Public infrastructural facilities such as dikes, highways, bridges, and seawalls were vital to domestic welfare. Financing their building and maintenance required extensive and sustained state–society collaboration, which was grounded in the shared public interest-based discourse of state legitimation. In fiscally decentralized Tudor and early Stuart England and Tokugawa Japan to 1853, self-governed communities were active in building and managing small- and medium-scale public works. But for large-scale infrastructural facilities, the royal government and shogunate had to become involved through ad hoc financing measures to cover the otherwise insupportable costs. The reverse was true in Qing China prior to 1840. The Qing state could reply upon a centrally managed fiscal system to directly fund the building and maintenance of major public works. For small-scale public works that mainly benefited local residents, it encouraged investment and involvement by local communities and gentry. It also advanced official funds to repair important local water control projects and let the benefited communities return the funds to the state over time without interest.

The rural economy will predominate in almost any preindustrial society – perhaps particularly so in China. No barriers comparable to medieval Europe’s guild rules made large sectors into urban monopolies; and though China was probably the world’s most urbanized large society c. 1200, and perhaps still as urban as Europe in the late 1600s, much of its elite lived in the countryside rather than in cities or fortified castles (especially between roughly 1100 and 1550). Moreover, the property systems prevailing in China’s most commercialized areas created incentives for most nonelite families to remain in the countryside, transferring labor not needed for farming to handicrafts without moving to town. The result was a highly diversified rural economy and cities that, though often quite large, were much smaller than the rural surplus could have supported.