Étienne Fortier-Dubois

free movement throughout the empire, encouraged by another Chinese invention, the motel

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

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

This tremendous growth came about, in significant part, because of a rather revolutionary reform to the taxation policies of the realm.

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

In 1078, China produced 125,000 tons of cast iron, more than the rest of the planet put together.