terms. In response, since the 1870s, the Chinese sought to rescue their civilisation by adopting a wide range of foreign examples in social engineering for social experiments and reforms. Nevertheless, China's per capita GDP is still very low despite its political influence in the world since the 1970s. It is justifiable to view China as a case of growth failure in the recent centuries. The study of Chinese economic history has the same age as China's modern history itself. The field has been led and dominated by the West. Scholarly attempts have been made since the turn of this century to explain China's premodern success and its downfall after the Opium War. Two approaches can be identified: the 'Sinological approach' which refers to China only and the 'comparative method' which compares China with the West. The former tries to find out what achievements China managed to make and when and how it made them and the latter seeks to understand why premodern China was not industrialised.

Book Review: governance in pacific Asia: political economy and development from Japan to Burma

In his latest book, Peter Ferdinand discusses the increasing economic integration of the Pacific Asian region as well as its impact on global affairs. Kent Deng is impressed by the breadth of the book’s coverage and the way it rethinks the once narrowly conceived boundaries of Asia

Can China’s economic growth recover in 2023?

China has stunned the world by making a sharp U-turn and replacing its draconian ‘Zero-Tolerance’ COVID policy, implemented since 2020, with a ‘Zero-Control’ policy announced just before the New Year 2023. One wonders how and why such a total change of heart by China’s leadership was possible. The answer seems to be: ‘It’s the economy, stupid!’, citing James Carville (or Donald Trump decades later)

Great leaps backward: poverty under Mao.

China had a long history of premodern growth in just about all categories: empire building and expansion, high yield agriculture, a wide range of inventions and innovations, impressive commercialisation and proto-industrialisation, a very strong foreign trade record and a comfortable living standard. However, all these were ruthlessly challenged by the rise of Western capitalism marked by the opium trade and the First Opium War (1840). If imperial China was noted as a country of political and socio-economic equilibrium, modern China since the Opium War has been a place of swinging changes. Mao’s era from 1949 to 1978 was such a period.

Clarifying data for reciprocal comparisons of nutritional standards of living in England and the Yangtze Delta (Jiangnan), c.1644 – c.1840

The Great Divergence Debate, initiated by the ‘California School’ in 1998 has revitalised a meta question for global history of “when,” “how,” and “why” the economies of Western Europe, on the one hand and the Ming-Qing Empire of East Asia, the Mughal empire of South Asia and the Ottoman Dominions of West Asia and the Balkans on the other, diverged economically and geopolitically over one long cycle of Eurasian economic development. This paper is designed to return to ‘basics’ by interrogating the estimates and proxies utilized by participants in the debate by placing them in a nutritional perspective to see whether and to what extent there was a common trajectory between the Yangtze Delta and England after 1500 for (1) a sustainable intake of food and (2) to support an increasingly urbanised, commercialised and industrialised economy. Our conclusion is that although the Yangtze Delta’s average living standards may have been respectable its economy was not modernising due to the mutually reinforcing factors of a physiocratic state, a labour-intensive farming sector, and low levels of urban development. A similar pattern might be shared by the Mughal and Ottoman empires in the same historical context

Japanese colonialism in comparative perspective

The paper examines the economic consequences of Japanese colonialism in Taiwan, Korea and Manchuria in the years from 1910 to 1945, and compares Japanese policies with those implemented by other colonial powers in Southeast Asia. In particular it addresses the writings of an influential group of American scholars who have published widely on Japanese colonial policies over the last fifty years. Their work has been used to support the argument that Japanese colonial policy was more developmental than that of other colonial powers, and laid the foundations for the stellar economic performance of Taiwan and the Republic of Korea in the decades after 1950. The paper challenges this argument by comparing a number of economic and social indicators in Korea, Taiwan and Manchuria with those from other Asian colonies and also from Thailand. The main conclusion is that while the Japanese colonies, especially Taiwan, score well on some indicators, they do less well on others. The idea of Japanese exceptionalism cannot be accepted uncritically

Micro foundations in the Great Divergence debate: opening up a new perspective

Prevailing approaches in historical studies adopt a macro view and place an overwhelming emphasis on the Industrial Revolution as a major discontinuity in Western development. On the contrary, recent research in accounting, management and business history has suggested a different direction. When opting for a micro-level focus, crucial discontinuities in management and accounting in the West can be traced back to the Renaissance Period. The paper thus searches for ‘micro foundations’ in managing and accounting practices to address the on-going debate on the East-West divergence. Despite the obvious problems with source availability, we outline a new research agenda for the debate