scholarly journals Land markets in late imperial and republican China

2008 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
KENNETH POMERANZ

ABSTRACTChina has had very active markets for both the sale and the rental of land since Song times (960–1279), if not longer. By the sixteenth century, most of the institutional arrangements that would characterize these markets until 1949 were in place. These institutions differed sharply from those of emerging land markets in early modern Western Europe: in particular, government played a lesser role in adjudicating disputes over land contracts, and customary arrangements included features that (a) gave some sellers of land claims on purchasers that could last for many years and (b) gave some tenants, especially in South and East China, very strong usufruct rights, which themselves became a form of tradable property. However, despite these and other differences from Western models, Chinese land markets were quite efficient, and provided the incentives needed for a very productive agriculture; secure tenants, for instance, responded to their strong position by behaving like owners and investing heavily in improving the land.

1987 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 132-161 ◽  
Author(s):  
Prasenjit Duara

Beginning around the turn of the twentieth century, the Chinese state launched onto a course of development that seemed to resemble the process in early modern Europe that Charles Tilly and others have called state making (Tilly 1975). The phenomenon of an expanding state structure penetrating levels of society untouched before, subordinating, co-opting, or destroying the relatively autonomous authority structures of local communities in a bid to increase its command of local resources, appeared to be repeating itself in late imperial and republican China. The similarities include the impulse toward centralization, bureaucratization, and rationalization; the insatiable drive to increase revenues for both military and civilian purposes; the violent resistance of local communities to this inexorable process of intrusion and extraction; and the formation of alliances between the state and local elites to consolidate their power (Duara 1983).


2021 ◽  
pp. 23-56
Author(s):  
Y. Yvon Wang

This chapter demonstrates that, under the regime of licentiousness, hierarchies of pleasure largely matched the distribution of worldly power: elites backed up both articulation and denial with physical and material domination. The chapter then introduces the early modern challenge to yin ideology. Despite the crisis in control over sexual depictions that began in the sixteenth century, hierarchical values around the regulation of these representations largely persisted. By exemplifying the crucial developments in Chinese markets for, and regulations of, sexual representations from the earliest periods of Chinese history up to about the year 1880, the chapter traces these developments as they form a culturally specific backdrop essential to understanding the pornographic transition after 1880. Ultimately, the remainder of the chapter turns to the late imperial breakdown of elite dominance over the circulation and consumption of sexual representations and how the legal and cultural authorities tried to impose new controls over licentious print goods.


2014 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-22
Author(s):  
Isaiah Gruber

Inspired in part by conversations with David Goldfrank, this essay considers aspects of how attitudes toward biblical language contributed to representations of national and religious identity in late medieval and early modern Muscovite Russia. At roughly the same time in history that revived Hebrew and Greek study in Western Europe helped to stimulate the Renaissance and Reformation, bookmen in East Slavia also reconsidered the original languages of sacred writings. Contrary to what is sometimes assumed, such interest was neither unknown nor marginal within Muscovite religious culture. Hebrew-Russian glossaries circulated in leading monasteries from at least the thirteenth century; major infusions of Greek (and other) words and definitions in the sixteenth century transformed these texts into multilingual dictionaries. This mainstream tradition in Russian Orthodoxy can be linked to such important religious figures as Nil Sorskii and Maksim Grek. I argue that by “appropriating” biblical languages and terminology, often via inaccurate translations, Muscovite Russian literati created and defended their distinctive identity vis-à-vis Jews and Greeks, who were considered God’s former chosen peoples. These findings suggest reconsideration of the nature and boundaries of faith in Muscovy in the “age of confessionalism.”


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Ulrich A. Wien

Abstract This thematic issue of the Journal of Early Modern Christianity focuses on the reception of the Reformation in Transylvania and especially on the development of Protestant churches oriented towards Luther and influenced by Melanchthon. In the late Middle Ages, Transylvania had become part of the cultural influence zone of Central Europe, but throughout the sixteenth century the region became permeated by religious developments in Western Europe too. Here, a very peculiar constellation of religious pluralism and co-existence emerged, and the different contributions examine the premises and networks behind these dynamics. In this joint effort, it becomes clear how Transylvania turned into a pioneer region of religious freedom, as it witnessed simultaneously the development of Catholic, Orthodox and various Protestant confessional cultures.


2014 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
PIOTR GUZOWSKI

ABSTRACTIn fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Poland, village courts facilitated the registration of a variety of private transactions among peasants. This article uses the surviving court books of this period to explore the courts' development and functions, and to analyse the numerous peasant credit contracts found in their records. The aim of the article is to show that in late medieval and early modern Poland the village courts provided a well-established system for registering peasant transactions, and that this played an important role in the development of credit and land markets.


2020 ◽  
pp. 299-312
Author(s):  
Daniel B. Rowland

This chapter cites Michael Cherniavsky's imaginative and original but unconvincing attempt to align the image of Ivan the Terrible with literary ruler images and actual rulers in contemporary, sixteenth-century Western Europe. It aligns Muscovy with European history and suggests that the most appropriate comparison for the Muscovy of Ivan IV is early medieval, rather than early modern, Western Europe. It also details the type of evidence that Cherniavsky used on what are generally called “literary” texts from Ivan's reign and the period immediately following. The chapter explains how the assertion that Muscovite political ideas were independent of religion and contradicts many of Cherniavsky's own conclusions leads to a very distorted view of early modern Russian political culture. It talks about comparisons of Carolingian Europe and Muscovy that inevitably produce the impression that Muscovy was “backward.”


1986 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 65-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patti A. Mills

This paper examines an early modern contribution to the literature on stewardship accounting, the Tratado de Cuentas or Treatise on Accounts, by Diego del Castillo, a sixteenth-century Spanish jurist.


Author(s):  
Marcin Piatkowski

In this chapter I explain why Poland and most countries in Eastern Europe have always lagged behind Western Europe in economic development. I discuss why in the past the European continent split into two parts and how Western and Eastern Europe followed starkly different developmental paths. I then demonstrate how Polish oligarchic elites built extractive institutions and how they adopted ideologies, cultures, and values, which undermined development from the late sixteenth century to 1939. I also describe how the elites created a libertarian country without taxes, state capacity, and rule of law, and how this ‘golden freedom’ led to Poland’s collapse and disappearance from the map of Europe in 1795. I argue that Polish extractive society was so well established that it could not reform itself from the inside. It was like a black hole, where the force of gravity is so strong that the light could not come out.


Author(s):  
Tom Hamilton

This chapter explores the material culture of everyday life in late-Renaissance Paris by setting L’Estoile’s diaries and after-death inventory against a sample of the inventories of thirty-nine of his colleagues. L’Estoile and his family lived embedded in the society of royal office-holders and negotiated their place in its hierarchy with mixed success. His home was cramped and his wardrobe rather shabby. The paintings he displayed in the reception rooms reveal his iconoclastic attitude to the visual, contrasting with the overwhelming number of Catholic devotional pictures displayed by his colleagues. Yet the collection he stored in his study and cabinet made him stand out in his milieu as a distinguished curieux. It deserves a place in the early modern history of collecting, as his example reveals that the civil wars might be a stimulus as much as a disruption to collecting in sixteenth-century France.


Author(s):  
Natalia Nowakowska

What is Poland? If the meaning of apparently stable words such as ecclesia has been anything but stable historically, the same is of course true of ‘Poland’, a simple noun which masks multiple possible meanings and polemical intents. For the sixteenth century, Poland should be defined not as an ethnic people (a nascent nation state), but rather as a political phenomenon. As such, this study will consider all the peoples and territories under the authority of the Polish Crown in the reign of King Sigismund I, regardless of their ‘ethnic’ or linguistic status. Twenty years ago, John Elliott coined the phrase ‘composite monarchies’, pointing out that most early modern monarchies were patchworks of territories acquired at various times by different means (marriage, conquest, inheritance), held together by one monarch....


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