Papers by Kenneth Pomeranz
The Journal of Asian Studies, 2004
The Journal of Asian Studies
The COVID-19 pandemic is nowhere near over. Some things, however, seem relatively clear. So far, ... more The COVID-19 pandemic is nowhere near over. Some things, however, seem relatively clear. So far, the agendas of the world's most powerful actors seem unchanged—or, indeed, accelerated. Partly as a result, disease mortality and economic losses have fallen largely on poorer people, though deaths so far have been concentrated among poorer people in rich countries. Consequently, the pandemic's implications look very different at the local, subnational, and international levels—although at all levels, they thus far reflect accelerations of preexisting trends more than new departures. Many developments reflect remarkable gains in human capacity to cope with disasters—a point highlighted by comparisons to the 1919 flu and other historical events pandemics made by the authors in this forum. Those gains are particularly evident in Asia, though they look more precarious in South Asia and Southeast Asia than in East Asia; this has contributed to a marked shift in rhetoric about global ...
Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies
Journal of Chinese History
Tonio Andrade'sThe Gunpowder Ageis a big book. It spans roughly 800 years, in both China and ... more Tonio Andrade'sThe Gunpowder Ageis a big book. It spans roughly 800 years, in both China and Europe. Its boldest claims concern China, but Andrade delves into European history as well, making it a challenge for any one scholar to assess his evidence and arguments. Because China specialists would want to know how historians specializing in European warfare and in Western science and technology evaluate Andrade's challenges to received wisdom, theJournal of Chinese History’s editor and editorial board invited historians outside the China field to contribute to a joint review. We succeeded in recruiting a distinguished panel, all of whom have written extensively on these issues: David Parrott, author of such books asThe Business of War: Military Enterprise and Military Revolution in Early Modern Europe; Philip Hoffman, author most recently ofWhy Did Europe Conquer the World?; Stephen Morillo, author ofWar in World History, among other books; and Ian Inkster, author ofScience an...
Twentieth-Century China
Twenty years ago, a graduate orals field in modern Chinese history-however that term was defined-... more Twenty years ago, a graduate orals field in modern Chinese history-however that term was defined-would probably not have included more than a handful of works on any area, other than the Northeast, that had not been ruled by the Ming or any area that lay west of today's Lanzhou-Chongqing railway. Today, research on West China abounds. Some of the reasons for that development come straight from contemporary headlines. They include the "Develop the West" program that the People's Republic of China (PRC) has put in place since 1999; unrest in Tibet and Xinjiang; spectacular (and controversial) infrastructural projects like the railroad to Lhasa, huge southwestern dams, and oil and gas pipelines linking Xinjiang to East China; and stories about the economic, environmental, and geopolitical significance of enormous mining concentrations like the rare earths complex at Bayan Obo (白云鄂博) and the coal boom in the Ordos (鄂尔多斯; both in Inner Mongolia). Other reasons are historiographic. The new Qing history, 1 emphasizing the Manchu-ness of that empire and the relationship of that heritage to the empire's success, has quite naturally increased interest among non-PRC scholars in thinking about the Republic and the PRC as successors to that dynasty in particular. In contrast, PRC historiography has more often treated the Qing as the culmination of a less differentiated "traditional" legacy that arises from the entire imperial period, generating a narrative that has considerable overlap with the "sinification" thesis to which the new Qing history is often contrasted. 2 Meanwhile, the increasingly
Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 2015
The Journal of Asian Studies, 2016
Amitav Ghosh, perhaps Asia's most prominent living author, moves among many genres and across... more Amitav Ghosh, perhaps Asia's most prominent living author, moves among many genres and across vast territories. His fiction—The Circle of Reason (1986), The Shadow Lines (1988), The Glass Place (2000), The Hungry Tide (2004), and The Ibis trilogy—takes us from Calcutta where he was born in 1956 to the Arabian Sea, Paris, London, and back again to the Indian Ocean, the Bay of Bengal, and beyond. His nonfiction—In an Antique Land (1992), Dancing in Cambodia and at Large in Burma (1998), and Countdown (1999)—rests on a PhD in social anthropology from Oxford. He went to Alexandria, Egypt, for his dissertation research. His science fiction, The Calcutta Chromosome, won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1997. His essays—published in The New Yorker, The New Republic, and The New York Times and collected in The Iman and the Indian (2002)—address major issues such as fundamentalism. Indeed, most of his work addresses big questions, exploring the nature of communal violence, the traces of lov...
Looked at in comparative perspective, among the most striking features of Qing political economy ... more Looked at in comparative perspective, among the most striking features of Qing political economy are the combination of highly commercialized agriculture with the strength of peasant land use rightsboth through smallholding and through various forms of secure tenancy-and the very small share of the population dependent on wage-earning. This paper begins by analyzing some reasons for this pattern, focusing on the intersection of customary land rights, agricultural practices and family formation in China's wealthiest regions. Most of the paper then traces its long-run consequences-for urbanization, internal trade, migration, environmental change, and fiscal policy-and compares them with those in other parts of the world. It argues that the intersection of these institutions with China's resource endowments created a distinct political economy which produced considerable agricultural and commercial dynamism, but not industrialization. It then shows that, though severely disrupted in the 19th and early 20th century, patterns derived from these basic conditions continued to shape Chinese economic development thereafter, and even into the present era of post-Mao reform.
This article asks how questions from social history can be more closely integrated into world his... more This article asks how questions from social history can be more closely integrated into world history and vice versa. It highlights cases in which this has already happened and suggests avenues for further development. It divides social history into three different types: history of daily life, history of social organization, and history of social movements and deliberate attempts to induce
Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Dec 1, 1999
ABSTRACT Technology and Culture 42.2 (2001) 354-355 The history of cane sugar in China followed a... more ABSTRACT Technology and Culture 42.2 (2001) 354-355 The history of cane sugar in China followed a very different path from the one it traced in the New World. Though the production of sugar greatly increased to meet an expanding consumer market from the sixteenth century on, China did not develop large plantations or slave-based plantation economies as in the New World. During the Ming and Qing periods, sugarcane cultivation and sugar manufacture were always undertaken by smallholders; sugarcane continually had to compete with rice and other subsistence and commercial crops, and never was it turned into a monoculture. Sucheta Mazumdar's book sets out to explain how Chinese sugar manufacture, operating within the confines of the smallholder system, was able to expand and why it declined in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with relation to the global economy. Mazumdar draws on a rich collection of primary and secondary sources to give an exceptionally detailed account of all aspects of sugar production in China, including consumption and demand in the domestic and world markets, manufacturing technology, the land system, and marketing structures, ending with a comparison of the divergent paths followed by the sugar industries in Guangdong and Taiwan. She demonstrates that changes in technology and cropping patterns raised the efficiency of production in the smallholder economy and enabled it to export large quantities of sugar before the late nineteenth century. The inability of South China to respond dynamically to the expanding demands of the world economy after this time she attributes to new social-property relations and peasant economic strategies. She singles out the new peasant property rights which emerged during the Qing as "the primary barrier between capital and production" (p. 406), and views the persistence of combining commercial agriculture with production for subsistence as another confining factor. She contrasts this situation, epitomized in the case of Guangdong, in which the peasants retained control over the immediate process of production, with Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule, where the sugar factory owner became the "real controller of the immediate process of production" (p. 407) and smallholders were subordinate to the needs of industrial capital. Readers of Technology and Culture will be interested in Mazumdar's new hypothesis concerning the invention of the two- and three-roller vertical sugar mill, which remained the main machine for crushing sugarcane in the New World and Asia from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth. Scholars still do not agree about exactly when, where, and how this roller mill first appeared. Mazumdar proposes that it was invented in the New World and subsequently transferred from the Americas to China (this is a revision of her 1984 doctoral dissertation, in which she gave India priority for the invention of the vertical two-roller mill). This adds another hypothesis to the ongoing debate concerning the origins of this mill; I have argued in favor of China, and Françoise Sabban proposes China for the two-roller mill and the New World for the three-roller version. Sugar and Society in China succeeds in putting the smallholder pattern of sugar production in South China within the global context, and demonstrates that it did not develop in isolation from the world market after the sixteenth century. I feel, however, that it fails to consider one important aspect of world sugar production, the role of government intervention. After the sixteenth century, governments of western countries protected sugar industries in their own colonies with tariffs, and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries this protection extended to include setting up infrastructures to encourage industrial capital to invest in new technology and expand production. Even today, most sugar industries all over the world enjoy some form of governmental protection. As Mazumdar points out, the Japanese colonial government succeeded in transforming the smallholding system into a modern sugar industry in Taiwan, so what prevented the Qing state and the Republican government from promoting the smallholder in Guangdong? The social and economic factors...
The Journal of Economic History, Jun 1, 2001
International Journal, Oct 1, 2001
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Mar 1, 2008
Northrop/A Companion to World History, 2012
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Papers by Kenneth Pomeranz