In several of the world's regions a ‘general crisis’ seems to have occurred in the first half of the seventeenth century. At that time in each region, political instability and war, population decline and urban stagnation, economic crises marked by falling prices and depleted stocks of precious metals, and dramatic climatic shifts converged. These symptoms have been detected in western Europe, in the Ottoman lands, and even in China and Japan. Their causes have been attributed in part to the effects of the price revolution, partly to climate change, and in part to rising populations which begin to outstrip agricultural production. The latter tendency in particular seems to have caused a fiscal crisis for the absolutist agrarian states characteristic of Eurasia in this period. Other analyses stress the effects of a tightening linkage in the emerging capitalist world economy in which precious metal flows served to mark newly imposed interdependencies.

The notion that the series of alarming events in Europe in the first half of the seventeenth century might be connected goes back at least as far as Voltaire. Professional historians of Europe during the past forty years have fixed on this period as the principal case to test the idea that societies can undergo a ‘general crisis’, in which agricultural, demographic, climatic, economic, military and political factors are interrelated (Hobsbawm 1954; Trevor-Roper 1959; Aston 1965; Parker and Smith 1978; Parker 1979). For some this was the crisis of the transition to capitalism, for others that of the absolutist state, while more recent commentators have put more emphasis on climatic and environmental factors. The causal connections between the various factors remain the most puzzling unresolved problem.

Approximately ten years ago now, several colleagues and I were discussing Geoffrey Parker and Lesley Smith's then recently-published volume on the ‘Seventeenth-Century Crisis’ when a specialist in Byzantine history told us that in his opinion at least, Parker, Smith, and the others who had contributed to their jointly-edited work had gotten it all wrong. The really important ‘general crisis’ in pre-modern times, he believed, had occurred not in the seventeenth century but rather in the fourteenth. As he went on to discuss the impact of climatic change, food shortages, epidemic disease, monetary fluctuations, and military operations on fourteenth-century Europe and the Middle East, I began to think about some of the great and terrible events that had occurred in East Asian history during that same century: the fall of the Kamakura Shogunate (1185–1330S) and the political turmoil of the Northern and Southern Dynasties (Nambokuchō) period (1336–92) in Japan; the economic and military disasters surrounding the fall of the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1279–1368) in China; and the food shortages, ‘Japanese pirate’ (wakō) raids, and civil wars that paved the way for the founding of the Yi dynasty (1392–1910) in Korea. In subsequent readings I added economic and political strife in fourteenth-century Southeast Asia, the decline of the Delhi Sultanate in India, the collapse of the Ilkhanate (1256–1335) in Persia, and the destructive rise of Timur (1336–1405) in Transoxania. Surely a case could be made, I came to think, for a 'General Crisis of the Fourteenth Century,' one much broader in scope than even our Byzantine specialist had been considering.

The seventeenth-century crisis concept served the research in European history well, it deepened and broadedned and broadened our understanding of well-studied issues, even though we were far from agreeing on a definition of what the seventeenth-century crisis was or is. This is the kind of conceptual embarrassment which baffles our colleagues in the social sciences, but which the historian takes in his stride.

Bengal is a vast cremation ground, a meeting place for ghosts and evil spirits, a land so overrun by dogs, jackals and vultures that it makes one wonder whether the Bengalis are really alive or have become ghosts from some distant epoch. And yet in the imaginative words of the poet, golden Bengal was once ‘well-watered, fruitful, abundant with crops.’ A garden of culture and civilization for over a thousand years … (Biplabi, 7 November, 1943, cited in Paul Greenough, Prosperity and Misery in Medern Bengal: the Famine of 1943–44, New York, 1982).

In recent studies of warlordism, one source has not, to my knowledge, been used. This is the collection of reports of the Sino-foreign salt inspectorate held in the Toyo Bunko. Of all the institutions of the China coast, the salt inspectorate, its offices deep in the interior, its revenues a magnet for predatory armies, was perhaps in closest touch with warlordism. This paper studies the relationship of salt and warlordism in Szechwan between 1914 and 1922. Szechwan in this period has been selected for 3 reasons. First, the reports from the inspectorates of Ch'uan-nan and Ch'uan-pei, which together covered not only Szechwan but also Yunnan, Kweichow and Hupei as supplied by its salt, are unusually informative on politics. Second, between 1914 and 1922, Szechwan, a border province both northern and southern or neither, ran a full gamut of warlordism: regional, provincial, subprovincial and stabilized. It also attracted the attention of ‘guest armies’ from outside. Third, 1914–1922 has coherence; 1914 saw Yüan Shih-k'ai ascendant and the inspectorate established in Szechwan; 1922 saw Yüan's legatee Hsü Shih-ch'ang descendant, and Liu Hsiang, the embodiment of stabilized warlordism in Szechwan, ascendant.

There are two lemons in the larder of Modern China's history. Stalin's, dating from April 1927, is certainly the better known:

Chiang Kaishek is submitting to discipline. The Kuomintang is a bloc, a sort of revolutionary parliament, with the Right, the Left and the Communists. Why make a coup d'etat? Why drive away the Right when we have the majority and the Right listens to us?… Also, they have connections with the rich merchants and can raise money from them. So they have to be utilized to the end, squeezed out like a lemon, and then flung away.

In recent years, China has adopted new strategies for economic development. These strategies seek increased productivity and effectiveness in the use of resources. Spatially regions specialize in the lines of production for which they have comparative advantages. And the coastal areas are experiencing an accelerated economic growth. The policy, however, operates under various constraints. First, the material base for development is a finite one and resources are very unevenly distributed across the landscape. Second, this development strategy depends to a certain extent on a substantial increase in China's foreign trade. As a result important investments are conceded to the transport sector. In the present context, is this strategy optimizing the use of available resources? The answer which is tentatively accepted here as a working hypothesis rests on the contradictory aspect of the concept of accessibility. Essentially all systems of transport and their networks generate territorial contradictions; and the resolution of these contradictions points to the direction of territorial development. The present analysis will focus on the geographic environment of China as a determining factor in the establishment of transport networks, followed by the history and performance of China's transport system within the confines of this paradigm. The objective of this paper is twofold: first, toexplore the role of transportation in territorial development, and second, to understand that transport systems do not solely reflect the physical conditions of a territory as an objective reality but also political ideologies which are forged to a certain extent by this reality.