The economic history of China covers thousands of years and the region has undergone alternating cycles of prosperity and decline. China, for the last two millennia, was one of the world's largest and most advanced economies.

For economic historians, it makes sense to begin with the formation of China’s national economy in the wake of China’s unification in 221 BC under the Qin. The year 1800 AD coincides with the beginning of the end for China’s premodern era, which …

In the years between 1368 and 1800 China's economy expanded immensely. Steady compounding growth in China's population was the main driver of this growth. Agriculture, industry and trade thus all increased in absolute terms but stagnated in relative per capita terms.

The economic history of China is covered in the following articles: Economic history of China before 1912 , the economic history of China during the ancient China and imperial China, before the establishment of the Republic of China in 1912.

Before the eighteenth century, China’s economy shared some of the features such as highly productive agriculture and sophisticated markets found in the most advanced regions of Europe.

This chapter discusses China’s foreign openness from 1800 to 1950 from the point of view of new sources of information on foreign trade and investment that became available because of Western influence in China.

The analysis of the emergence of modern economic development in China has centred on four issues: the categorisation of the overall experience within the spectrum from decline through stagnation to growth and development; the extent of the foreign involvement and the nature of its relationship to the domestic economy; the complex interaction of ...

Chinese agriculture was so efficient however that technology from anywhere else in the world even in 1800 would not have increased productivity. Demand for copper, iron and silver easily outstripped the Chinese economy's capacity to supply them.

China’s long-term economic trajectory: forces propelling spurts of innov-ation and growth, restrictions that often impede these dynamic forces, and enduring features of China’s polity that generate tensions between central-ized authoritarian …

Dunstan, Helen, Conflicting Counsels to Confuse the Age: A Documentary Study of Political Economy in Qing China, 1644–1840 (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan, Center for Chinese Studies, 1996).Google Scholar