Volume 32, Number 21 & 22 · January 16, 1986
Turbulent Empire
By Jonathan D. Spence
The Magistrate's Tael: Rationalizing Fiscal Reform in Eighteenth-Century Ch'ing China
by Madeleine Zelin
University of California Press, 385 pp., $35.00
The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China
by Philip C. C. Huang
Stanford University Press, 369 pp., $38.50
From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China Harvard University Press
by Benjamin A. Elman
Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, distributed by, 368 pp., $20.00
Among the great and enduring questions in the study of Chinese history are these: In an agricultural country of such extraordinary size how was the land farmed and what were the patterns of ownership and tenancy? How was the rural revenue extracted from the farms and apportioned to the different sectors of the imperial bureaucracy? What was the ideology that served as the country's social bond, and what was the relation to the state of the scholars who created that ideology? The scale of these questions and the span of China's history make definitive answers elusive; but the recent appearance of three remarkably fine books by Madeleine Zelin, Philip Huang, and Benjamin Elman certainly takes us a major step forward in our attempts to find explanations.
Review, 3436 words
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