Why was there no capitalism in early modern China?
By: APPEL, Tiago Nasser
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ArticlePublisher: São Paulo : Editora 34, 2017Online resources: Acesso Revista de Economia Política = Brazilian Journal of Political Economy 37, 1, p. 167-188Abstract: In this paper, we ask the following question: why couldnt Early Modern China make the leap to capitalism, as we have come to know it in the West? We suggest that, even if China compared well with the West in key economic features commercialization and commodification of goods, land, labor up to the 18th century, it did not traverse the path to Capitalism because of the fact of empire. Lacking the scale of fiscal difficulties encountered in Early Modern Europe, Late Imperial China did not have to heavily tax merchants and notables; therefore, it did not have to negotiate rights and duties with the mercantile class. More innovatively, we also propose that the relative lack of fiscal difficulties meant that China failed to develop a virtuous symbiosis between taxing, monetization of the economy and public debt. This is because, essentially, it was the mobilization of societys resources primarily by way of public debt or taxes towards the support of a military force that created the first real opportunities for merchants and bankers to amass immense and unprecedented wealth
In this paper, we ask the following question: why couldnt Early Modern China make the leap to capitalism, as we have come to know it in the West? We suggest that, even if China compared well with the West in key economic features commercialization and commodification of goods, land, labor up to the 18th century, it did not traverse the path to Capitalism because of the fact of empire. Lacking the scale of fiscal difficulties encountered in Early Modern Europe, Late Imperial China did not have to heavily tax merchants and notables; therefore, it did not have to negotiate rights and duties with the mercantile class. More innovatively, we also propose that the relative lack of fiscal difficulties meant that China failed to develop a virtuous symbiosis between taxing, monetization of the economy and public debt. This is because, essentially, it was the mobilization of societys resources primarily by way of public debt or taxes towards the support of a military force that created the first real opportunities for merchants and bankers to amass immense and unprecedented wealth
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