Early Modern China: 1550-1800

Catalog description

This course studies early modern Chinese society, economy, and the state from ca. 1550 to 1800, a period which marked the culmination of the development of the centralized, bureaucratic, imperial state and exhibited significant innovations in economic structure and activity. Students will be able to describe the pressure of unprecedented demographic growth, and explain how the society began to experience many of the problems that continue. They will be able analyze China's failure to build on its earlier economic and technological successes by exploring intellectual life and its relation to scientific and technological innovation.