Economic development of the early modern China: A revisiting (original) (raw)

Recently, many Japanese have been shocked by the fact that the GDP of China had exceeded that of Japan, and that China had overtaken Japan as the world’s second-largest economy. This would further encourage economic historians of China to reevaluate potential of China’s economy, even before its encounter with the West. In this paper, I argue that i) in the recent China’s economic historiography, scholars have been increasingly focusing on quantitative changes, rather than qualitative and transformative “development”. This can be interpreted in the context of the important shift in social thoughts after the collapse of post-Cold War regime, and in the evolutional development in the cliometrics. ii) recent findings in quantitative history are best culminated in the historical statistics compiled by Angus Maddison, including those of pre-modern China. Maddison’s studies have made a great contribution: He incorporates the experiences of China into global economic historiography, in a way which encourages the comparison beyond time and space, and empirical and cross-disciplinal discussion as well. Yet the credibility of statistical records (and estimation itself) on population and productivity, for example, are still opened to debate. iii) one of the most critical issues is that most of the arguments in comparative history obviously resort to a conventional essentialism to understand the economic growth in pre-modern China, in which monotonous “institutions” are often identified as explanatory variables.