You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
John Dardess has selected a region of great political and intellectual importance, but one which local history has left almost untouched, for this detailed social history of T'ai-ho county during the Ming dynasty. Rather than making a sweeping, general survey of the region, he follows the careers of a large number of native sons and their relationship to Ming imperial politics. Using previously unexplored primary sources, Dardess details the rise and development of T'ai-ho village kinship, family lineage, landscape, agriculture, and economy. He follows its literati to positions of prominence in imperial government. This concentration on the history of one county over almost three centuries g...
One of the most important questions facing scholars of China is how Chinese society is held together. It is now well known that China has been marked by great diversity. In the realm of social customs, not only were there broad regional or class differences, but also, at a local level, the people in one village might adopt a different set of practices from those of neighboring communities. Yet the majority of these varied practices seems to have fit within a frame that was distinctly Chinese. Thus scholars must also ask how people of dissimilar occupations and economic interests, living in widely separated parts of the country, came to recognize and act on a common set of cultural beliefs. E...
The development of China’s economy has long been an enigma to Western historians. Did it consist of centuries of stagnation followed by a period of collapse or was it a process of steady development, reaching a high point by the eighteenth century? What is certain is that China’s economic growth never developed into a full industrial revolution and China was overtaken by the West, but the reasons for this are highly contested both within and outside China. Topics of the Key Papers here include land use and land ownership, handicraft industries and early industrialization, trade and commerce, transport and communication and taxation and finance. It begins with papers on the earliest development of the economy in the Qin and Han dynasties, but concentrates on the periods of greatest interest and most significant development, namely the commercial revolution of the Song dynasty, the industrial and commercial expansion of the mid-Ming and the impact of Western and Japanese trade and investment in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.