China's mixed state-capitalist model needs no introduction, but the notion that the world's first large integrated market economy emerged in China one thousand years ago might appear novel to a general reader. Drawing from an array of Chinese-, Japanese-, and Western-language texts, author William Guanglin Liu reads history backwards, finding a stellar economic prequel—in Song-era China (960–1279)—to post-Dengist efforts in tapping a deep promarket vein in the Chinese psyche. Rather than laying the blame upon Western imperialism for China's loss of rank, Liu attributes the decline of the flourishing eleventh-century market economy to both the Mongol conquest (1206–1279) and the antimarket “command” policies inaugurated by the Ming dynasty (from 1368). With this comparative study of the eleventh-century Song economy and that of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries under the Ming, the author delves deeply into a trove of imperial data to make informed statements on premodern economic development. It is this abrupt switch from market to “command” economies that the author believes has the most significance in steering events in China between 1000 and 1500.
In his own words, Liu seeks to challenge the notion of a “fourteenth-century turning point” in Ming China's fortunes based on population data, as promoted by a number of Western economic historians of China (Mark Elvin among them) (p. 57). By engaging a millennium-long sweep of Chinese economic history, Liu joins a select group of historians either working within a correlated world history framing or taking on board the theories of the French Annales school, associated with Fernand Braudel and his concern with the quotidian. In doing so, Liu offers a foil both to officialized scholarship, as produced in China, and to Western “revisionist” writing, including that of the California School of economists drawing attention to the enormous importance of Asia in the early modern world and what the author terms the Marxist-Malthusians among them.
Essentially, the text is divided into four parts. Part 1 examines broad approaches to the subject and, at the heart of this work, the collection of data and its analysis. Song-era poll taxes, land taxes, and household registrations are just a sample of the wealth of riches brought to life in this book. Part 2 focuses on the Song era, with its rapid expansion in population, water transport, and monetization. Part 3 focuses upon the Ming era, highlighting both declining population and urbanization, and part 4 examines agriculture in the Lower Yangtze and changes in agricultural productivity, of which the author offers his own revisionist assessment. The book is supplemented with over one hundred tables of close-packed data, further enriched by ninety pages of appendices on macrolevel data relating to population, money stock, waterways, agricultural acreage, long-term changes in real wages, estimates of national incomes, major commodities in the domestic market, and military farms. Derived from government-compiled records, these data clusters become the key variables used to compare the market economies across the eras. As such, the book is both quantitative and descriptive and can be read both ways.
To take one example, the spectacular rise of inland water transport—with the shift of the northern Song-era capital to Kaifeng in Henan province, located along the Grand Canal—reveals the extent to which the eleventh-century mercantile economy flourished. Following the work of Japanese economic historians, Liu dubs this period a “canal century” (p. 94). Population growth, an increase in household size, the expansion of acreage, and agricultural productivity data all revealed a prosperous market economy. Although not mentioned here, other scholars have also used iron and steel production as indices of Song-dynasty sophistication.
In contrast, the early Ming “command” economy with its lijia or community administrative system, its military farms, and its involuntary migration actively stifled the market economy. Farmers were deprived of their right to produce for the market. Demonetization ran its course with an actual retreat to barter economy arrangements as in the Lower Yangtze. Ming taxes further stymied development. Even Song-era soldiers were better rewarded than those of a later age. The early Ming dynasty, to take one example of unproductive state-sponsored display, famously dispatched Admiral Zheng He on a series of resource-draining overseas maritime expeditions, followed by a move of the capital to the arid North. Economically, the Ming dynasty did turn around in the sixteenth century; however, this was not a new step toward protocapitalism, as some would contend, but rather a “delayed recovery” of the market after a collapse of the former command economy (p. 200).
A significant contribution to late imperial Chinese economic history, Liu's work is bound to attract specialist attention for its bold challenge to a standard thesis of a fourteenth-century turning point. The book will be welcomed especially by those seeking hard-to-find comprehensive economic data on Song- and Ming-era China. General readers, perhaps, would rather trade some of this data for even more explanatory maps that include place names. Nevertheless, business history students who are alert to other civilizations and time frames will benefit from this work.
