Historiographical Context and Bibliographical Guide

This chapter reminds readers that the recent rise in the volume of publications in the economic history of Imperial China has been promoted by the extraordinarily rapid rate of economic growth achieved by the Peoples’ Republic over the last forty years. The economic and, by implication, the geopolitical advance of communist China to a position of eminence within and significance for the growth of the world economy at large has raised the meta historical question of when, how and why did the Chinese economy decline into a condition of relative backwardness compared with advanced modern economies of Western Europe, North America, Australasia and Japan? The question remains germane and salient because western views of the Chinese state economy and society were (as historiographical surveys reveal) almost entirely favourable before the eras of industrialization and enlightenment in Western Europe. Thereafter western intellectuals entertained increasingly negative perceptions of Chinese civilization that degenerated into Eurocentric levels of denigration and contempt before 1914. Although Eurocentrism became less common in the wake of the barbarous conflicts of the twentieth century, condescension continued until the Chinese economy revealed its underlying potential for modern economic growth after the death of Mao in 1976. Thus, the protracted debate on the Great Divergence can be represented as a controversy inspired by a generation of Sinologists who have attempted with some success to rescue the economic history of Imperial China from a Western tradition of writing that history as one of decline and retardation. The following chapters written by an economic historian of Europe locate this famous debate in historiographical context and are also offered as a survey and critique of that laudable (and for global and comparative economic history) highly provocative, stimulating and heuristic endeavour.