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The Religious Ethic and Mercantile Spirit in Early Modern China (Hardcover)
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The Religious Ethic and Mercantile Spirit in Early Modern China (Hardcover)
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Why did modern capitalism not arise in late imperial China? One
famous answer comes from Max Weber, whose The Protestant Ethic and
the Spirit of Capitalism gave a canonical analysis of religious and
cultural factors in early modern European economic development. In
The Religions of China, Weber contended that China lacked the
crucial religious impetus to capitalist growth that Protestantism
gave Europe. The preeminent historian Ying-shih Yu offers a
magisterial examination of religious and cultural influences in the
development of China's early modern economy, both complement and
counterpoint to Weber's inquiry. The Religious Ethic and Mercantile
Spirit in Early Modern China investigates how evolving forms of
Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism created and promulgated their
own concepts of the work ethic from the late seventh century into
the Qing dynasty. The book traces how religious leaders developed
the spiritual significance of labor and how merchants adopted this
religious work ethic, raising their status in Chinese society.
However, Yu argues, China's early modern mercantile spirit was
restricted by the imperial bureaucratic priority on social order.
He challenges Marxists who championed China's "sprouts of
capitalism" during the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries as
well as other modern scholars who credit Confucianism with
producing dramatic economic growth in East Asian countries. Yu
rejects the premise that China needed an early capitalist stage of
development; moreover, the East Asian capitalism that flourished in
the later half of the twentieth century was essentially part of the
spread of global capitalism. Now available in English translation,
this landmark work has been greatly influential among scholars in
East Asia since its publication in Chinese in 1987.
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