Harriet Zurndorfer

This book examines one of the most important problems concerning Chinese civilization - how was the pattern of stability and continuity of Chinese society and economy achieved and maintained from approximately 800 to 1800. It uses the results of detailed, specialized research about the Chinese landholding system, marketing patterns, the role of the extended family therein, taxation and non-elite social groups in one specific locale to answer questions that historians of any civilization ask about the structure and functioning of a given society. The author has investigated the development of the Hui-chou community over a 1,000 year period by concentrating on six grand questions, each answered by one chapter. The answers to these questions, as given in this work, show that 'stability' is a dynamic concept. 'Continuity' in Hui- chou is the result of the 'changes' in population growth, commercialization, and class differentiation acting in concert over the long term.

The Development of Hui-Chou Prefecture 800 to 1800

Change and Continuity in Chinese Local History

Paola Zamperini

Paul Ropp

This is a collection of original essays which focuses on the causes, meanings and significance of female suicides in Ming and Qing China. It is the first attempt in English-language scholarship to revise earlier views of female self-destruction that had been shaped by the May Fourth Movement and anti-Confucian critiques of Chinese culture, and to consider the matter of female suicide in the wider context of more recent scholarship on women and gender relations in late imperial China. The essays also reveal the world of tensions, conflicting demands and expectations, and a variety of means by which both women and men made moral sense of their lives in late imperial China. The volume closes with an extensive bibliography of relevant and important Chinese, Japanese, and Western publications related to female suicide in late imperial China.

Female Suicide in Late Imperial China

Passionate Women

Jos Gommans

This volume brings together some of the very best of half a century of enduring scholarship in the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient. The selected articles show how historians have developed their understanding of economic and social change in China and India. As introduced by two of its current editors, these seminal studies not only demonstrate the crucial contributions of JESHO but also reflect the various scholarly tendencies in their respective fields. Hence this volume offers readers a unique opportunity to critically compare the historical and the historiographical roots and routes of the modern development of these two new global superpowers.

Highlights of Fifty Years of the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient (1957-2007)

Roots and Routes of Development in China and India

Matthew Gordon

Richard Kaeuper

Violence permeated much of social life across the vast geographical space of the European, Asian, and Islamic worlds and through the broad sweep of what is often termed the Middle Millennium (roughly 500 to 1500). Focusing on four contexts in which violence occurred across this huge area, the contributors to this volume explore the formation of centralized polities through war and conquest; institution building and ideological expression by these same polities; control of extensive trade networks; and the emergence and dominance of religious ecumenes. Attention is also given to the idea of how theories of violence are relevant to the specific historical circumstances discussed in the volume's chapters. A final section on the depiction of violence, both visual and literary, demonstrates the ubiquity of societal efforts to confront meanings of violence during this longue durée.

Harriet Zurndorfer

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