Throughout China's long imperial history, the political-economic system was supported mainly by the rents and taxes collected from the peasantry. The survival of the system depended on orderly relations between landlords and tenants and between the state and landowners. In the century before the Communist triumph in 1949, both sets of relations were profoundly changed. How did this transformation come about? With the commercially advanced lower Yangzi region as its focus, this book provides the most comprehensive treatment to date of rents and taxes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century China....