Between government and market: building blocks of a new economic history of China’s industrial development during the Ming Dynasty (ca. 1368-1644)

Abstract

What happened to long-term economic development, especially from the perspective of industry, in Late Imperial China? When and why did China fall behind the West? What was the role of government in this process, and what was the interaction between government and market? These are the key questions addressed in this research. To answer them, we focused on the Ming Dynasty and employed the approach of historical reconstruction of national accounts to investigate selected industrial sectors. In addition, to understand the continuities and changes, we also explored several other dynastic periods before and after the Ming, including the Song, the Yuan, and the Qing, and occasionally even the Republican period. This is, however, a large challenge, as ready-to-hand historical data on China is extremely scarce. Therefore, in this study, we first focused on the craftsmen system, established by the Chinese state to control craftsmen, whose skills were indispensable to the development of the handicrafts industry. Then, we limit our scope by selecting four industrial sectors—namely, tea, iron, arms, and shipbuilding industries—as the examples to measure the development of Ming industry. The resulting estimates provided us with material for several fresh reflections on the central questions.