This book is unique in its depth of perspective. It uses a comparative approach to explain why China’s role in the world economy has changed so dramatically in the last thousand years. It concludes that China is likely to resume its natural role as the world’s largest economy by the year 2015, thus regaining the position it had held until the end of the nineteenth century.
The study provides a major reassessment of the scale and scope of China’s resurgence over the past half century, employing quantitative measurement techniques which are standard practice in OECD countries, but which have not hitherto been available for China.
Written by the author of many studies on comparative economic history, including two best sellers for the OECD Development Centre, this book is essential reading for all those who seek to understand the role of China in the world economy, in the past, as well as in the present and the future.

Chinese economic performance in the long run

The "Rise of the West" has been treated by economic historians as stemming from the onset of rapid economic growth, driven by technological advances. In contrast, all premodern and non-Western economies have been treated as showing only slow or no growth, interrupted by periodic crises. This is an error. Examined closely, many premodern and non-Western economies show spurts or efflorescences of economic growth, including sustained increases in both population and living standards, in urbanization, and in underlying technological change. Medieval Europe, Golden Age Holland, and Qing China, among other cases, show such remarkable efflorescences of impressive economic growth.Yet these did not lead to modern industrialized societies. The distinctive feature of Western economies since 1800 has not been growth per se, but growth based on a specific set of elements: engines to extract motive power from fossil fuels, to a degree hitherto rarely appreciated by historians; the application of empirical science to understanding both nature and practical problems of production; and the marriage of empirically oriented science to a national culture of educated craftsmen and entrepreneurs broadly educated in basic principles of mechanics and experimental approaches to knowledge. This combination developed from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries only in Britain, and was unlikely to have developed anywhere else in world history.

Efflorescences and Economic Growth in World History: Rethinking the "Rise of the West" and the Industrial Revolution

Modern economic growth started in the West in the early nineteenth century. This survey discusses the precise connection between the Industrial Revolution and the beginnings of growth, and connects it to the intellectual and economic factors underlying the growth of useful knowledge. The connections between science, technology and human capital are re-examined, and the role of the eighteenth century Enlightenment in bringing about modern growth is highlighted. Specifically, the paper argues that the Enlightenment changed the agenda of scientific research and deepened the connections between theory and practice.

/pdf/long-term-economic-growth-and-the-history-of-technology-qmdik18onn.pdf

Long-Term Economic Growth and the History of Technology

This chapter focuses on personalism, elaborating on the three key elements—guanxi, xinyong, and personal control. It takes a critical view of the culturalist explanation for Chinese business success and the inferred disparity between an idealized, static model of the three concepts and that of how guanxi and xinyong are dynamic concepts and how they actually play out in the reality of running a firm. The chapter also makes a key distinction of guanxi bases as a necessary prerequisite but not equivalent to guanxi relations, in the process identifying six main guanxi bases—locality/dialect, fictive kinship, kinship, workplace, trade associations and social clubs, and friendship. It suggests that a multiplex of guanxi relations facilitates better business ties than singular strands. The chapter explores the difference between personal trust and systems trust. It stresses the need to consider institutional and environmental elements that may shape the organization of Chinese firms rather than just the organization per se.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/591264.pdf

Guanxi Bases, Xinyong and Chinese Business Networks

Collective action theorists propose that state formation results from the strategic behavior of rational and self-interested actors, both a political elite and those outside the official structure of the state (Levi 1988: 3) The approach taken to collective action research by political scientists provides a potential path for anthropological inquiry, although, in their publications we find methodological inadequacy in hypothesis testing and a tendency to depend on European and Mediterranean history for sources of comparative data We attempt to overcome these shortcomings by subjecting the theory to a rigorous attempt at falsification using systematic cross-cultural analysis based on a world-wide sample of societies We describe the theory, show how we operationalized it for cross-cultural comparative coding, and describe the main results of our analysis

Collective action in the formation of pre-modern states

A dictionary of official titles in Imperial China

Conflict and Control in Late Imperial China.

Introduction Part I. The formative age, prehistory-206 BC 1. General history 2. State and society 3. Thought 34. Literature and art Part II. The Early Empire, 206 BC-AD 960: 5. General history 6. Government 7. Society and the economy 8. Thought 9. Literature and art Part III. The Later Empire, 960-1850: 10. General history 11. Government 12. Society and the economy 13. Thought 14. Literature and art Epilogue.

Charles O. Hucker

Papers

A dictionary of official titles in Imperial China

Conflict and Control in Late Imperial China.

China's Imperial Past : An Introduction to Chinese History and Culture

Governmental Organization of The Ming Dynasty

The censorial system of Ming China