My dissertation identifies four major parties in a feudal society: the ruler, the ruler's bureaucratic agents (local governments), the lords, and the peasants. In the context of Feudal China, the dissertation focuses on the landlord-peasant relationship and the landlord-local government relationship, while treating the ruler-lord relationship as exogenous.

Preliminary Material -- Introduction -- Notes on the Translation -- Preface (1957) -- Authors' Note (1959) -- Weights and Measures -- The Development of the Regional Economy of Shandong During the Qing Period -- The Development of Commercial and Handicraft Towns -- The Commercialization of Agriculture -- The Differentiation of the Peasantry -- Micro Studies of the Managerial Landlord Economy in Shandong During the Qing Period -- Field Data on Three Typical Managerial Landlords -- Field Data on two Rentier Landlords -- Field Data on 131 Managerial Landlords -- Analysis of the Economic and Social Significance of the Managerial Landlords and Conclusions -- Analysis of the Economic and Social Significance of the Managerial Landlords -- Preliminary Conclusions -- Appendixes -- Class Structure of 197 Villages in 42 Districts of Shandong, c. 1900 -- Economic Activities of 131 Managerial Landlords From 46 Districts of Shandong, c. 1900 -- Conditions of Starting and Stopping Work and Sources of Income of Wage Laborers in 141 Villages in 47 Districts of Shandong, c. 1900 -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Glossary -- Index -- Harvard East Asian Monographs.

"This well-documented study discusses the social and economic changes in Shandong province before the influence of the West was felt at the end of the nineteenth century. The authors show that by the sixteenth century, commercial and handicraft towns linked to national and local markets had already begun to emerge. Urban growth was made possible by increased agricultural production, which in turn stimulated specialization and increased commercialization in the agricultural sector. Another important change in rural society at this time was the emergence of a new stratum of wealthy landlords who managed their estates with wage labor. Case studies of managerial landlords, who form the main focus of this study, are included as well as generalizations drawn from questionnaire materials. Luo Lun and Jing Su wrote this book while they were young researchers at Shandong University in the late 1950s, using data they had gathered in the culturally relaxed period of the Hundred Flowers. In his introduction, Endymion Wilkinson analyzes the authors’ thesis and concludes that their Leninist model is inapplicable to premodern Chinese history. The value of this study lies not so much in its conclusion that even without the impact of Western imperialism China would of itself have developed a capitalist society, but rather in the wealth of data the authors present, in this first in-depth study of a relatively advanced region in north China."

This study seeks to lay bare the relationship between the sociopolitical structures that shaped peasant lives in Manchuria (northeast China) during the Qing dynasty and the development of that region’s economy. The book is written in three parts. It begins with an analysis of the ideological, political, and economic interests of the Qing ruling house in defending its homeland in the northeast against occupation by non-Manchus, and examines how these interests informed state policy and the reconfiguration of the region’s social landscape in the first decades of the dynasty. The book then addresses how this agrarian configuration unraveled under challenge from settler peasant communities and gives an account of the resulting property and labor regimes. The study ends with an account of how that social formation configured peasant economic behavior and in so doing established the limits of economic change and trade growth.

In this wide-ranging study, Sucheta Mazumdar offers a new answer to the fundamental question of why China, universally acknowledged one of the most developed economies in the world through the mid-eighteenth century, paused in this development process in the nineteenth. Focusing on cane-sugar production, domestic and international trade, technology, and the history of consumption for over a thousand years as a means of framing the larger questions, the author shows that the economy of late imperial China was not stagnant, nor was the state suppressing trade; indeed, China was integrated into the world market well before the Opium War. But clearly the trajectory of development did not transform the social organization of production or set in motion sustained economic growth.

At first glance, this trajectory bears a superficial resemblance to that of Europe during the early modern period. My analysis reveals, however, that these were native developments, originating at the level of local societies in China before working their way upward to the state level. In short, my research has brought entirely indigenous set of Chinese ideas and institutions into a global history of the state and political economy, as well as opened the way for rich comparative study with other parts of the world.