Quantitative History of China State Capacity, Institutions and Development

This Open Access book marks the beginning of a new era in the study of Chinese history. Since the beginning of the computer age, quantitative techniques have been increasingly used to study specific topics like family, population, and living standards in China's past. However, sample sizes have usually been small due to either historical archives' availability constraints or limited human processing capacity. With much increased computing power and machine-assisted reading/processing capacity, many big historical databases have become available, offering quantitative historians and social scientists great opportunities to study China's past development experience. This volume showcases a collection of new findings concerning China's political, social, and economic history and typically based on newly constructed large historical datasets. Most of the work has involved an interdisciplinary team of economists, sociologists, political scientists, historians and econometricians, demonstrating how new big data and quantitative methods may be brought to bear on some of the biggest questions related to China's development over the past three millennia and on the implications of distant past events on contemporary China. Topics covered range from the roles of war, state formation, religion, culture, finance and institutions in long-run development and technological innovations, to regicide history, to the organization and capacity of the bureaucracy. Contributors include leading figures in the quantitative study of China's long-run socioeconomic and political history. This volume will be of value to anyone with an interest in Chinese economic, political, social and/or institutional history as well as anyone interested in quantitative history more generally.  

Zhiwu Chen is Chair and Cheng Yu-Tung Professor in Finance at The University of Hong Kong (HKU). He currently serves as director of both Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (HKIHSS) and Centre for Quantitative History (CQH). His research covers finance theory, the sociology of finance, economic history, quantitative history, emerging markets, as well as China’s economy and capital markets. He was a former Professor of Finance at Yale University (1999–2017) and a Special-Term Visiting Professor at Peking University and Tsinghua University. In 2013, he started the annual Summer School for Quantitative History cum International Sympo-sium on Quantitative History at Tsinghua University and continues to organize them at Peking University, with the goal of promoting quantitative research on the history of China and beyond.

Cameron Campbell is Chair Professor in the Division of Social Science at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). He is also a Distinguished Professor in the School of History and Culture at Central China Normal University. His research focuses on demography, stratification and inequality in historical China and in comparative perspective. For his research, he and his collaborators in the Lee-Campbell Group construct, analyze, and publicly release datasets constructed from archival and other sources. He was a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford 2022–23, and a Guggenheim Fellow in 2004–2005. He was a Changjiang Scholar at Central China Normal University from 2017 to 2020.

Debin Ma is a Professor of Economics at Fudan University, Shanghai China and a Quondam Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford University. His main expertise is on the long-term economic growth of East Asia, especially China. His research interests include global history; the interna-tional comparison of living standards; institutions, legal traditions, and ideology; human capital and productivity; and the economic history of the silk industry. He has published widely on Asian and comparative economic history and is the co-editor of the Cambridge Economic History of China.