For not a few readers, the “Lower Yangzi” (Jiangnan) is now a region name associated with the prehistory of present-day China's economic growth. This collection of essays aims to shed light on the historical trajectory of the market economy in the Jiangnan area during the late imperial period. The book is made up of two parts. According to the editor, the first part is about “economic value,” specifically money, prices and productivity; the second part concerns “social space,” including urbanization, institutions and networks (Chapter 1). To put it more plainly, the editor is trying to place the former part within the sphere of the “market” in a narrow sense, the sort of thing dealt with by orthodox macro- and microeconomics. In the latter part, the editor uses “social space” or “institutions” as strategic terms to encompass the various spheres beyond the narrow “market” equilibrium.
In Chapter 2, Richard von Glahn shows that Chinese society has experienced three upheavals in the silver economy: the Southern Song (1127–1276), the “Silver Century” (1550–1650) from the late Ming to the early Qing, and the late Qing when the flow of silver reversed in the nineteenth century. By summarizing his own research and making thorough use of secondary scholarship, especially in Japanese and Chinese, he explains convincingly that during each cycle silver played a critical role in daily transactions, and more importantly, functioned in different ways according to time and space. During the first cycle, society and local governments had a demand for silver as means of exchange and for making governmental payments, especially on the southeastern coast and the Upper Yangzi. The diversity (sometimes geographical, but not always so) of monetary use doubtlessly conditioned the economic environment of China, even after the second cycle when global inflows and outflows of silver increased dramatically. Sycee or silver coins of varied purity were exchanged simultaneously with flexible rates. For anyone outside of the many “payment communities,” the use of money in itself inevitably increased transaction costs. Glahn's biggest contribution, as well as that of the avant-courier Kuroda Akinobu, is that he does not simply write a monetary history of China in the context of the cross-border dynamism of economic activity. A complex of “institutions” as such also regulated the circulation of money. Sui-wai Cheung, in Chapter 5, describes how silver-denominated grain prices in Jiangnan fluctuated in response to the rise and fall of silver inflows from abroad during the Qing period, and yet such a vulnerability to exogenous variables was not always the case. Indeed, the Chinese economy exhibited a certain degree of robustness in the face of silver flows during the eighteenth century.
In Chapter 3, Harriet T. Zurndofer deals with the growth of the industrial sector and domestic demand. In a skillful way, she sorts out facts and discussions about cotton growing, the development and the spatial pattern of cotton spinning or textile production, managerial and market structures, the transfer of technologies, and the role of the Ming-Qing government. Chinese and Japanese historians have long argued out nearly most of the issues several times, especially during the 1950s and 1960s. Still, her emphasis on morphological typology is appealing even to present readers. According to her, strong intervention by the state in the cotton trade and industry helped create unprecedented prosperity in the cotton economy and stabilized its growth. However, coupled with a paternalistic state and reciprocal norms in society, the industrial and trade structure was quite different from that of Europe. The absence of multicore configurations such as the “putting out” system or the regional division of labor clearly characterizes Chinese economic history.
Thus, we see wider structural aspects in these stories. The rest of the first part of the book deals purely with quantitative history, but we should note that morphological history and identifying stages in economic growth or development are equally important here. In Chapter 4, Liu Guanglin reviews arguments on crop yields and output per capita, and finds two conflicting perspectives. Among those who detect upward growth in the early modern Jiangnan economy, some scholars lay emphasis on the remarkable economic development during the period between the Tang and Song, while others see the main turnaround as being in the Ming and Qing. These two positions may not be incompatible. The difference between the “Tang-Song transition” arguments and the Chinese version of the “long sixteenth century” lies in to what extent we consider global factors, when we analyze the prehistory of the economic growth in the present-day PRC. From the viewpoint of a quantitative historiography, however, a trade-off relationship certainly exists between the two perspectives. If one emphasizes the epochal importance of the Song, the importance of the Ming-Qing period has to be partially dismissed, and vice versa.
Li Bozhong is a representative historian who sees the circumstances of Ming-Qing Jiangnan as being unprecedented. In Chapter 6, he briefly introduces the findings contained in his previously published monograph on historical statistics in the Huating-Lou area, near present-day Shanghai. Inspired by the arguments of Kenneth Pomeranz and others, he tries to compare economic variables such as regional GDP in the nineteenth century with their counterparts in Holland. According to him, one can observe a comparably high level of production and livelihood in Jiangnan during that period. His bold treatment of statistical data, including a rate of employment, is questionable, and readers might wish he could have fully updated his conclusions so as to make it easier to evaluate his contribution.
Aside from Li's adventurous measurement of the regional economy, there is no doubt that questions about the starting point and phases of Chinese economic growth are closely associated with issues of its institutional and social configurations. The essays in the second part of the book are designated as dealing with “social space.” Presumably by chance, they are all on trade and commerce. Shiba Yoshinobu in Chapter 7 reprises his findings about the evolution of urban networks, especially after the Song period. While cities in China were originally military and/or bureaucratic, and the historical materials relating to them fundamentally official, he finds a remarkable trend towards a flourishing of the private sector and the emergence of an intermediate category of settlements outside the imperial cities.
Against a hierarchical image of city networks, in Chapter 9, Joseph McDermott stresses the more horizontal and multi-centric aspects of commercial networks. By minute analysis of genealogies, he vividly illustrates subsistence strategies and the managerial organization of the Fang and Cheng clans in Huizhou. Their commercial activities were characterized by their decentralized structures, reciprocal norms, and non-profit-maximization behaviors. While this picture may seem somewhat conventional (we already have precursors such as Usui Sachiko or Tang Lixing), and whereas the family organization typical of Huizhou merchants was merely one part of the diversified trade networks in late imperial Jiangnan, this “human” mercantile history nicely complements Shiba's picture, which is based on the central place theory. Angela Schottenhammer, in Chapter 11, likewise discusses trade organizations during the Qing period. Guilds (huiguan) and brokers functioned as agents for the government (in fact, the distinction between an official government sphere and merchants was not always clear), hubs of information, and risk-minimizers within the copper trade between the Qing and Tokugawa Japan. Her findings will also contribute to the rapidly progressing studies of the overseas Chinese, including those by Shiba.
The remaining two chapters are specifically on institutions. Billy So in Chapter 8 revisits recent arguments of comparative institutional approaches, and tries to extend them to historical analysis of the Chinese economy. He clearly shows that the benchmark of comparison has shifted substantially, after the collapse of the Cold War regime, from “capitalism” into “economic growth (not development)”. He lays special emphasis on social fabrics that strongly support economic growth, and asserts that this is valid in the most general sense. Still, one can detect a whiff of Max Weber in this New Confucian-like argument, regardless of So's vigorous rebuttal of criticisms that he (and a famous New Confucian scholar Yu Yingshi) is a cultural essentialist. If we were to explain economic growth in China – which is primarily nothing but a statistical phenomenon – by endogenous factors including societal configurations, then how can we explain economic decline without also introducing exogenous factors?
So seems to employ a Northean model, which presumes that institutions evolve chronologically from informal into formal. Judging from the experience of Chinese economic history, this position is not entirely tenable, and, more importantly, is not even shared among the contributors to this volume. In Chapter 10, Tam Ka-chai explores the institutional framework of inland water transport in Songjiang prefecture based on late-Ming casebooks. Colorful pictures drawn by him of everyday activities along the numerous river channels will greatly stimulate the reader's interest. His findings on local officials’ attitudes toward control of inland water transport are valuable: magistrates were reluctant to regulate local trade within their own jurisdictions, in contrast to their strict policing of long-distance trade. Combined with the abovementioned absence of division of labor among regions, and the central place theories developed by Lösch, Christaller, and Skinner, Tam Ka-chai's argument will help us understand the present PRC's regional autonomy in terms of physical distribution.
At the same time, as long as the term “institution” referred to here is taken to be equivalent to state regulation, it will connote something formal, exogenous, and non-autonomous. This cannot be apposable with endogenous institutions in the Coasean sense. It makes even less sense to conclude that transport regulations in Songjiang evolved from societal fabrics. While the institutional approach is a sophisticated analytical tool and has been applied worldwide and in cross-disciplinary arguments, we undeniably see the arbitrary and/or confused application of key concepts here.
This collection of essays is the result of a symposium held in Taipei, yet one finds no vestige of scholarly dialogue in this volume. Conflicting (superficially at least) arguments, for example on the problems of identifying stages of economic development, the spatial implications of market areas, and the connotations of “institution”, are arranged without care here. Paradoxically, this very lack impels readers to think about these multi-layered issues independently and proactively. This book is best suited for discussions in university courses, even more so when readers refer to more modest revisionist arguments, including those developed by Loren Brandt, Debin Ma, and Thomas Rawski.
