This article is a survey and critique of recent endeavours to establish statistical foundations for a chronology for the great divergence based upon trends and levels in relative wages. Our reading of the bibliography in Chinese labour history, together with a preliminary investigation into...

The Northern Song Period (960–1127) has been recognised as one of the most important eras in China’s economic and demographic history. This study investigates climatic and geopolitical conditions and factors that led to economic restructuring whereby intensive growth took place to generate...

The period of 1840 (when the Opium War broken out) till now is commonly regarded as China’s modern era, ‘modern’ in terms of China’s departure from its original growth and developmental path. In this context, the term modern has been intimately associated with something alien to the...

China had a long history of premodern growth in just about all categories: empire building and expansion, high yield agriculture, a wide range of inventions and innovations, impressive commercialisation and proto-industrialisation, a very strong foreign trade record and a comfortable living...

My essay surveys a range of printed secondary sources going back to publications of the day (and includes research in primary sources) in order to revive a traditional and unresolved debate on economic connexions between the French and Industrial Revolutions. It argues that, on balance, the...

At a ‘conjuncture’ in pre-modern global history, labeled by previous generations of historians as the ‘Scientific Revolution’, the societies and states of western Europe established and promoted a regime of interconnected institutions for the accumulation of useful and reliable...