This volume explores commercial relations between the United States and China from the eighteenth century until 1949, fleshing out with facts the romantic and shadowy image of "the China trade." These nine chapters by specialists in the field have developed from papers they presented at a conference supported by the national Committee on American-East Asian Relations.
The work begins with an Introduction by John K. Fairbank, then moves on to analysis of the old China trade up to the American Civil War, centering on traditional Chinese exports of tea and silk. A second section deals with American imports into China--cotton textiles and textile-related goods, cigarettes, kerosene. Finally, the impact of the trade on both countries is assessed and the operations of American-owned and multinational companies in China are examined. For both the United States and China, the economic importance of the trade proves to have been less than the legend might suggest.
These fourteen essays covering a wide range of subjects of great current interest reflect the continuous evolution of the author’s thought from 1951 to 1961. Range and flexibility characterize Alexander Gerschenkron’s dynamic approach to Europe’s industrial history. Connecting evolution in individual countries with their degree of economic backwardness, he presents the industrialization of the continent as a “case of unity in diversity,” thus offering a cogent alternative, supported by case studies, to the traditional view of industrialization as monotonous repetition of the same process from country to country. Brought together for the first time, these essays were originally published in specialized periodicals in the United States and abroad.
Explaining and systematizing the elements of creative innovation in industrial history, Gerschenkron opens new paths of research and poses a number of pertinent questions for the problem of economic development in backward countries. His versatile analysis not only includes construction of ingenious industrial output indices and fruitful historical hypotheses on the index-number problem, but also original insights gleaned from a study of Soviet novels and a brilliant critique of Doctor Zhivago.
Rulers and Capital in Historical Perspective explains why modern banking and credit systems emerged in the nineteenth century only in certain countries that then subsequently industrialized and became developed.
Tracing the contemporaneous cases of India and the United States over time, Abhishek Chatterjee identifies the factors that were crucial to the development and regulation of a modern banking and credit system in the United States during the first third of the nineteenth century. He contrasts this situation with India’s, where the state never formally incorporated a sophisticated private credit system, and thus relegated it to the sphere of the informal economy.
Chatterjee identifies certain features in both societies, often—though not always—associated with colonialism, that tended to restrict the formation of modern institutionalized money and credit markets. Rulers and Capital in Historical Perspective demonstrates thatnotwithstanding the many other differences between the North American colonies (prior to independence), and India, the same facets of their relationships with Great Britain prevented the emergence of a modern banking system in the two respective societies.
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