The Ming and Qing Imperial States and Their Agrarian Economies

Patrick Karl O’Brien
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Patrick Karl O’Brien: London School of Economics and Political Science

Chapter Chapter 4 in The Economies of Imperial China and Western Europe, 2020, pp 47-67 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract No participant in the Divergence Debate has argued that the problems of an agrarian empire that had successfully exploited its rich natural resources to reach a production possibility frontier of diminishing returns could have been anything but complex and costly to solve. The issue specified in this chapter is what options were realistically available to the state to alleviate problems becoming increasingly acute from the demise of the Ming in the seventeenth century onwards? Could those options have conceivably included industrialization and structural change along western lines? From a Eurocentred perspective this option may be plausibly dismissed as too anachronistic to contemplate. Thus the retardation of China may, therefore, continue to be represented as endogenous. Furthermore and without some conceivable reforms to the empire’s financial and monetary systems, the range of strategies available to the state for defence against western aggression, the maintenance of internal order and positive interventions to raise investment in the empire’s depreciating infrastructure for agrarian development at both extensive and intensive margins for cultivation remained severely circumscribed. In short, the core of any historical narrative for divergence includes penalties attached to an early start and a long term failure of the Ming and Qing regimes to create a state with the fiscal resources and executive systems for the governance of an empire with a successful organic and physiocratic economy.

Keywords: Fiscal capacity; State formation; Bureaucracy; Public goods; Internal order; External security; Imperial expansion; International and external migration; Common resources; Reciprocal but anachronistic comparisons (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-54614-4_4

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