6 - The political economy of agrarian empire and its modern legacy

Summary

The problems of explaining change in Chinese economic history

The difficulties of adapting explanations of economic change in European history to the Chinese experience have challenged some of the best specialists working on Chinese history throughout the twentieth century, as well as a number of equally gifted social theorists and comparativists. Many scholars have developed expectations for economic change in China based on readings of economic change in Europe because this is the better studied area. Indeed, until the last few decades, most general arguments about historical change in agrarian economies and the development of industrial economies had as their empirical base, either implicitly or explicitly, some assessment of European experiences of capitalism. When we take European developments as the norm, all other experiences appear to be abnormal. We begin to search for what went wrong in other parts of the world. This is especially the case for a civilization like China where improvements in agricultural production and handicrafts were joined to the spread of commercialization and urbanization beginning in the tenth century to create what one tradition of Japanese scholarship has labeled China's “modern age” (kinsei). The Japanese Marxist tradition, as we've seen in Timothy Brook's earlier chapter, disputes this assessment, but shares with interpretations of China's “modern” (by European standards) tenth-century economic development the challenge of explaining the absence of a European-like set of economic changes thereafter.