Utilising Marxian, Weberian, and institutionalist approaches, this book proposes a new theoretical framework for understanding the nature of Chinese economic history: the 'imperial mode' of China. The book aims to innovatively apply a cohesive historical materialist framework to the economic evolution of China, while at the same time offering micro-analysis of China's institutions throughout its history.

Taking a long-run perspective, from ancient China up until the present, the book aims to show how Chinese economic history can be viewed as a dynamic evolutionary process consisting of various stages. The first part of the book lays out the imperial mode as a mode of production based on China's agricultural economy, with a structure consisting of a central authority, the bureaucratic system, and the peasantry. The second part then chronologically examines the different dynasties through this analytical lens and suggests ways in which China's resistance to institutional changesin the early modern period has had long-lasting consequences for its economic development. The book goes on to show how the imperial mode is able to facilitate the agricultural economy, but did not foster the modern commercial and industrial economy. It integrates modern China into the long wave of economic history, showing how this imperial mode still exerts influence on China's current path of development, as well as introducing a new way of understanding communist China from a historical perspective.

This book will have interdisciplinary appeal for researchers and students of economic history, economic development, the history of China, economic sociology, and social history more broadly.

Introduces a new theoretical framework for understanding Chinese economic history Presents a long-run examination of Chinese economic history from ancient China up to the present day Contrasts the economic development of China with the rise of more individualised economic systems in the West

Autorentext

George Hong Jiang is an assistant researcher in the School of Economics at Peking University and also a visiting researcher in the Max Weber Institute of Sociology at Heidelberg Universität. He was previously a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. He got a doctoral degree in macroeconomics at the Department of Economic Policy and Quantitative Methods, J. W. Goethe Universität Frankfurt.

Inhalt
Part I. Origins 1.- Introduction 2.- A Historical Pattern: The Imperial Mode of China 3.- The Empire-building in the Pre-Qin Period 4.- Ideas Matter: Profound Thought in the Pre-Qin Period Part II. Trajectories.- 5. Adolescence of the Imperial Mode 6.- Maturity: The Tang-Song Transition 7.- Mismatch: The Ossifying Institutions 8.- Beginning Modernization: The Late Qing and the Republican Period 9.- Zigzag Modernization in Communist China Part III. "Aufheben".- 10. The Rise of the West: What Happened and How 11.- China's Peculiarities: Why China Declined and Rebounded 12.- To Understand China: The Past and the Future.