IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/hal-00686137.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Foreign threats, technological progress and the rise and decline of Imperial China

Author

Listed:
  • Kenneth S. Chan
  • Jean-Pierre Laffargue

    (CES - Centre d'économie de la Sorbonne - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

Abstract

This paper addresses why technological progress occurred off-and-on in Imperial China but came to a standstill at around the time of the European Renaissance, leading to the decline of Imperial China. We suggest that the threat of war could have induced innovative activities as well as the accumulation of public capital, which led to the development of a modern sector in Imperial China. Using numerical simulation, we find a stagnated equilibrium in an agrarian economy under low threats of war and another with a high level of technological knowledge, public capital and a vibrant modern sector under strong threats. Long periods of peace would have the opposite effect. Some supportive historical evidence from urbanization is provided.

Suggested Citation

  • Kenneth S. Chan & Jean-Pierre Laffargue, 2012. "Foreign threats, technological progress and the rise and decline of Imperial China," Post-Print hal-00686137, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-00686137
    DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0106.2012.00583.x
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Kenneth S. Chan & Jean-Pierre Laffargue, 2014. "The Growth and Decline of the Modern Sector and the Merchant Class in Imperial China," Review of Development Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 18(1), pages 13-28, February.
    2. Zhu, Jiong & Ang, James B. & Fredriksson, Per G., 2019. "The agricultural roots of Chinese innovation performance," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 118(C), pages 126-147.
    3. Takuma Kunieda & Keisuke Okada & Akihisa Shibata, 2017. "A Simple Model of Contract Enforcement Institutions," Pacific Economic Review, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 22(3), pages 410-434, August.
    4. Emmanouil M. L. Economou & Nicholas C. Kyriazis, 2016. "The Achaeans and the Europeans: An Interdisciplinary Comparison of Federations," International Journal of Social Science Research, Macrothink Institute, vol. 4(2), pages 8-23, September.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-00686137. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.