Christian missionaries are shown to have contributed to the historical rise of international trade by bridging the information gap between Europe and unfamiliar overseas lands from the 16 th century onward. To prove that they unintentionally mitigated information barriers for early traders, we focus on the experience of historical China where European missionaries arrived from 1580 onward but maritime foreign trade was largely banned between 1371 and 1842. Our analysis demonstrates that following China's forced opening for international trade in 1842, regions with longer past missionary presence typically bought foreign goods earlier, imported more in terms of both value and goods diversity, and exported more local products, as these places had more foreign interactions and appeared more frequently in the missionaries' letters and publications back in Europe. Our findings substantiate the importance of the information channel through which the missionaries accelerated trade globalization.

China's center of socioeconomic activities was in the North prior to the Tang dynasty but is in the South today. We demonstrate that Arab and Persian Muslim traders triggered that transition when they came to China in the late seventh century, by lifting maritime trade along the South Coast and re-creating the South. Between 742 and 1393 CE, prefectures with better access to maritime trade, or higher porcelain trade participation, experienced significantly higher population growth, but the predictive coefficient weakened substantially after the maritime trade ban of 1371 CE. These findings are robust after controlling for many confounding factors.

Political elites can affect state-building, but the reasons for the geographical clustering of political elites have not been thoroughly explored. By focusing on historical China and utilizing a unique dataset covering the period from 618 to 1911, we have discovered that the regional disparity in producing political elites can be attributed to past exposure to war. Specifically, wars with external regimes were more likely to provide officials with military experience. Our research reveals that war has played a crucial role in the rise of political elites through three channels: bolstering the state's investment in administrative and defensive capacity, providing access to the bureaucratic system, and stimulating the formation of social capital that is beneficial for education. By examining the impact of wars on the bureaucracy, our study expands the discussions surrounding the concept of "war made the states" and provides a paradigm of "war-and-power redistribution" within a strong autocratic state.

We examine whether the spatial distribution of economic activities formed in very early history can persist despite various shocks. Utilizing a unique dataset based on archaeological and historical records from China, we find that regions with more agglomerated economic activities after the Neolithic Revolution (5000 BCE–2000 BCE) consistently had higher population densities over six millennia, even after experiencing war shocks. This enduring Neolithic pattern was determined by favorable agricultural locational fundamentals and reinforced by investments in state-building, leading to path dependence. However, the forced opening and modernization since the mid-19th century led to the rise of new agglomerations in trade- favorable areas, permanently disrupting the spatial equilibrium since the Neolithic. Causality is established using a Difference-in-Differences (DiD) strategy, supplemented with an instrumental variable (IV) analysis. Our findings emphasize that a sizable shock in productivity can alter the value of locational fundamentals and reshape long-standing historical spatial patterns.

Survival cannibalism persisted across human societies until recently. What drove the decline in cannibalism and other forms of violence? Using data from the 1470–1910 period, this paper documents that in historical China, the Confucian clan—an institutionalized kinship network—acted as an informal internal market to facilitate intra-clan resource pooling and risk-sharing, thus reducing the need for cannibalism during times of drought-related famine. The risk mitigation role of the clan remains robust after controlling for economic development and other factors and ruling out alternative channels. Thus, kinship networks and their associated culture contributed to human civilizational development before the advent of formal markets.

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Volumes of historical archives in China have been digitised, from which various datasets have been constructed for scholarly inquiry. Furthermore, the excavation of thousands of archaeological sites provided detailed data about prehistoric development across China's landmass. As a result, there has been remarkable progress in quantitative studies on China's past. This article reviews recent work in five theme areas to provide a background for the papers included in this special issue. These themes include state formation, Confucianism, human capital, Christian missionaries, and long-term persistence studies. The five papers in this issue fall into these themes and are introduced where appropriate.

The Chinese economy demonstrated significant vigor from the eleventh century to the nineteenth. This period of nine centuries achieved remarkable progress in implementing the imperial examination system, improving literacy, establishing private landownership, developing market institutions, adopting new crops and improved farming technology, strengthening the lineage order, and lifting ordinary people’s capacity to deal with risks. According to the optimistic view, this is also the period during which two economic revolutions, the Tang–Song and Ming–Qing transitions, took place, marked by continuous economic growth and improvement in living standards for the population.1 To other scholars, however, this long period of quantitative growth was largely achieved through population increase, preventing China from escaping the “Malthusian trap.” That is, while the total size of the Chinese economy may have grown due to the rising population, per capita living standards failed to rise above historical norms and might have even declined during the long period. This period’s achievement and impact were nothing comparable to that of the Industrial Revolution which started in eighteenth-century Britain.

Over the past millennium, China has relied on the Confucian clan to achieve interpersonal cooperation, focusing on kinship and neglecting the development of impersonal institutions needed for external finance. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that the Confucian clan and financial markets are competing substitutes. Using the large cross-regional variation in the adoption of modern banks, we find that regions with historically stronger Confucian clans established significantly fewer modern banks in the four decades following the founding of China's first modern bank in 1897. Our evidence also shows that the clan continues to limit China's financial development today.

We hypothesize that besides technology and resource expansion, risk-mitigation improvements pushed the Malthusian limits to population growth in pre-industrial societies. During 976-1850 CE, China’s population increased by elevenfold while the Confucian clan emerged as the key risk-sharing institution for members. To test our hypothesis using historical data from 269 prefectures, we measure each region’s clan strength by its number of genealogy books compiled. Our results show that prefectures with stronger clans had significantly higher population density due to better resilience during natural disasters and fewer premature deaths of children. Confucian clans enabled pre-industrial China to sustain explosive population growth.

The Jesuits introduced European sciences to China from 1580. At the time, China was an autarkic civilization whose intelligentsia was dominated by Confucian literati. By making use of this knowledge supply shock, this paper examines the importance of knowledge diffusion in the production of new knowledge. Based on prefecture-level data on the distribution of the Jesuits and of Chinese scientific publications, this paper documents that the Jesuits stimulated scientific publications by Confucian literati. But this effect shrank after the Jesuits were expelled by the emperor of China in 1723.

Over the past millennium, China has relied on the Confucian clan to achieve interpersonal cooperation, focusing on kinship and neglecting the development of impersonal institutions needed for external finance. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that the Confucian clan and financial markets are competing substitutes. Using the large cross-regional variation in the adoption of modern banks, we find that regions with historically stronger Confucian clans established significantly fewer modern banks in the four decades following the founding of China’s first modern bank in 1897. Our evidence also shows that the clan continues to limit China’s financial development today.

This paper studies the cross-regional variation of interest rates in China in the 1930s. Based on county-level data from the Buck (1941) rural surveys, we examine factors that may have influenced rural interest rates in pre-1949 China. Since the quality of institutions that define property rights and facilitate contract enforcement is important for such transactions as land tenancy arrangements, we treat land tenancy rate (or percentage of owner-farmers) as a proxy for institutional quality. Contrary to the popular belief among historians and economists that usury or high interest rates caused persistent poverty, we find that while the monopoly-exploitation hypothesis has little explanatory power, a region’s institutional quality and income level are persistent and significant determinants of interest rates. Thus, poverty is a key driver of high rates of interest. Economic growth and the development of market institutions are crucial for lowering high interest rates and combating usury.

在中国经济、社会转型到这个地步时,特别是在产业结构上、品牌建立上、创新型国家方面都有非常多的愿望和渴求时,实现教育转型尤其重要.中国经济转型需要教育的转型,需要培养兴趣丰富、人格完整、头脑健全的通识公民、思辨型公民.