Sugar and Society in China: Peasants, Technology, and the World Market (Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series)

In this wide-ranging study, Sucheta Mazumdar offers a new answer to the fundamental question of why China, universally acknowledged as one of the most developed economies in the world through the mid-eighteenth century, paused in this development process in the nineteenth. Focusing on cane-sugar production, domestic and international trade, technology, and the history of consumption for over a thousand years as a means of framing the larger questions, the author shows that the economy of late imperial China was not stagnant, nor was the state suppressing trade; indeed, China was integrated into the world market well before the Opium War. But clearly the trajectory of development did not transform the social organization of production or set in motion sustained economic growth. In this wide-ranging study, Sucheta Mazumdar offers a new answer to the fundamental question of why China, universally acknowledged one of the most developed economies in the world through the mid-eighteenth century, paused in this development process in the nineteenth. Focusing on cane-sugar production, domestic and international trade, technology, and history of consumption for over a thousand years as a means of framing the larger questions, she shows that the economy of late imperial China was not stagnant, nor was the state suppressing trade: indeed, China was integrated into the world market well before the Opium War. But clearly the trajectory of development did not transform the social organization of production or set in motion sustained economic growth. Using a comparative perspective, Mazumdar locates late imperial China within the framework of global history and proposes a fundamental integration of local and global history that recasts our understanding of Qing history.

In this wide-ranging study, Sucheta Mazumdar offers a new answer to the fundamental question of why China, universally acknowledged as one of the most developed economies in the world through the mid-eighteenth century, paused in this development process in the nineteenth.

Focusing on cane-sugar production, domestic and international trade, technology, and the history of consumption for over a thousand years as a means of framing the larger questions, the author shows that the economy of late imperial China was not stagnant, nor was the state suppressing trade; indeed, China was integrated into the world market well before the Opium War. But clearly the trajectory of development did not transform the social organization of production or set in motion sustained economic growth.

In this wide-ranging study, Sucheta Mazumdar offers a new answer to the fundamental question of why China, universally acknowledged as one of the most developed economies in the world through the mid-eighteenth century, paused in this development process in the nineteenth. Focusing on cane-sugar production, domestic and international trade, technology, and the history of consumption for over a thousand years as a means of framing the larger questions, the author shows that the economy of late imperial China was not stagnant, nor was the state suppressing trade; indeed, China was integrated into the world market well before the Opium War But clearly the trajectory of development did not transform the social organization of production of set in motion sustained economic growth. Dedication Acknowledgments Contents List of Tables, Maps, and Figures Note on Transliteration, Names, and Conversions Introduction 1 Consumption and Demand: Parameters of the Domestic Market 2 The World Market: Changing Patterns of Trade 3 From Cane into Sugar: The Technology o fSugar Manufacture 4 The Social Formation of Late-Imperial China 5 Commercialization in a Smallholder Economy 6 Markets and Monopsonies: Commercial Capital, Strategies, and Structures 7 Divergent Outcomes: The Sugar Industry in Guangdong and Taiwan Conclusion Appendix: Weights, Measures, and Money Notes Works Cited Glossary Index