Étienne Fortier-Dubois

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

China and Europe are different in many ways, but one is that after the Mongol conquest in the 12th century, China remains a unified empire run by a single Mandarin bureaucracy.

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

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

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

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

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.

By 1370 the population had fallen to half of its level under the Song.

Despite its strengths, Song China never developed an effective military system. Instead it relied on mercenaries, diplomacy, and paying off outside threats.