This landmark book is the most recent installment in the impressive array of economic histories by Cambridge University Press. The thirty-nine chapters across two volumes cover the period between the emergence of territorial states and urban economies in East Asia in the first millennium BCE and China's present-day bid to become the global leader in technology, international trade, and infrastructural development. The editors are suited to the task. Richard von Glahn's Economic History of China: From Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century (2016) laid the groundwork for the present project, particularly its first volume. Debin Ma's work on the institutional change and factors of economic growth in early modern China brings coherence to the second volume's coverage of the country's tortuous journey toward economic “modernity” from the mid-nineteenth to the early twenty-first century.
By chance, The Cambridge Economic History of China came out exactly forty years after the two-volume historical survey...
