As Richard von Glahn points out in the “Introduction” to The Economic History of China: From Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century, there is currently no other comprehensive English-language survey of China's economic history. For more than 40 years, Mark Elvin's The Pattern of the Chinese Past (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1973) has effectively served as the point of entry despite never being intended to play that role (pp. 3, 7). The Economic History of China is intended to serve as just this type of comprehensive survey, updating and expanding the scope of Elvin's seminal work with four decades of research in Chinese, Japanese, and Western languages. Each of the nine chronological chapters summarizes research on areas of fiscal and monetary policy, social and economic organization, demography and urbanization, technological change, and commerce and markets. Each chapter also presents case studies to give intuitive and specific pictures of local society.
Yet this is more than a work of summary and synthesis. While von Glahn is clear that he “[has] not proposed an overarching theory of the Chinese economy,” he does have two theoretical perspectives to advance: a repudiation “of any linear, stadial notion of history or economic development” and a disavowal of “a fundamental tenet of neoclassical economics, namely the idea that the market is the driving force in economic development” (his emphasis, p. 7). This provokes two major interventions: a non-linear and non-determinist periodization and summary of Chinese history; and a specific intervention into the debates over China's development and standards of living that emerged around Kenneth Pomeranz's The Great Divergence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
Von Glahn actively disavows the Weberian and Marxist portrayals of Chinese society as largely static until the intervention of the West (p. 1), as well as work by China scholars that portrays China as “trapped in some form of structural equilibrium” outside of a few periods of revolutionary change (p. 4). Instead von Glahn offers a new periodization of Chinese history based on state attitudes and interventions into the economy. Chapter 1 describes the “patrimonial state” in the early Zhou (1045 to 707 bce), based on loose associations of autarchic communities. He then follows the transition to “city states” (Chapter 2) and the creation of the fiscal state in the Qin and Early Han (250–281 bce, Chapter 3). Von Glahn identifies two forms of fiscal sate: a “military-physiocratic state” with a focus on agriculture and war (p. 85), and a “mercantilist fiscal state” that “manipulates the terms of exchange and the money supply” (p. 118). He uses these two types to describe state policy for the rest of premodern Chinese history: a period of division (Chapter 4); the restoration of a fiscal state by foreign dynasties (Chapter 5); the mercantilist state reemerging in the late Tang and Song (c. 780–1127, Chapter 6); the “Heyday of the Jiangnan Economy” between 1127 and 1550 under a strong money supply (Chapter 7); and finally, opposition to commerce in the Ming and Qing (1368–1911 ce) and a devolution to a “military-physiocratic” style government (Chapters 7 and 8).
This periodization provides a very useful framework for analysis, which in the Chinese context must address the role of the state in the economy. Terms like “patrimonial,” “physiocratic,” and “mercantilist” reflect Chinese economic thought far better than traditional terms like “feudal. ” Yet these terms are still fundamentally anachronistic, grounded in the European experience more than a millennium after the events described in China. I am also troubled by the absence of any treatment of the Liao and Jin Dynasties (916–1234), important states in North China which are addressed in existing scholarship; and by a rather one-dimensional understanding of the Ming state with minimal reference to key Chinese scholarship on Ming fiscal policy. (See, especially Liang Fangzong. Liang Fangzhong wenji [Collected Works of Liang Fangzhong]. Beijing: Zhonghua Book Company, 2008–2011.) More generally, von Glahn imputes that a mercantilist state offered the best governance for the Chinese economy; this is a refreshing change from the free-market zealotry of neoclassical economics, but the success of the mercantilist position is controversial in Chinese historiography.
If von Glahn's new periodization will be both useful and controversial, his treatment of the Great Divergence debate will likely draw the most attention. Von Glahn gives an authoritative summary of market development in China both before (Chapter 8) and after 1800 (Chapter 9). He presents new evidence showing standards of living, degree of market integration, and credit availability were all lower in China than in Western Europe around 1800. Yet von Glahn notes that Chinese institutions for credit, contract, partnership, and business organization were different from European institutions, but not necessarily inferior. Differences between Europe and China were of degree, and did not categorically preclude China from industrial development. Von Glahn also disagrees with other “California School” arguments that the divergence of Chinese and European fortunes was based in resource availability (Pomeranz, The Great Divergence), or the degree of urbanization (Jean-Laurent Rosenthal and R. Bin Wong, Before and Beyond Divergence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). Instead he returns with new evidence to support an old argument: that warfare and the development of treaty ports in the nineteenth century destroyed and displaced native Chinese institutions.
As a reference work and introduction The Economic History of China is an astounding success. It is eminently readable, succinct but thorough; it touches upon all major areas of economic history, and most major debates in both Chinese and comparative economic history. A particular strength is the attention to language: for each key term von Glahn provides a brief institutional history; a clear, context-sensitive English translation; and the original term in Chinese. Von Glahn's original arguments on the nature of political and economic change, the periodization of Chinese history, and the divergence debate are clear and provocative, and largely persuasive. Despite minor oversights, The Economic History of China lives up to its promise to both summarize and frame China's economic history. It is highly recommended to both specialists on China and comparative scholars of political and economic history.
