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How states develop the capacity to tax is a question of fundamental
importance to political science, legal theory, economics,
sociology, and history. Increasingly, scholars believe that China's
relative economic decline in the 18th and 19th centuries was
related to its weak fiscal institutions and limited revenue. This
book argues that this fiscal weakness was fundamentally ideological
in nature. Belief systems created through a confluence of
traditional political ethics and the trauma of dynastic change
imposed unusually deep and powerful constraints on fiscal
policymaking and institutions throughout the final 250 years of
China's imperial history. Through the Qing example, this book combs
through several interaction dynamics between state institutions and
ideologies. The latter shapes the former, but the former can also
significantly reinforce the political durability of the latter. In
addition to its historical analysis of ideological politics, this
book makes a major contribution to the longstanding debate on
Sino-European divergence.
Tying together cultural history, legal history, and institutional
economics, The Laws and Economics of Confucianism: Kinship and
Property in Preindustrial China and England offers a novel argument
as to why Chinese and English preindustrial economic development
went down different paths. The dominance of Neo-Confucian social
hierarchies in Late Imperial and Republican China, under which
advanced age and generational seniority were the primary
determinants of sociopolitical status, allowed many poor but senior
individuals to possess status and political authority highly
disproportionate to their wealth. In comparison, landed wealth was
a fairly strict prerequisite for high status and authority in the
far more 'individualist' society of early modern England,
essentially excluding low-income individuals from secular positions
of prestige and leadership. Zhang argues that this social
difference had major consequences for property institutions and
agricultural production.
Tying together cultural history, legal history, and institutional
economics, The Laws and Economics of Confucianism: Kinship and
Property in Preindustrial China and England offers a novel argument
as to why Chinese and English preindustrial economic development
went down different paths. The dominance of Neo-Confucian social
hierarchies in Late Imperial and Republican China, under which
advanced age and generational seniority were the primary
determinants of sociopolitical status, allowed many poor but senior
individuals to possess status and political authority highly
disproportionate to their wealth. In comparison, landed wealth was
a fairly strict prerequisite for high status and authority in the
far more 'individualist' society of early modern England,
essentially excluding low-income individuals from secular positions
of prestige and leadership. Zhang argues that this social
difference had major consequences for property institutions and
agricultural production.
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