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Wenkai He shows why England and Japan, facing crises in public finance, developed the tools and institutions of a modern fiscal state, while China, facing similar circumstances, did not. He’s explanation for China’s failure at a critical moment illuminates one of the most important but least understood transformations of the modern world.
This survey of the fiscal history of China's last imperial dynasty explains why its ability to tax was unusually weak. It argues that the answer lies in the internal ideological worldviews of the political elite, rather than in external political or economic constraints.
China's extraordinary rise as an economic powerhouse in the past two decades poses a challenge to many long-held assumptions about the relationship between political institutions and economic development. Economic prosperity also was vitally important to the longevity of the Chinese Empire throughout the preindustrial era. Before the eighteenth century, China's economy shared some of the features, such as highly productive agriculture and sophisticated markets, found in the most advanced regions of Europe. But in many respects, from the central importance of irrigated rice farming to family structure, property rights, the status of merchants, the monetary system, and the imperial state's fiscal and economic policies, China's preindustrial economy diverged from the Western path of development. In this comprehensive but accessible study, Richard von Glahn examines the institutional foundations, continuities and discontinuities in China's economic development over three millennia, from the Bronze Age to the early twentieth century.
At publication date, a free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Scholarly discussions on economic development in history, specifically those linked to industrialization or modern economic growth, have paid great attention to the formation and development of the market economy as a set of institutions able to augment people’s welfare. The role of specific nonmarket practices for promoting the economic development and welfare has been a distinct concern, typically involving discussion of the state’s economic policies. How have societies tackled those issues t...
AD 690: Caught between Emperor and Caliph, Spain's children fight for their nation - and each other. Far from his homeland, Theudemir of Aurariola counts it a curse when his commander asks him to spy on the Greek fleet he serves. His honour weighs him down in the wars between Emperor and Caliph, where men serve only themselves and treachery takes what battle does not. His best friend Yosef has disappeared, the woman he loves is fighting on Saharan sands, and an old enemy threatens the uneasy alliance he leads. When Spain's civil war threatens the lives of those he loves, it is time for Theudemir to go home. But with Spain divided by bitter civil war, home is no longer simple - and neither is...
This book explores ways foreign intervention and external rivalries can affect the institutionalization of governance in weak states. When sufficiently competitive, foreign rivalries in a weak state can actually foster the political centralization, territoriality and autonomy associated with state sovereignty. This counterintuitive finding comes from studying the collective effects of foreign contestation over a weak state as informed by changes in the expected opportunity cost of intervention for outside actors. When interveners associate high opportunity costs with intervention, they bolster sovereign statehood as a next best alternative to their worst fear - domination of that polity by adversaries. Sovereign statehood develops if foreign actors concurrently and consistently behave this way toward a weak state. This book evaluates that argument against three 'least likely' cases - China, Indonesia and Thailand between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries.
Provides an alternative to both capitalist and communist conceptions of modern historical development based on relations to property
A "meticulously planned murder plot," a conspiracy that spanned tens of years! From the moment a famous actress' nude 'died in the hotel, a splendid revenge' assassination 'was quietly unveiled! A police officer who was expelled from the police force, a police officer who was in active service but had a dishonorable past, and a retired spy who was both righteous and evil but could not differentiate between the two, met each other on the killing stage. Truth, evil, lies, deceit. Where would one find the light of justice in this place filled with unknown dangers? With a single thought, he would become the Great Wisdom, and with a single thought, he would become the Great Wisdom. Everything was for nothing.
Spain, AD 687: Three children come of age amid the turbulent decline of Visigothic Spain. Yosef is preparing to leave Granada with his father on a trading mission to the East. His friend, wild, silent Laelia, is unsure of her betrothal to the aristocratic Theo. Then Oppa, scheming son of the new Visigoth king, comes south, hungry for riches and for blood. Within days, Laelia is wounded, Theo is enslaved, Yosef’s father has been killed and Yosef himself has fled a false accusation of murder. Now his perilous journey through the Arab lands of North Africa becomes desperately important - and loyalty becomes a choice. Set against a sprawling medieval landscape, The Votive Crown is the first fu...
In this wide-ranging study, Ghassan Moazzin sheds critical new light on the history of foreign banks in late nineteenth and early twentieth century China, a time that saw a substantial influx of foreign financial institutions into China and a rapid increase of both China's foreign trade and its interactions with international capital markets. Drawing on a broad range of German, English, Japanese and Chinese primary sources, including business records, government documents and personal papers, Moazzin reconstructs how during this period foreign banks facilitated China's financial integration into the first global economy and provided the financial infrastructure required for modern economic globalization in China. Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China shows the key role international finance and foreign banks and capital markets played at important turning points in modern Chinese history.