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Chapter 1 What Kind of Book is This? -- Chapter 2 The World that Trade Created -- Chapter 3 The Military Revolution in the Era of Early Economic Globalization -- Chapter 4 The Big Shuffle: theEast Asian World in the Era of Early Economic Globalization -- Chapter 5 Fighting on Sea and Land: International Conflicts in East Asia in the Era of Early Economic Globalization -- Chapter 6Strategy and Armies: National Security in the Late Ming and the Military Reform Campaign -- Chapter 7 A Time of Great Strife: Four Major Wars in East Asia in the Late Ming -- Chapter 8 Concluding Remarks: The Writing of History is Terrifying.

For centuries the Yangzi delta has acted as the locomotive of China's economic growth. This book examines the surprising phenomenon of a long period of economic growth from 1620 to 1850 in the traditional agriculture of this extremely densely populated area, when no new land was available and no major technological breakthroughs occurred. Intensification of farming and rationalizations of resources saw an optimum model of peasant family economy become the norm. The contrast with western patterns of development improves our understanding of China's economic performance, past and present.

Abstracts. The Eurocentric growth model has been the basic workhorse for numerous Chinese economic historians. This deep seated Eurocentric paradigm is concerned mainly with conterfactuals and tends to ignore past reality. To illustrate the problems of this Eurocentric approach, this paper examines the rural economy of Jiangnan, also known as the Yangzi Delta, during late imperial times. A main characteristic of the villages in the Wuxi county in Jiangnan were the mixture of the rural–urban lifestyle and development. Jiangnan's developmental patterns, in the Song and the Qing dynasty, from the Maoist period (pre‐1979) to post‐1979 development, contrast sharply with the predictions of the Western development models.

This article tests recent ideas about the long-term economic development of China compared with Europe on the basis of a detailed comparison of structure and level of GDP in part of the Yangzi delta and the Netherlands in the 1820s. We find that Dutch GDP per capita was almost twice as high as in the Yangzi delta. Agricultural productivity there was at about the same level as in the Netherlands (and England), but large productivity gaps existed in industry and services. We attempt to explain this concluding that differences in factor costs are probably behind disparities in labor productivity.

"The first English translation of Li Bozhong's pioneering study, An Early Modern Economy in China uses sophisticated analysis to reconstruct the GDP of the Yangzi Delta. In this innovative economic history, Li provides a basis for understanding for the Delta's economy, an area of unprecedented growth in modern times. Using careful quantitative research Li carefully reconstructs the economies of the region, combining three methods of estimating GDP: output, income and expenditure. The result reveals the structure and level of income and production in this highly commercialized and urbanized part of China, establishing a benchmark for future reconstruction's of regional economies through GDP. This is a landmark text in the field of economic history which has had a great impact understanding the Chinese economic history in global perspective."