China’s rise as the world’s second-largest economy surely is the most dramatic development in the global economy since the year 2000. But China’s prominence in the global economy is hardly new. Since 500 bce, a burgeoning market economy and the establishment of an enduring imperial state fostered precocious economic growth. Moreover, contrary to the view that China’s economy withered under the dual constraints of Western colonialism and Chinese tradition after 1800, recent scholarship has identified the onset of modern economic growth in response to new incentive structures, investment opportunities, ideas, and technology, laying the foundation for the post-1978 economic miracle. China’s combination of market-led growth under the firm hand of the state has produced a model of economic development that challenges conventional theories of capitalism and economic growth. The spectacular growth of the contemporary Chinese economy also spurred deeper investigation into the Chinese economy – long a neglected field of study, at least in the Western academy. Scholarship on Chinese economic history has now developed to the stage where a Cambridge History devoted to the subject is appropriate and feasible.

When visited by the British trade mission led by Lord George Macartney, who aimed to show off the best of Western trade and technology, the Qianlong Emperor of Qing China was known to have famously replied in 1792, “Our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its borders. There is therefore no need to import the manufactures of outside barbarians in exchange for our own produce.” Qianlong’s statement came at the height of Qing’s glory, overseeing a remarkable tripling of population and a doubling of territory between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. No single political entity at the time achieved such size in both geography and population under such stability and durability.

China’s rise as the world’s second-largest economy surely is the most dramatic development in the global economy since the year 2000. But China’s prominence in the global economy is hardly new. Since 500 BCE, a burgeoning market economy and the establishment of an enduring imperial state fostered precocious economic growth. Moreover, contrary to the view that China’s economy withered under the dual constraints of Western colonialism and Chinese tradition after 1800, recent scholarship has identified the onset of modern economic growth in response to new incentive structures, investment opportunities, ideas, and technology, laying the foundation for the post-1978 economic miracle. China’s combination of market-led growth under the firm hand of the state has produced a model of economic development that challenges conventional theories of capitalism and economic growth. The spectacular growth of the contemporary Chinese economy also spurred deeper investigation into the Chinese economy – long a neglected field of study, at least in the Western academy. Scholarship on Chinese economic history has now developed to the stage where a Cambridge History devoted to the subject is appropriate and feasible.

For over two millennia, China has sustained the largest single human society on the planet through the development of one of the most sophisticated agrarian systems in history. Even until quite recent, agriculture occupied a central place in the Chinese economy, commanding a dominant 60 to 70 percent of the total economy throughout. Agricultural institutions define the Chinese economic system and agricultural production drove long-run economic change or growth in China. Agriculture was at the center of the Great Divergence debate. Agricultural harvest or failures sometimes spelled the rise and fall of dynasties throughout history. Moving to the modern era, Chinese agriculture became the scapegoat for China’s modernization failure and was regarded as the incubator for Communist revolution. However, given its overriding importance, research on modern Chinese agriculture has been surprisingly understudied for the last few decades.