Kinship Networks, Social Status, and the Creation of Property Rights in Early Modern China and England

Scholars have often assumed that traditional Chinese laws and customs reinforced the economic and political dominance of elites, whereas English institutions, from early times, promoted individual equality. This is deeply inaccurate: Qing and Republican property institutions actually afforded greater economic protection to the poorer segments of society than comparable early modern English institutions. In particular, Qing and Republican property customs gave much stronger powers of redemption to landowners who had pawned their land—generally via “conditional sales” (dian) in China, and via mortgages in England.  Chinese conditional sellers were customarily allowed to retain redemption rights indefinitely, while English mortgagors would generally lose their land if they did not redeem within one year.  Because poorer peasants, in both societies, were far more likely to collateralize land than richer ones, the far bigger window of redemption in Chinese customs provided stronger institutional relief for the economically disadvantaged. This paper argues that this important institutional difference stemmed from the different ways Chinese and English rural communities allocated social status. Status and authority correlated with wealth far more closely in early modern English communities than in Chinese villages, where strong “Confucian” kinship networks dominated social and economic life. Within these networks, an individual’s social status depended, in large part, on his membership and generational seniority in patrilineal descent groups, rather than personal wealth. This guaranteed that many low-income households enjoyed status and social authority quite disproportionate to their wealth. Compared to low-income English households, who were generally excluded from positions of social authority due to insufficient landed wealth, they possessed far higher levels of social bargaining power and, therefore, were much more capable of bending property customs to their liking. The state played a complex background role by influencing underlying social structures and, specifically in the English case, by harshly enforcing customary redemption deadlines.