The presentations in this panel are arranged chronologically. Lowenstein’s paper, “Commercial innovation in global comparative perspective,” revisits the Great Divergence debate by questioning the standard premise that China lacked the commercial and financial revolutions that propelled Western Europe’s takeoff. By shifting attention from presumed cultural or political deficits to the organization of economic life, it argues for more comparable developmental trajectories—at least in the domain of commercial innovation and institutional reform—and thereby reframes what counts as causal difference in global economic history. Yang’s paper on the Kiakhta trade regime (1820–1850) challenges the marginalization of Qing–Russian commerce by showing how a formally regulated barter system functioned as a sophisticated overland exchange institution embedded in global commodity and liquidity cycles. It traces how silver scarcity, monetization pressures, and asymmetries in collective organization destabilized frontier exchange and translated market shifts into political conflict and regulatory action. Fang’s paper, “Making National Markets Legible,” turns to China’s Republican period to examine how price surveys, indices, and graphical techniques rendered economic space measurable and governable, from the nationwide surveys conducted by Beiyang governments to regional investigations and Guangdong’s 1935–36 monetary reforms; it shows that quantification was not a technical afterthought but a key arena in which authority was asserted and intervention justified. Zhang’s paper brings the story into the reform era, explaining how smallholder claim-making under ambiguous mountain tenure in Anxi County generated a bottom-up transformation of property regimes and scaled into a sustained tea boom through social competition and environmental feedback. Taken together, the panel reframes China’s economic transformation as the cumulative outcome of institutional experiments in exchange, property, and measurement—processes that both shaped and were shaped by wider Eurasian trajectories.