Description
Book SynopsisThe author presents a convincing new interpretation of the origins and nature of the agrarian crisis that gripped the North China Plain in the two centuries before the Revolution. His extensive research included eighteenth-century homicide case records, a nineteenth-century country government archive, large quantities of 1930''s Japanese ethnographic materials, and his own field studies in 1980.
Through a comparison of the histories of small family farms and larger scale managerial farms, the author documents and illustrates the long-term trends of agricultural commercialization, social stratification, and mounting population pressure in the peasant economy. He shows how those changes, in the absence of dynamic economic growth, combined over the course of several centuries to produce a majority, not simply of land-short peasants or of exploited tenants and agricultural laborers, but of poor peasants who required both family farming and agricultural wage income to survive. This
Trade Review
'Huang's book is extraordinarily rich, and I believe it to be the best sustained study of rural north China yet written.' Jonathan Spence, The New York Review of Books
Table of Contents
Note of place-names; Part I. Background: 1. The issues; 2. The sources and the villages; 3. The ecological setting; Part II. Economic Involution and Social Change: 4. Managerial farming and family farming in the 1930's; 5. The small-peasant and estate economies of the early Qing; 6. Commercialization and social stratification in the Qing; 7. Accelerated commercialization in the twentieth century; 8. Managerial farming and family farming: draft-animal use; 9. Managerial farming and family farming: labor use; 10. The underdevelopment of managerial farming; 11. The persistence of small-peasant family farming; 12. The commercialization of production relations; Part III. The Village and the State: 13. Villages under the Qing state; 14. Changes in the village community; 15. Village and state in the twentieth century; 16. Conclusion; Appendixes; Character list; Index.
