Abstract
This chapter discusses an important current debate that illustrates many of the indeterminacies and historiographical challenges that have been raised in earlier chapters: a debate over the nature of China’s economic development since 1600. Was China on a path of steady growth or asphyxiating involution? Neither the facts, nor the institutional descriptions, nor the interpretations of these facts and descriptions, are yet settled. So the case presents an excellent opportunity to observe the historians at work.
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Notes
- 1.
Elvin’s concept of the high-level equilibrium trap is discussed in Little (1998, Chapter 8).
- 2.
Rawski (1989). Rawski too concludes that real wages were rising during the period, but more slowly than Brandt’s estimate; he suggests an average annual rate of increase of about 0.4%.
- 3.
Philip Huang also makes an effort to estimate the extent of hired labor in North China, and arrives at a rough estimate of 14–17% of farm work being performed by hired labor (Huang, 1985).
- 4.
Conversations with Bozhong Li and his generous sharing of an unpublished manuscript permitted me to see the importance of the circumstances described in this section for interpreting the performance of China’s rural economy in the early twentieth century.
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Little, D. (2010). The Involution Debate. In: New Contributions to the Philosophy of History. Methodos Series, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9410-0_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9410-0_8
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