Chinese Capitalism, 1522–1840. Edited by Xu Dixin and Wu Chengming. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000. Pp. x1, 517. $79.50.

Abstract

This book is a translation of the first volume of a trilogy entitled History of the Development of Chinese Capitalism published between 1985 and 1993 by a team of researchers at the Institute of Economics of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. It focuses on the emergence of what Chinese historians have called “embryonic capitalism” (often translated more literally as “the sprouts of capitalism”) prior to the Opium War (1840–1842), which in Chinese historiography marks the beginning of China's modern era. The authors utilize an explicitly Marxian analysis to distinguish embryonic capitalism as a distinct phase of economic development. Many Western scholars have begun to define the period 1500–1800 as China's early modern era, finding in the emergence of free labor markets, regional specialization in agriculture and handicraft production, rural market integration, the growing autonomy of merchant groups, and increased foreign trade patterns of socioeconomic change comparable to contemporary developments in Europe. The authors of this study, in contrast, distance themselves from the hypothesis, once prevalent among Chinese historians, that China during this period was developing a capitalist economy along lines similar to Europe. Yet at the same time they challenge the tendency to view the late imperial economy as homeostatic, a characterization that gained considerable currency among Chinese historians during the 1980s, most notably in the “super-stability” hypothesis advanced by Jin Guantao and Liu Qingfeng in their 1983 book Prosperity and Crisis: The Super-Stable Structure of China's Feudal Society (Changsha: Renmin chubanshe). The introduction by Chris Bramall and Peter Nolan provides non-specialists with a useful guide to the historiographical background of this book and its methodological approach; but their review of alternative interpretations of the late imperial Chinese economy, which only considers scholarship published up to the mid-1980s, is outdated.