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RelatedHighlights

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

Jeffrey D. Sachs • The Ages of Globalization: Geography, Technology, and Institutions

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

John Darwin • After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000

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

John Darwin • After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000

The move to agriculture resulted in the emergence of property. Before that, there was no sense of private property since there was no need. But when you spend a year growing a field of corn, you don’t want someone else to come along and eat it.

James Dale Davidson • The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State

sari added

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

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Étienne Fortier-Dubois added

The last 1,000 years can be roughly split into two 500-year chunks: feudalism & capitalism. Feudal lords controlled all of the land, farms, buildings and capital. This was passed down inside families and never distributed to the workers. There was no way for anyone to create new forms of capital because they could not get access to any in the first... See more

Ric Burton • Community Capitalism

sari 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

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.