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China assembled the basic components of a market economy earlier, and on a much larger scale, than any other part of Eurasia.

Eighteenth-century China saw the end of serfdom, abolished by the Yung-cheng emperor,93 and a new freedom to buy and sell land. The number of market towns rose steadily. In the Kiangnan region on the lower Yangtze, where water communications had favoured the growth of large commercial cities, cotton cloth was manufactured on a large scale by villag

China’s part in international commerce may have been relatively small, but its internal trade may have been as large, if not larger, than that of contemporary Europe.

The adoption by the provincial gentry of literati ideals (and bureaucratic ambitions) was a vital stage in China’s transition from a semi-feudal society, where power was wielded by great landholders, into an agrarian empire. What made that possible was an imperial system that relied much less on the coercive power of the imperial centre (a clumsy a