, Columnist
Seeing China Through Its Economic History
Don't be too sure that slower growth will promote instability. That's not what's happened before.
Past and future.
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Is it possible to better understand China today by looking back to the country's economic history? I don't mean the years of communism under Chairman Mao, but rather earlier times, those which seem to many Western observers like a blurred sequence of one dynasty after another.
Enter Richard von Glahn's “The Economic History of China: From Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century,” a book likely to go down as one of the year's best. Over the last 15 years, the economics profession has gone from a poor understanding of China's economic history to knowing quite a bit. Von Glahn's exhaustive but readable book is the best guide to this rapidly growing body of knowledge.