Just a moment...
Then the Mongols invaded, and after that came the Ming empire. And the Ming were quite the opposite of the Song. They wanted tight, centralized control of everything. They literally controlled where you could travel, and they needed a report from every merchant on how much stock he held in his warehouse at regular intervals. This was a recipe for k... See more
Just a moment...
Étienne Fortier-Dubois added
Decline set in instead over the course of Mongol rule. While the Chinese market economy did not collapse, the serious damage inflicted during the Mongol conquest, the burden of ill-fated major invasions of Japan and Vietnam, ruinous inflation in the paper currency and a system of official discrimination against southern Chinese all contributed to t... See more
r/AskHistorians - Reddit
Étienne Fortier-Dubois added
The Song Dynasty might justly be considered the world’s first large-scale capitalist economy: land was privately owned, merchant families invested in joint-stock companies, international trade was open, harbors were improved, and Chinese ocean-based trade expanded throughout the Indian Ocean to East Africa and the Red Sea. A navy established in the
... See moreJeffrey D. Sachs • The Ages of Globalization: Geography, Technology, and Institutions
Étienne Fortier-Dubois added
At the base of the Song triumphs was the excellence of governance. The Song Dynasty has been termed “The Age of Confucian Rule.”
Jeffrey D. Sachs • The Ages of Globalization: Geography, Technology, and Institutions
During the same years as the rise of the Seljuks and Ottomans, China was experiencing another golden age, the Song Dynasty, which is dated from 960 to 1279 (figure 5.10). On the eastern border of temperate Eurasia, a newly unified and peaceful China entered a period of stunning technological innovation, population growth, and economic prosperity. C
... See moreJeffrey D. Sachs • The Ages of Globalization: Geography, Technology, and Institutions
The Yuan follow up on this by being super into global trade, commerce, and cultural exchange (whether anyone else wants to or not)... to the point where their shoddy economic policies, climate change, and the Black Death burn out the Chinese economy and throw the whole region in chaos (again)
Then the Ming comes in, saying "screw that, we're going b... See more
Then the Ming comes in, saying "screw that, we're going b... See more
r/AskHistorians - Reddit
Étienne Fortier-Dubois added
At the same time, private commercial trade independent of the tributary trade was highly restricted. Indeed, in 1371, the Ming emperor had prohibited purely private trade. Zheng He’s patron and sponsor was the Yongle emperor (r. 1402–24). Upon the emperor’s death, his son discontinued the voyages on the grounds that they were unnecessary, expensive
... See more