Based on a reconstruction of a weighted index of political unification and a time series of incidences of warfare for the past two millennia, this paper develops a narrative to show that the establishment and consolidation towards a single unitary monopoly of political power in China was an...

This article develops data on the history of wages and prices in Beijing, Canton, and Suzhou/Shanghai in China from the eighteenth century to the twentieth, and compares them with leading cities in Europe, Japan, and India in terms of nominal wages, the cost of living, and the standard of...

China’s long-term economic dynamics pose a formidable challenge to economic historians. The Qing Empire (1644-1911), the world’s largest national economy before 1800, experienced a tripling of population during the 17th and 18th centuries with no signs of diminishing per capita income. While...

The Tong Taisheng (统泰升) merchant account books in the Ninjing county of Northern China in 1800-1850 is the most complete and integrated surviving archive of a family business. It contains unusually detailed and high-quality statistics on exchange rates, commodity prices and other...

type="main" xml:lang="en" <p>This article develops data on the history of wages and prices in Beijing, Canton, and Suzhou/Shanghai in China from the eighteenth century to the twentieth, and compares them with leading cities in Europe, Japan, and India in terms of nominal wages, the cost of living,...</p>

Through a detailed reconstruction of 1933 GDP for the two provinces in China's most advanced region, the Lower Yangzi, I show that their per capita income was 55 percent higher than China's average, and they had experienced a growth and structural change between 1914–1918 and 1931–1936...

This article provides an historical overview on the development of Chinese money and monetary regimes between about 1800 and 1950. It develops a simple conceptual framework based on the relative costs of assessing the inherent value of the currencies of different denomination. Based on this...

This article mobilizes and integrates both existing and new time series data on real wages, physical heights and age-heaping to examine the long-term trend of living standards and human capital for China during the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. Our findings confirm the existence of a...

China’s long-term economic dynamics pose a formidable challenge to economic historians. The Qing Empire (1644-1911), the world’s largest national economy before 1800, experienced a tripling of population during the 17th and 18th centuries with no signs of diminishing per capita income. While...