A critical survey of recent research in Chinese economic history

Deng, Kent

doi:10.1111/1468-0289.00150

Cited by 91 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 99 publications

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“…The widespread existence of market activities and the importance of private property in nineteenth century (and earlier) China would not suggest an overwhelmingly poor property rights regime. (Faure 2006, Deng 2000. While the lack of company law in that country might have made capital-raising hard, when China finally introduced a Company Law Act enabling limited liability in 1904, few Chinese companies registered under the act.…”

Section: The Failure To Catch Upmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Business History, the Great Divergence and the Great Convergence

Jones

2017

SSRN Journal

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This working paper provides a business history perspective on debates about the Great Divergence, the rise of the gap in incomes between the West and the Rest, and the more recent Great Convergence, which has seen a narrowing of that gap. The literature on the timing and causes of the Great Divergence has focussed on macro analysis. This working paper identifies the potential for more engagement at the micro level of business enterprises. While recognizing that the context of institutions, education and culture play a role in explanations of wealth and poverty, the paper calls for a closer engagement with the processes how these factors translated into generating productive firms and entrepreneurs.

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Section: The Failure To Catch Upmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Worryingly, eighteen and nineteenth century China had widespread literacy, which did not translate into the creation of modern firms. (Deng 2000) Probably the greatest negative consequence of low education levels was raising the cost of skilled labor.…”

Section: The Failure To Catch Upmentioning

confidence: 99%

Business History, the Great Divergence and the Great Convergence

Jones

2017

SSRN Journal

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“…Compared with China there was little protection in law for individual property against the power of the state (Bayly 2004: 60-62;Deng 2000: 4;Deng 2004). Accumulation of private capital was clearly difficult under these circumstances.…”

Section: Ethnic Origin and Occupationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dutch Commerce and Chinese Merchants in Java

Claver¹

2014

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“…That perception was largely inherited from the Western occupants of the Treaty Port Concessions (beginning in the 1840s following the Opium Wars) and was reinforced by Maoist propaganda that depicted the desperate state of most of the country's population for centuries preceding the 'necessary' Communist takeover (cf. Deng, 2000). Accounting researchers here have developed an argument that, while perhaps not achieving all the features of DEB, Chinese businesses and their bookkeepers/accountants over the centuries developed an indigenous form of 'Chinese double-entry bookkeeping' (which we here label 'CDEB') that was at least adequate for the development of the increasingly lively commercial sector in China, whereby the overwhelmingly agricultural economy brought a significant amount of its output (including home produced textiles) to market, and trade increasingly spread across regions as well as internationally (Richardson, 1999;cf.…”

Section: Historico-theoretical Debates: the Significance Of Western Dmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contesting the Indigenous Development of 'Chinese Double-Entry Bookkeeping' and its Significance in China's Economic Institutions and Business Organization Before c.1850

Hoskin

Macve

2012

SSRN Journal

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Abstract*The recent rapid growth of China's economy has reopened historical debate about the extent to which it prospered during the Míng and Qīng dynasties through developing a significant market orientation on the base of its underlying agricultural bureaucratic feudalism. As a contribution to this debate, we question here the extent to which there is justification for claims concerning the development of a concomitant and indigenous Chinese form of double-entry bookkeeping (CDEB)-seen as having developed among bankers, merchants and proto-industrialists-and for its significance within such a market economy. Given that discussion on post-medieval European accounting history indicates that there is not necessarily a direct and positive connection between the development of Italian double-entry bookkeeping (DEB) and associated practices of entity accounting, and the development from the sixteenth century of Western capitalism, we argue that caution should be exercised in drawing any analogous connection in the Chinese context. But equally we wish to raise a more foundational issue concerning the similarities and differences between the knowledge worlds within which DEB and CDEB emerged, as a means to better reading the specific historical practices and discourses of each. We therefore review the invention and dissemination of western DEB as a technology emerging within a textually and semiotically changing knowledge world in the Latin West from the twelfth century AD, and consider how the evidence for the development and use of CDEB may then be reviewed in the context of the Chinese knowledge world. As part of such a reading, we focus on tracing possible intercultural linkages between the Western and Chinese developments across the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries. In this way we seek to problematise conventional 1 Visiting Professor, Essex Business School, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester CO4 3SQ, UK hoskin357@gmail.com 2 Emeritus Professor, Department of Accounting, London School of Economics, London WC2A 2AE, UK R.Macve@lse.ac.uk 2 formulations of the respective significance of both DEB and CDEB, while acknowledging that, at the current moment of such transcultural historical study, the mechanisms of translation and diffusion of practices and discourses generally remain obscure and inconclusive until the era of the transformation of China's modern economy in recent decades. There remains a clear need for further research utilising primary archival sources to test the arguments developed in the existing research literatures, and here.

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A critical survey of recent research in Chinese economic history

Cited by 91 publications

References 99 publications

Business History, the Great Divergence and the Great Convergence

Business History, the Great Divergence and the Great Convergence

Dutch Commerce and Chinese Merchants in Java

Contesting the Indigenous Development of 'Chinese Double-Entry Bookkeeping' and its Significance in China's Economic Institutions and Business Organization Before c.1850

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