An Early Modern China? Perspectives from Environmental and Economic History

Within the past 15 years, scholarly work on China has raised questions about the uniqueness of features generally attributed only to early modern Europe, showing that in many ways China from about 1400 to 1800 was as “early modern” as Europe, thus questioning the presumed causal connections between the “early modern” and “modern” world.  This paper explores China’s commodity markets and processes of environmental change, demonstrating that China’s markets were more integrated and efficient than those in Western Europe or North America at the same time, and that a combination of advanced agricultural technology, state action, and markets had substantially weakened the linkage between climatic shocks to agriculture and mortality crises, earlierin China than in Europe, and without the concurrent creation of an industrial economy.  Clearly Smithian dynamics were at work in late imperial China, both providing some of the evidence for the argument that China shared “early modern” characteristics with parts of Western Europe, as well as driving environmental change in China.  But when viewed from the perspective of environmental change, and of Chinese and European understandings of the causes of those changes, in particular of species extinction, China looks less “early modern” than “late imperial,” thereby reproblematicizing the applicability of “early modern” to China.