r/AskHistorians - Reddit

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

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

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Why did this happen? The simple explanation is the Mongol conquest. However, China recovered from that disaster under the Ming by most measures, and the institutions created under the Song were still extant when the Mongols were expelled in 1368.

purely contingent and accidental reasons. Pomeranz puts great stress on one factor, that China’s coal reserves were both geologically inaccessible and geographically remote, making a steam-powered industrial revolution like the one in Europe impossible

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

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

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The Ming Emperors believed that Song policy had produced a weak, divided polity and had undermined the stability of traditional Chinese society.

Self-sustaining industrialization took off just once in human history, in Britain in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. All other industrialization since then are descendants of the technologies, corporate laws, and financial mechanisms of Britain’s breakthrough. Before Britain’s industrial revolution, other places had developed industr

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