The Ch'ing dynasty was ailing--so concluded a number of late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century Chinese scholar-officials. They wrote with concern about what they perceived to be vitally threatening problems: rapidly increasing population exerting inflationary pressure on prices of land and services and limiting opportunities for upward social mobility; the beginning of a down-ward slide in the standard of living; commercialization of all aspects of life; and military and bureaucratic decay. Although these phenomena did not undermine the fundamental stability of the dynasty until perhaps...
The Ch'ing dynasty was ailing--so concluded a number of late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century Chinese scholar-officials. They wrote with concer...
The role of contract in early modern Chinese economic life, when acknowledged at all, is usually presented as a minor one. This volume demonstrates that contract actually played a critical role in the everyday structure of many kinds of relationships and transactions; contracts are, moreover, of enormous value to present-day scholars as transcriptions of the fine details of day-to-day economic activity. Offering a new perspective on economic and legal institutions, particularly the closely related institutions of contract and property, in Qing and Republican China, the papers in this volume...
The role of contract in early modern Chinese economic life, when acknowledged at all, is usually presented as a minor one. This volume demonstrates th...
