The State and Goals of Economic History: A Review of Between Command and Market: Economic Thought and Practice in Early China Edited by Elisa Levi Sabattini and Christian Schwermann. Sinica Leidensia 154. Leiden: Brill, 2021. $150.00 (cloth)

Economic history has long been the “weak link” in the historiography of early China. There are two reasons for this. Western Sinology, given its strong philological tradition inherited from early French-German Sinologies,¹ developed a strong humanities orientation that guided the great majority of scholars into studies of language, literature, philosophy, and art, but paid relatively little attention to the social and especially economic conditions of society.² Modern Chinese historiography, after a half-century (ca. 1930s–1980s) of zeal for Marxist historical theory that treated changes in the economic infrastructure as causes of social development, has now largely reverted to its traditional focus on empirical research, to the regrettable neglect of social theories. This is in marked contrast to the study of the history of the Classical Western world. Since the 1920s, Western historiography has developed deep roots in the social sciences, owing much to the pioneering work of prominent sociologists or sociologist-historians like Max Weber and Karl Polanyi. The polarization of the research agenda around the “primitivism–modernism” debate, though no longer trendy, provided a long energy-drive that generated numerous excellent studies in the economic history of the ancient Mediterranean.³ The study of economic history of the ancient Near East has been conducted within the same theoretical orbit of what can be called a distinctive ancient economy.⁴ It is above all regrettable that early China has been by and large absent from the dialogue about the ancient economy.⁵ However, until early China scholars can transfer our meticulous textual information and archaeological data into general analyses of the economic institutions and performances of our early world, we cannot expect historians of the Classical West to learn the tidbits of our field. Therefore, if we want to engage historians of the Classical West in conversation on these topics, early China scholars must be able to write more consciously for broader audiences. Conversations that are framed in more general, comparative terms will also enable historians of later China to be more easily drawn into the discussion.

The economy of early China was at its foundation different from the Graeco-Roman economy formed on the operation of the “households” of the free citizens, once thought to have been directed essentially to the exploitation of the non-citizen bodies by status rule.⁶ Underlying the Graeco-Roman economic institutions was a city-state culture, which made the Roman Empire behave very differently from the Qin and Han Empires that inherited a long tradition of the bureaucratic management of society and economy.⁷ The economy of early China was characterized by a strong reliance on the political state, which performed the role of a prominent economic actor and mediated between the economic interests of the elite lineages in a condition that resembles that of a domain state.⁸ The “household” was a new economic unit in China that split off the body of the traditional lineage in the broad sociopolitical transition to the territorial state after the seventh century BCE. The new states embraced strong political ambitions, fulfilled invariably through territorial expansion and control, for which purpose it also created unprecedented economic growth in its combined role of both a regulator of economic order and an economic player. Although the above outline of economic history can be learned through macro-historical comparison, the details of it as well as logics behind it await future discoveries.

Elisa Levi Sabattini's and Christian Schwermann's edited volume, Between Command and Market: Economic Thought and Practice in Early China is a meaningful step in this direction. The volume could not be more timely; it is the first organized scholarly undertaking to probe into the darkness of a field with rich new information. The purpose of this review essay is to highlight the volume's unique contributions as well as its limits. In the words of Sabattini and Schwermann, the volume:

[A]ims at integrating studies of early Chinese thought and economic history of the first five centuries BCE to produce an integral view of economic realities, of how they were perceived and interpreted by political thinkers[,] and of how their interpretations influenced economic actions during that formative period, in which the foundations for traditional Chinese approaches to problems of production, consumption, trade and distribution of wealth and to the economic role of the state were laid(9).

Recognizing economic history and economic thought as essentially two disciplines, the editors set as the primary goal of the volume to achieve an integral view of the economic realities of early China, including how economic ideas might have impacted economic practice. Toward this end, five scholars were invited to contribute chapters (1–4, 7) on economic thought, while three chapters (5–6, 8) are devoted to economic practice. In general, the two editors adopt a skeptical altitude towards the economic arguments scattered across the various texts and consider them only “secondarily” sources of economic thought, being influenced by the world view and political agenda of their authors or compilers (23–25).⁹ Nevertheless, they still hope that the texts can be analyzed along with the excavated corpses of manuscripts to reveal economic realities during the five hundred years before the Christian Era. Thanks to their effort, the economic history of early China is finally making some progress.

Contributions of the volume

A good example of using the “secondary” economic sources to uncover economic theory is offered by Paul Goldin in one of the most innovative chapters of the volume. As Goldin points out, the ancient text Yuejue shu 越絕書 contains information about what may be called the “boom-and-bust” price-cycles, ones that are associated with and indicated by the circling movement of Jupiter over twelve years (or twelve stations, six in the Yang section and six in the Yin section), or by the circulation of the Five Phases. These are the economic cycles that are significantly longer than the yearly fluctuation of price in an economy that even modern economists have struggled to explain (52–53).¹⁰ And the association of these economic cycles with celestial bodies or with cosmological concepts was just as natural and attractive in the political and intellectual milieu of pre- to early imperial China. Rulers needed to know these cycles to devise market mechanisms to stabilize prices and the whole economy (55). This is certainly an important discovery that adds a significant piece to the economic theories of early China. But if we go a step further from economic theory to the economy, such a theory could not have existed without a point of reference to economic reality. This means “boom-and-bust” cycles must have been observed in early China. In this sense, Goldin's case actually answers the question the two editors raised in their introduction about the value of the economic arguments in the early Chinese texts which they regarded as only “secondarily” sources of economic thought. In an attempt to date this knowledge, Goldin compares it with descriptions in the Guanzi 管子 that offer specific market mechanisms for price control,¹¹ and the Yantie lun 鹽鐵論 that further advocates the state's monopoly of production in order to control prices of certain commodities. This evolutionary scheme of economic policies seemingly places the Yuejue shu at an earlier stage of development, although Goldin, recognizing that it is difficult to date the text, offers this only as an “impressionistic judgement” (57). In addition, Goldin points out that the Yuejue shu makes no mention of coinage, which was common knowledge by early imperial times; by contrast, the Guanzi chapters apparently relate to some real policies of the Qin and early Han Empires such as government intervention of the salt and iron markets (47, 57). These are very meaningful observations, but I remain skeptical about using the philosophical ideas in a text to date it, even if it is, unfortunately, very often the only option available to a scholar. Nevertheless, the sequence of the latter two texts is rather convincing as the same point is also suggested by Hans van Ess in his chapter.

Yuri Pines contributes a sensitive analysis of the economic thought in the Book of the Lord of Shang.¹² Recognizing that the ideas of the book amount to programing “radical social engineering,” but perhaps not as radical and totalitarian as in other late Warring States texts including the Hanfeizi 韓非子, Pines makes two unique observations about the economic history of pre-imperial China. First, the argument for making people farm was not presented as a positive bureaucratic-administrative way for the state to enrich itself, which is the ultimate purpose of the book, but was based on a subtle understanding of human nature that naturally incentivizes people to pursue “riches and good name” (81–82); the state can utilize (or manipulate) such incentives for its needs by setting up the system of ranks and awards, which is the most important proposal in the book (102–105). Second, the argument against merchants, who are excluded from the system of ranks and merits, was not made through declaring them vermin to society, as in Hanfeizi, but took into account the mechanisms of market exchange. Suppressing merchants can make money cheaper and grain expensive—the idea of qing 輕 vs zhong 重 that was fully developed later in Guanzi—so the people would prefer farming. When more people are engaged in farming, the state is enriched (85–86). Pines also makes other insightful observations concerning the problem of economic growth, a hot topic in economic history in the past twenty years.¹³ However, in my view, Pines's methodologically most inspiring contribution lies in his experiments to try to tie the economic thought in individual chapters of the book to their particular historical contexts and, by doing so, to come up with a chronology for the core chapters of the Book of the Lord of Shang. Although his primary concern is the date of the text, he is making the important crossover from textual history to economic history. For instance, Pines argues that chapter 2, “Orders to Cultivate the Wastelands,” reflects the pre-reform (before Shang Yang) Qin society; that is, a traditional Zhou-model of society based on hereditary rights of the lineages and their elite members who lived on income from the land and people they controlled with tax duty for the state, if any, favorably adjusted (87–88).¹⁴ On the contrary, chapter 6 seems to date to the reform period (definitely before 309 BCE) on account of its clearly expressed dissatisfaction about fields divided into small mu (100 paces long) that was famously changed by Shang Yang in favor of large mu (240 paces long), which has been archaeologically proven to have been in use in Sichuan by 309 BCE (92–94). Another later chapter, 15, seems to describe an increase of population to 70–80,000 supported by 60 li of arable land (compared to ca. 50,000 people on the same arable land face in chapter 6); the same chapter also describes the territory of Qin to have grown to five thousand li, of which 20 percent can be worked to produce grain. According to Pines, this keyed in with the reality of the late Warring States period when Qin had already effectively conquered Sichuan and northwestern Hubei along the Han River valley. More importantly, Pines points out that the strong anti-merchant bias of the book poses a sharp contrast to the thriving commercial economy under the Qin Empire evidenced by excavated manuscripts, and this would seem to Pines to date the book before the rise of a commercial culture in Qin, probably not so late following Qin's first issuance of coins in 337 BCE (104–105). In short, Pines's micro-chronological approach to correlating economic arguments to specific phases of economic reality of Warring States Qin is innovative and largely convincing, although it is inevitable that scholars may still debate his interpretations.

Chapter 3, by Hans van Ess, provides an effective recapture of the main economic ideas in the “Qingzhong” 輕重 chapters of the Guanzi. Emerging from the recapture is a prime financial regime with King Wen and King Wu of Zhou as its arch designers or authority, one that uses three types of money including pearls or jade, gold, and copper coins for exchange (126–128), and takes the price of grain as its fundamental price yoke (121). In this regime, any (local) ruler is allowed to manipulate the market by using administrative orders to create “artificial prices,” so as to “procure the wealth of All under Heaven” and “attract the people of All under Heaven” that will give him supreme power to win in interstate wars (129–132). This latter agenda seems to Van Ess to match Warring State social reality, but could have hardly been conceived under the unified Han Empire (131, 134). Van Ess is more interested in the date of the “Qingzhong” text than in the economic reality of early China, and this can be justified by just how much debate the text has generated among previous scholars (117, 137–140). While not in complete disagreement with the position, first taken by Wang Guowei 王國維 and Luo Genze 羅根澤 and followed by many Chinese and Western scholars, that dates Guanzi to the former Han dynasty, Van Ess is strongly convinced that several statements in the “Qingzhong” chapters do not correlate with this hypothesis, and the world view that a single state strives to conquer all others makes it “highly improbable that these passages were written under the conditions of a unified centralistic state” (139). Certainly, other scholars may have different opinions on this point. Very much in line with what we now know about textual transmission in early China, Van Ess concludes, convincingly in my view, that the “Qingzhong” chapters “may have undergone considerable changes due to editing in Han times[,] but it still looks possible that major parts of the convolute were written before that time” (140).

Andrew Meyer's approach focuses on how a possible economic reality might have altered the intellectual mind and textual habits of the Warring States period, but not how the textual presentations can be analyzed to uncover the economic reality of early China. The two are related, but not the same. Meyer's main argument goes as follows: (Earlier) texts such as the Lunyu 論語 (153)¹⁵ exhibit staunch resistance to market exchange and accept goods such as meat only as part of rituals, not for their market values (147–148). This adheres to a mode of exchange characteristic of the Western Zhou period, as exemplified by the inscription on the Mai fangzun 麥方尊 (JC: 6015)¹⁶ in which, “[r]ather, the ties between lord and vassal are reaffirmed and strengthened by the movement of bronze from one to the other and back to the first” (149). In sharp contrast, late Warring States and early imperial texts such as Hanfeizi, Lüshi Chunqiu 呂氏春秋 and Zhanguo ce 戰國策, and even as early as Mencius 孟子, offer numerous anecdotes that show not only that goods obtained from the marketplace were taken for granted and services were naturally compensated with salaries (as in the cases of Gongyi Xiu and even Mencius) (155–157), but even loyalty and righteousness, concepts of more abstract value (in the examples of Tian Chang, and Feng Xuan) (150, 155), could be rightfully purchased in the market.¹⁷ Meyer notes, quite insightfully, that these are reflections of an ever-expanding commercial economy in the late Warring States period that had made a deep impact on the textual culture and intellectual mind of the time. Meyer's reading of Confucius in the Analects, so resistant to service rendered as commodity in exchange for salary (149), matches so well the government practice of the Western Zhou where officials received no regular salary based on the period of service, but were granted ad hoc gifts symbolizing merely royal favor.¹⁸ However, the Mai fangzun might not be the best example of the Western Zhou mode of ritual exchange, and the reading of its inscription as meaning “to gift the bronze he received back to the lord from whence it came” (likely translating the phrase “用侯逆”) is probably inaccurate.¹⁹ More importantly, it should be noted that, as we are only now beginning to understand the economic reality of the Western Zhou, the ritually appropriate exchange described in the Analects for Confucius was not the only mode of exchange during the Western Zhou; on the contrary, market exchange of labor and commodities occurred in parallel (see below).

Turning to chapter 5 by Maxim Korolkov, we are moving from intellectual history to the realm of economic history. Korolkov starts with a broad vision of the relationship between state, market, and economic institutions considered from the perspective of economic history in general, much of which has been based on Mediterranean (Graeco-Roman) experiences. The study of financial institutions, for instance, contract, credit, transaction costs, is certainly a focus of recent economic history under influence by NIE theory. Here, Korolkov argues that, based on contemporaneous manuscripts from Liye 里耶, the Qin Empire developed a sophisticated credit system that allowed the government to lend money and goods, and the debts to be remitted across different administrative units facilitated by an empire-wide accounting system (175). Officials regularly collected repayments from private debtors in their jurisdiction for loans they received in their former counties of residence. Individual citizens could also receive payment from their residential counties for awards they earned in a different county. For insolvent loans, the government allows the debtor to pay by his labor using the standard conversion rate of 8 coins = 1 day of labor with self-provision (179–180). By the time of the annual report in the eighth month, the officials of the current county would have to provide an “obligation tally” on request to the government at the origin of the debt, and the latter's officials would then be able to credit the owed amount to their account. This required complex records kept in both counties that needed to be verified later until the debt was paid off, again being recorded and announced to the lending county. The smooth operation of the system was guaranteed by the discipline of the Qin bureaucracy exercising authority on behalf of the imperial state, and this was certainly different from both the kind of credit practice that Alain Bresson has recently described for ancient Greece, which consisted of the operation of organized social groups of the free citizens, and from Roman practice.²⁰ Doubtless this system granted the Qin great economic freedom to mobilize and to transport labor forces across long distances for large projects like the construction of walls, roads, bridges, canals, and palaces as well as imperial mausoleums, and to accurately estimate and manage their costs in a centrally directed economic system that Korolkov calls a “Command Economy.” Furthermore, the system allowed the conversion of all legal punishments as well as official disciplinary penalties into cash value, to be paid off in the form of labor service (206–207). Especially the universal conversion system enabled everything (including even social ranks) to be represented by cash-value as commodity, and its price can be compared empire-wide. This, as Korolkov points out, “had an impact on longer-term socio-economic processes such as commercialization, expansion of markets, and changing attitudes toward the value of labour and the status of social groups that provided labour” (164).

Robin Yates’ chapter 6 provides a comprehensive survey of the economic behavior of the Qin government at the county level based on the newly published Liye manuscripts. The chapter offers, first of all, a concise and welcome introduction both to the Liye manuscripts and to the administrative set-up of a Qin county like Qianling 遷陵, whose archive documents were discovered (245–260). As already pointed out by Korolkov, the Qin state is concerned with almost everything of economic value (170). Yates suggests that all of the county bureaus were engaged in economic affairs to some extent, with the Bureaus of Finance, Director of Works, Granaries (Offices of Fields and Domestic Livestock), and Households having the greatest involvement (258). Officials in these bureaus acted in accordance with laws and ordinances relevant to their businesses and produced various standard documents (generally referred to as jiaoquan 校卷) (267),²¹ that conform to specific forms and templates called shi 式 that determined the inclusion or exclusion of information as well as the language in which they do it. Certainly, they also produced large numbers of detailed statistics records (ke 課) in accordance with the standard format (cheng 程) down to the numbers of pigs and chickens on the farm, and official annual reports to the commandery and central government (ji 計) (276–290). One very important recognition is that the county government not only collected taxes for the imperial state, it was itself directly engaged in the production of all kinds of commodities, being in fact the most prominent economic player in its region. The county produced large quantities of grain and hemp on its public fields, raised horses, oxen (cattle), and goats or sheep, as well as dogs, pigs, chickens, and geese, grew various types of vegetables, and operated factories that produced clothes and other necessities. The county's officials freely sold their extra products to private individuals or business groups and purchased from the market necessary things that the county's own production lines could not produce in enough quantity. Certainly, the county was in possession of large numbers of convict laborers that it could put to work on the public farms or in the public factories. But the officials also had to feed and clothe them with items they produced or purchased from the market (290–294). This certainly gives a picture of the Qin county as a giant self-sufficient economic organization. This is the key to the “Command Economy” of early imperial China that inherited the legacy of an early domain economy that goes as far back as to the Western Zhou period.

Elisa Levi Sabattini's own contribution focuses on the economic thought of Jia Yi 賈誼, a founding figure of the mainstream economic policies pursued by the Han Empire since the time of Emperor Wu. However, as Sabattini points out, Jia Yi's economic ideas were not really applied during his lifetime, under Emperor Wen of Han (202–157 BC), when the political situation in the Han Empire was very different from a half century later (351). Therefore, Sabattini admits that her own study of economic thought is “closer to the intellectual history approach” (323). The main subject is Jia Yi's call for state control of the circulation of copper and the imperial monopolization of the right to cast coins. Due to the special social and political circumstances of the founding of the Han Empire and the binary state structure in its early decades, particularly under Emperor Wen, private families (especially the titulary kings) were allowed to cast coins. This was particularly true with the regional kingdoms Wu and Chu that controlled the richest copper mines in southern Anhui, heavily exploited since the late Western Zhou, mines that gave the two states tremendous economic power until their fall in 154 BCE.²² But according to Jia Yi, the damage to society by allowing the private houses to cast coins is multifold (he summarizes it as “Three Disasters”). Most fundamentally, it would endanger the agricultural foundation of the empire (338–339). By contrast, state control of copper and the monopolization of coinage will give the emperor both domestic and international advantages which he summarizes as the “Seven Blessings.” It will cause the people to return to agriculture, eliminate the reasons for mutual distrust among them, and enable the state to use the wealth obtained to establish institutions and to create social distinctions. Internationally, it will eventually enable Han to defeat the Xiongnu Empire.

Kakinuma's contribution is supplemental to his previous articles in English and book-long treatment in Japanese of the monetary system in early China (370–374).²³ On the conceptual level, the mention of the tripartite structure of prices (formed by market price, standard price, and adjusted price) is important and commonly known to scholars of the early imperial period, but his denial of money before the Warring States period is regrettably stuck in the old understanding that market and commerce could not have emerged that early, echoing distantly the early substantitivist position on the market in the ancient economy. The main part of Kakinuma's chapter is devoted to a survey of evidence in Eastern Han texts for the use of copper coins, gold, hemp, and silk as monies, which in most cases are expectations rather than discoveries. Kakinuma has doubts about the total of 700,000 jin of gold accumulated during the Western Han, but the recent discovery of high quality gold (including standard horse-hoof gold) totaling 120 kg from the tomb of Haihunhou 海昏侯 suggests rather the Western Han must have had huge quantities of gold.²⁴ Kakinuma's criterion for accepting a certain type of commodity as “money” is rather unrestricted, which makes his refusal to consider the use of money before the Warring States period rather odd. Recent evidence shows that in the Western Zhou period cowries (and copper ingots) were used to purchase and represent the values of commodities in the same way that coins and textiles did in the Eastern Han period. In my view, the most interesting aspect of this rich chapter is Kakinuma's demonstration of the physical arrangement in the walled market as well as of the mechanisms by which sellers and buyers reached their deals by using the technique of gouju 鉤距 (price comparison), human brokers known as the kuai 儈, and physical price-tags to overcome market insecurity due to information asymmetry (370–374). In addition, the sociology of money, though limited to Eastern Han, is also very interesting (374–375). In short, the real picture of the market and its commercial culture that Kakinuma has tried to construct is a valuable addition to the economic history of early China.

Discussion

Let me turn to some of the issues raised by the above studies and by the volume as a whole that have important ramifications for the economic history of early China, a field of inquiry that can be said to be emerging only now. I hope this discussion will help us highlight the fundamental characteristics of the early Chinese economy, identify key problems that need to be prioritized in future research, and at the same time keep in mind the long-term goals of the economic history of early China. But first of all, a few words must be said about the goal and organizational choices of the present volume and how it is situated in terms of academic disciplines.

Viewed as a volume of economic history, the jump from Korolkov's and Yates's chapters on Qin economy to the money economy of the Eastern Han leaves a regrettable gap, the Western Han, during which important economic reshaping took place that explains the origin of the Eastern Han money economy. Sabattini's chapter on Jia Yi, both by its chronological limit to the first decades of Western Han, and by its focus on economic thought, cannot fill this gap. If the book was ever intended to provide a holistic view of the economy of early China, it would of course have had to cover the entire Bronze Age. Omitting it makes Qin economic practice look much like an abrupt freak. However, the volume's coverage of works of economic thought is rather extensive, discussing most of the important political-economic texts from early China. As such, the five chapters taken together can serve as a valuable introduction to early Chinese economic thought and texts. The two segments, one on economic thought and the other on economic reality, each has excellent chapters. Though arranged to intercept each other in an overall chronological order, they really sail well as two boats heading to different ports (or perhaps a number of ports). Except for Pines, few authors make reference or comparison to the economic realities presented in the three chapters, and there is no sign that any of the three reality chapters was framed by the economic arguments presented in the chapters on economic thought. Frankly, there is still a long way to go for the volume to achieve “an integral view of economic realities” of early China.

This disparity is understandable given the limit of chapters in the volume, but it also reflects an unfortunate boundary between the two fields of knowledge: economic thought is essentially both a subject of philosophy and of intellectual history (323), while economic history is a subfield of social history. There is a division between the scholars who are fundamentally concerned with how the ancient mind worked and the scholars whose aim is to explain how the society worked in ancient times. The two groups of scholars stand on different bases of knowledge, are equipped with different intellectual habits, and pursue different goals of intellectual inquiry. To make the transmitted political-economic texts serve the purpose of economic history will require graduate programs that build the training and competence of both scholars of thought and those of economic history into one coherent intellectual enterprise.

If there is an overall argument about the early Chinese economy in the book, it is the view of the two editors that the ancient Chinese economy differs from the Polanyi-Finley model of substantivist economy for its strong trend towards market exchange, commercialization of its products, and manipulation of prices (1–2). However, this overall argument, as noted above, is taking the Warring States period as its vantage point, while excluding the entire millennium of economic development before it. Moreover, the supposed commercialization that characterized the Warring States economy (or, in the view of Pines, of Qin only after the reform of Shang Yang in the mid-fourth century BCE) and triggered people to think “the ancient Chinese economy might not have been as firmly ‘imbedded’ in culture and society” (1), had very different drives and supporting dynamics that need serious further studies to reveal, from that which supported the Graeco-Roman market economy, especially in its most modernist version reconstructed by Peter Tamin.²⁵ The Roman Empire would go as far as putting the right to collect taxes up for auction to private entrepreneurs in a system that was called “Tax-farming,”²⁶ which would be unthinkable in the Qin and Han Empires; as Yates demonstrates, Qin officials carefully calculated and collected taxes in each category although we do not necessarily know the share of the tax revenue that was left for local use by the county (294–304). Underlying this contrast between the two ancient economies is the real question: Viewed from the standpoint of China, what was the relationship between the expansion of the territorial states and the rise of a commercial economy? (163). The macro historical process in China from regional states to territorial states and to empire is fully demonstratable with our current evidence, and has its own logic of development.²⁷ So, more likely the commercialization of the economy was the result of a series of social and economic reforms and inventions necessitated and implemented by the ever-growing territorial state, but not possibly the other way around as in the Mediterranean world.²⁸ But the question is then: How? In this regard, Yates's and Korolkov's chapters are excellent expositions of the state's central role in the economy at the county level, but more work needs to be done to address the imperial state's role in the overall economic system. In other words, not only had the economy “never been independent from political centre” of the state (3), but all commercial and market developments have to be understood as the expansion of the state's economic nervous system. This raises two related questions that I should discuss.

The first concerns the state's role as a prominent player in the economy, and this role is different both from that of the creator of economic institutions and guarantor of economic order, and from that of a monopolizer of certain sectors of the economy, advocated by Jia Yi. The state, as seen in Liye, managed large areas of agricultural lands, raised pigs and chickens, grew vegetables, and operated factories. This contrasts sharply with governments in the Mediterranean world that by and large are satisfied with the role of a consumer who, through taxation, enjoyed the lion's share of the output of the economy.²⁹ But why this difference? Simply speaking, the ancient Chinese economy since the Bronze Age had the strong characteristics of that of a “domain state,” in which the royal house and the state produced large proportions of the material provision that it needed to survive, and made its budget (if any) based on it.³⁰ It can also be considered a lineage economy in which the whole economy was sliced into many largely independent domains organized by the lineages. The state was poised in a network of exchange between the lineage contingents as main economic players, although it apparently controlled large proportions of key materials such as copper that gave the state economic advantage. This mode of economic management can be fully demonstrated for the Western Zhou period based on the bronze inscriptions.³¹ Although evidence for the subsequent centuries needs to be systematically analyzed, it would be odd if the Spring and Autumn economy differed dramatically from it. It was this tradition of a domain economy that was easily transferred into a state-directed “Command Economy” in the process of the state's expansion into a territorial giant.

Viewing the economic development in early China this way, we must also rethink the place of the private economy in the economic system of the early empires. This is also the reason the editors of the volume are in fact against the concept of “Command Economy” because of the booming private economic activities in the early empires (29–30).³² Yates provides evidence that county officials purchased products from the private entrepreneurs in order to clothe labor forces under their care (293). Previously, Korolkov also demonstrated that the private market served as a buffer zone for the state to which the county released its extra labor force especially in low seasons in order to reduce costs.³³ On the other hand, Sabattini and Schwermann provide cases that government officials in Western Han were allowed to operate private businesses (27–29). The evidence suggests that the private economy was not only supplemental to the state economy, but was indispensable to the healthy operation of the state economy. In the long-run, the development of the private economy can be seen as a necessary response to the long tradition of the state's role as a main economic player, which assigned to the private economy the role as the state's business partner (332). Viewing their relationship this way, perhaps the strong anti-merchant sentiment so sharply expressed in the works of Jia Yi and others can be seen as merely a reflection of the anxiety of state officials over a competitive private economy in a special time when the state's economic power was relatively weak.

Only Korolkov associates his work with the century-long tradition of economic history that was developed mainly based on Mediterranean experience (165–169). Of course, the editors are also familiar with this development; however, it is interesting that they seem to follow it to a different theoretical conclusion. Korolkov suggests that the Qin economy shows essential resemblance to the substantivist model of economy that places the political state and its institutions at the foundation of the economic order of the market.³⁴ Sabattini, on the other hand, argues that “ancient Chinese economy might not have been as firmly ‘imbedded’ in culture and society as Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) and, in his wake, Moses I. Finley (1912–1986) thought its Greek counterpart to have been” (1–2), because of its higher degree of commercialization (this is itself a problematic proposition). Certainly, there is a huge inventory of literature in economic history after Finley that is rich in both theoretical reconsiderations and methodological innovations that can duly guide our study of the economy of early China. In this regard, early China scholars are facing both a dilemma and an opportunity. On the one hand, there is an embarrassing lack of theoretical foundation to studying the economy of early China; on the other hand, there is a compelling wealth of theories and methodologies in the economic history of the ancient Mediterranean. If we are ever going to build the economic history of early China as a branch of the economic history of Western historiography, we must make greater effort to digest this great intellectual legacy before turning to the evidence of practice from early China. At the same time, we must also keep in mind that the Greek economy (leaving aside the Greek Bronze Age for now), was dramatically different from the Roman economy both in size and in structure. For example, Korolkov refers to Keith Hopkins’ early work to build the state and market into a single economic model, which is referred to as the “Tax-Trade” model of the Roman economy (167).³⁵ However, the Romans collected taxes only in cash which caused the provinces to have to find ways to offset their fiscal deficit through trading with the center, as Hopkins argued. This is not only different from the Qin Empire, which collected taxes mainly in kind, but also from the economic system of the Greek city-state where the state's legal authority was built on economic initiatives of the private, often tax-exempted citizens.³⁶

It is more urgent, however, to study the economic history of the Bronze Age. This is the period that scholars of economic thought unfortunately have little to contribute; instead, our information about the economy of the Bronze Age comes almost entirely from archaeology, augmented by paleographical documentation. To be sure, there has never been a lack of interest among archaeologists about the facts of production and, to a lesser degree, distribution of key material goods. But their eyes often skip over the organizing structure of the production as well as the social mechanisms and institutions that determined the special conditions of distribution and consumption. There have been recently some useful analyses of the archaeological data to assess the economic conditions and modes of production of the Shang and Western Zhou period. These studies show, quite contrary to the economic historians’ previous understanding of the early state that embedded a “redistributive” economy, the perspective of an early stage of a commodity economy, based on mass-production of ritual or everyday objects in huge factories.³⁷ The studies also show that it is beneficial, and indeed necessary, for the archaeologists who deal with matters in economy to conduct research under agendas developed by social historians, so the meaning of their material evidence can be fully appreciated by historians in cross-cultural analyses. On the other hand, historians of China have also begun to take the period into their general account of the economic development of pre-modern China.³⁸ However, we are yet to see systematic analyses of the period as a whole that can both establish the theoretic framework and methodological guidelines, and also account for its archaeological as well as paleographic evidence. Such studies should have the potential to explain economic changes in the centuries during which the territorial state was formed, thus offering new explanations about the rise of the imperial economy.

This is an important book, and it will be remembered as one of the stepping stones by which the study of the economic history of early China has taken off. There is still a long way to go for early China scholars to develop their own positions about the economy of early states and empires, but the way was even longer without the contributions in this book.