1 Timothy Brook, The confusions of pleasure: commerce and culture in Ming China (Berkeley, 1998), 63–4, 79, 95.

2 Quoted in Yang Guozhen, Ming Qing tudi qiyue yanjiu (Beijing, 1988), 30.

3 Yang, Ming Qing tudi qiyue, 30.

4 See Douglass North, Institutions, institutional change, and economic growth (Cambridge, 1990).

5 See for instance Philip Huang, The peasant family and rural development in the Lower Yangzi region, 1350–1998 (Stanford, 1990), 107–8.

6 Huang, Peasant family and rural development, 102–14, especially p. 111; Xu Dixin and Wu Chengming, Chinese capitalism, 1522–1840 (New York, 1998), 147–62, 375–80.

7 Brenner, Robert and Isett, Christopher, ‘England's divergence From China's Yangzi Delta: property relations, microeconomics and patterns of development’, Journal of Asian Studies 61:2 (2002), 609–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 The late eighteenth and especially the nineteenth century saw serious problems that impeded long-distance trade and thus exacerbated ecological strains (on which see Kenneth Pomeranz, The great divergence: China, Europe, and the making of the modern world economy (Princeton, 2000), 225–53); an awkward monetary system with a variety of currencies that were not easily convertible to each other complicated this further, strongly favouring local over long-distance trade (Kuroda Akinobu, Chūka teikoku no kōzō to seikai keizai (Nagoya, 1994), 1–142). State regulations inhibited mining, and thus the supplies of both ores and energy (Huang Qichen, Zhongguo gangtie shengchan shi, shisi-shiqi shiji (Zhengzhou, 1989), 109–40; Yu Mingxia, Xuzhou meikuang shi (Nanjing, 1991), 19–21); and the rural financial sector, though still poorly understood, seems to have had problems which became worse over the course of the 19th century, on which see Pan Ming-te, ‘Rural credit market and the peasant economy (1600–1949) – the state, elite, peasant, and “usury”’, Ph.D dissertation, University of California, Irvine, 1994, 404–78. And during the nineteenth century there was also a serious decline in public security, though exactly when and where this became acute is hotly debated.

9 See Kenneth Pomeranz, ‘Women's work and the economics of respectability’, in Bryna Goodman and Wendy Larson eds., Gender in motion (Lanham, MD, 2005), 243–4, on the volatility of returns in cotton textiles. For a general account of Qing (1644–1912) peasant borrowing to expand handicraft production or intensify agricultural production, see Pan, ‘Rural credit market’, 73–201. For examples of mortgaging land to raise capital for commerce, see Cao Xingsui, Jiu Zhongguo Sunan nongjia jingji yanjiu (Beijing, 1996), 31, and Thomas Buoye, Manslaughter, markets, and moral economy: violent disputes over property rights in eighteenth-century China (Cambridge, 2000), 95.

10 Li Wenzhi, Ming Qing shidai fengjian tudi guanxi de songjie (Beijing, 1993), 107; Li Wenzhi and Jiang Taixin, Zhongguo dizhu zhi jingji lun (Beijing, 2005), 432; Chen Shu-chu, Zhejiang sheng tudi wenti yu er wu jian zu, 1927–1937 (Taibei, 1996), 310.

11 Pomeranz, Great divergence, 211–97.

12 The legal scholar Liang Zhiping argues that Chinese customary law (including but not limited to the law of landed property) was suited to a ‘peasant commodity economy,’ but not to capitalism. Since he does not define capitalism, I am not sure to what extent he would endorse the argument above, but he does emphasize that customary law in the Qing accommodated market activity of all sorts while also responding to popular desires for security and evolving slowly rather than through legislation based on abstract, systemic principles. See Liang Zhiping, Qingdai xiguanfa: shehui yu guojia (Beijing, 1996), 173–8.

13 Xu and Wu, Chinese capitalism, 184–371, has many examples.

14 Pomeranz, Great divergence, 3–107. Some other evidence for this proposition will be considered in the course of this article, though settling the debate over it lies outside my purpose.

15 Li and Jiang, Zhongguo dizhu zhi, 386–400, 414.

16 Li and Jiang, Zhongguo dizhu zhi, 387–8; Chen, Zhejiang sheng tudi wenti, 310.

17 See for instance Yang, Ming Qing tudi qiyue, 91–133. Some areas even had ‘one field, three masters’: see, for instance, Li and Jiang, Zhongguo dizhu zhi, 290–91; Kusano Yasushi, Chūgoku kinsei no kisei jinushisei: denmen kanko (Tokyo, 1989), 515.

18 For this view, see particularly Huang, Peasant family and rural development, 10–12, 86–7, and Brenner and Isett, ‘England's divergence from China's Yangzi Delta’, 616. I have already replied at some length to Huang in Pomeranz, Kenneth, ‘Beyond the East/West binary: resituating development paths in the eighteenth century world’, Journal of Asian Studies 61:2 (2002), 539–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and see no need to repeat the discussion here; anyone interested in my response to Brenner and Isett (awaiting publication in a conference volume) should contact me directly. On demographic issues in particular, see Lee, James, Campbell, Cameron and Feng, Wang, ‘Positive check or Chinese checks?’, Journal of Asian Studies 61:2 (2002), 591–607CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Yang, Ming Qing tudi qiyue, 31–3; Melissa Macauley, Social power and legal culture: litigation masters in late Imperial China (Stanford, 1998), 230–5.

20 ‘Grave land’ was land reserved for the burials of members of a particular lineage. Such land might be planted with trees that also provided some economic return, but would not be intensively exploited, since the primary concern was to safeguard the existence of grave sites with proper geomantic properties. Since such land was supposed to serve a purpose that extended infinitely into the future, it was also supposed to be very difficult to sell or mortgage.

21 Ray Huang, Taxation and government finance in sixteenth-century Ming China (Cambridge, 1974), 99.

22 Philip Huang, The peasant economy and social change in North China (Stanford, 1985), 99.

23 Kenneth Pomeranz, The making of a hinterland: state, society, and economy in inland North China, 1853–1937 (Berkeley, 1993), 240. See also Li and Jiang, Zhongguo dizhu zhi, 278, and 281–3 on similar tends with banner land.

24 Anne Osborne, ‘Property, taxes, and state protection of rights’, in Madeleine Zelin, Jonathan Ocko and Robert Gardella eds., Contract and property in early modern China (Stanford, 2004), 120–58, especially pp. 132, 152.

25 John L. Buck, Land utilization in China: a study of 16,876 farms in 168 localities, and 38,256 families in twenty-two provinces in China, 1929–1937 (Nanking, 1937; reprinted New York, 1964), 193; Chen Han-seng, Landlord and peasant in China (New York, 1936), 31–5.

26 On ‘enclaving’ see Arjun Appadurai, ‘Introduction: commodities and the politics of value’, in Arjun Appadurai ed., The social life of things: commodities in cultural perspective (Cambridge, 1986), 22, 25–6.

27 New-world potatoes, sweet potatoes and most importantly maize reached Southeast China via Manila in the late sixteenth century and spread gradually across the empire thereafter. For the most part, these crops could not compete with established crops (especially rice) on the best lands, but they did become quite common on marginal lands of various sorts. The eighteenth century saw a considerable expansion of these crops, especially in highland regions where other Chinese staples were difficult or impossible to grow. They also found favour as foods that took little labour to produce in areas where other kinds of production (e.g. logging) was going on and it was expensive to ship in food, and as a hedge against wildly fluctuating markets for people who were converting some of their former grain land to cash crops (e.g. people switching from rice to sugar in Guangdong). See for instance Ping-ti, Ho, ‘The introduction of American food plants into China’, American Anthropologist 57 (1955), 191–201Google Scholar; Osborne, Anne, ‘The local politics of land reclamation in the Lower Yangzi Highlands’, Late Imperial China 15:1 (1994), 1–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sucheta Mazumdar, Sugar and society in China (Cambridge, 1998), 257–60; Evelyn Rawski, Agricultural change and the peasant economy of South China (Cambridge, 1972), 44, 51, 73.

28 Rubie Watson, Inequality among brothers: class and kinship in South China (Cambridge, 1985), 68; Chen Han-seng, Landlord and peasant in China (p. 42) cites a 20 per cent discount for clan members, but notes that this was by no means the universal practice. Jerry Dennerline, ‘Marriage, adoption, and charity in the development of lineages in Wu-hsi from Sung to Ch'ing’, in Patricia Ebrey and James Watson eds., Kinship organization in late Imperial China 1000–1940 (Berkeley, 1986) (p. 188 and passim) makes the related point that lineage-owned estates might be preferentially rented to the sons (biological or adopted) of land-poor widows in the lineage, but says nothing about the rates paid.

29 See Sifa Xingzheng Bu, Zhongguo min shang shi xiguan diaocha lu (originally compiled 1912; published Nanjing, 1930; reprinted Taibei, 1969). These issues are covered on pp. 15–1,291 but because of the way the text is organized, it is hard to say exactly how much of it is devoted to these issues; they are interspersed with various other aspects of customary property law.

30 Osborne, ‘Property, taxes, and state protection of rights’, 121, 127.

31 Osborne, ‘Property, taxes, and state protection of rights’, 136.

32 Osborne, ‘Local politics of land reclamation’, 6–7, 15, 24, 25–7, 30; Robert Marks, Tigers, rice, silk and silt: environment and economy in late Imperial South China (Cambridge, 1997), 331–2.

33 Chūgoku Nōson Kanko Chōsa Kai, Chūgoku Nōson Kanko Chōsa (6 volumes, Tokyo, 1953–1958), Vol. 2, 513, 527–36. Prasenjit Duara, Culture, power and the state: rural North China 1900–1942 (Stanford, 1988), 222–3.

34 Osborne, ‘Local politics of land reclamation’; Eduard Vermeer, ‘The decline of Hsing-hua Prefecture in the early Ch'ing’, in Eduard B. Vermeer ed., Development and decline of Fukien Province in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Leiden, 1990), 140–3.

35 Dennerline, ‘Marriage, adoption, and charity’, 187–8, 193–4; Hilary Beattie, Land and lineage in China: a study of T'ung-ch'eng County, Anhwei, in the Ming and Ch'ing Dynasties (Cambridge, 1979), 115–19.

36 See for example Osborne, ‘Local politics of land reclamation’, 8, 11, 15–16, 19.

37 Osborne, ‘Property, taxes, and state protection of rights’, 153.

38 Osborne, ‘Property, taxes, and state protection of rights’, 121–2, 133–6; Madeleine Zelin, ‘A critique of rights of property in prewar China’, in Zelin, Ocko and Gardella eds., Contract and property in early modern China, 17–36.

39 See for example Myron Cohen, ‘Writs of passage in late Imperial China: the documentation of practical understandings in Minong, Taiwan’, in Zelin, Ocko and Gardella eds., Contract and property in early modern China, 37–93; Osborne, ‘Property, taxes, and state protection of rights’; Yang, Ming Qing tudi qiyue. A good survey of research on Ming Qing contracts is Kishimoto Mio, ‘Ming Qing qiyue wenshu’, in Wang Yaxin and Liang Zhiping eds., Ming Qing shiqi de minshi shenpan yu minjian qiyue (Beijing, 1998), 280–326.

40 See Scogin, Hugh, ‘Between heaven and man: contract and the state in Han Dynasty China’, Southern California Law Review 63 (1990), 1342–3Google Scholar, 1354.

41 Scogin, ‘Between heaven and man’, 1370–84.

42 But for a different interpretation of yue see Hiroaki, Terada, ‘The nature of social agreements (yue) in the legal order of Ming and Qing China’, International Journal of Asian Studies 2:2 (2005), 309–26Google Scholar, who notes that the term was also used for community compacts in which individual, voluntary assent was less central, and efforts to express and enforce a collective moral sense were more important; he sees some of that sense of yue colouring many of the documents we usually call ‘contracts’ as well.

43 Cited in Valerie Hansen, Negotiating life in traditional China: how ordinary people used contracts, 600–1400 (New Haven, 1995), 56.

44 Hansen, Negotiating life in traditional China.

45 Osborne, ‘Property, taxes, and state protection of rights’, 121, 138, 143, 151–2.

46 Liang Zhiping, Qingdai xiguanfa, 159–61: Macauley, Social power and legal culture, 65, 119–20, 363–4, n. 80; Philip Huang, Civil justice in China: representation and practice in the Qing (Stanford, 1996), 110–37. Huang (Civil justice, 54–6) points out that in the case of rental contracts, middlemen could expect to have future obligations to mediate disputes, but this was less likely with land sales, which did not necessarily create a continuing relationship.

47 Osborne, ‘Property, taxes, and state protection of rights’, 156.

48 Hansen, Negotiating life in traditional China, 58–63.

49 Cohen, ‘Writs of passage in Late Imperial China’, 59–60.

50 See for instance Hui-chen Wang Liu, ‘An analysis of Chinese clan rules: Confucian theories in action’, in Arthur F. Wright ed., Confucianism and Chinese civilization (Stanford, 1959), 16–49.

51 Zelin, ‘A critique of rights of property’, 20, 31–2.

52 Zelin, ‘A critique of rights of property’, 33.

53 Typically, this would be the senior adult male resident in the household, but there were exceptions. Occasionally, for instance, a son of the deceased household head of a complex household might take precedence over a co-resident uncle. In very infrequent cases, a widow might be head of a household in which no appropriate males were present, or might be recognized as de facto head even if a young adult son were the de jure head.

54 See for example Osborne, ‘Property, taxes, and state protection of rights’, 145.

55 For example Dennerline, ‘Marriage, adoption and charity’, 191–4, 202.

56 See for example Osborne, ‘Local politics of land reclamation’, 11, 13, 19.

57 See for example Michael Szonyi, Practicing kinship: lineage and descent in late Imperial China (Stanford, 2002).

58 Siu, Helen, ‘Recycling tradition: culture, history and political economy in the Chrysanthemum Festivals of South China’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 32:4 (1990), 769–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Frederic Wakeman, Jr., Strangers at the gate: social disorder in South China, 1839–1861 (Berkeley, 1966), 109, 153–6; Chen Han-seng, Landlord and peasant in China, 28.

59 Huang, Peasant family and rural development (pp. 28–9) summarizes current thinking on why there has been relatively little new land formation in the Yangzi Delta since roughly 1200 CE. The exception to this generalization is Chongming Island, in the mouth of the Yangzi, and there is a complex debate over precisely how its particular version of separate surface and subsoil rights worked. See, for instance, Kusano, Chūgoku kinsei no kisei jinushisei: denmen kanko, 453–92, and Hiroaki, Terada, ‘“Chongming xianzhi” ni mieru “chengjia,” “guotou”, “dingshou,” ni tsuite: denmen dentei kanko keisei katei no ichi kenkyu’, Toyo bunka kenkyujo kiyo 98 (1985), 39–178Google Scholar. There is agreement, however, that some form of dual property prevailed, with both the investor/subsoil owner and reclaimer/tenant/surface-right-owner holding transferable rights.

60 Guo Qitao, Ritual opera and mercantile lineage: the Confucian transformation of popular culture in Late Imperial Huizhou (Stanford, 2005), 13–86; Keith Hazelton, ‘Patrilines and the development of localized lineages: the Wu of Hsiu-ning City, Hui-chou, to 1528’, in Patricia Ebrey and James Watson eds., Kinship organization in late Imperial China 1000–1940 (Berkeley, 1986), 137–69, especially pp. 165–7. See also Beattie, Land and lineage in China, 88–126, on a somewhat less commercialized area a bit further inland along the Yangzi.

61 Dennerline, ‘Marriage, adoption, and charity’, 206; Beattie, Land and lineage in China, 127–9.

62 Susan Naquin and Evelyn Rawski (Chinese society in the eighteenth century (New Haven, 1987), 36–7) provide a brief summary.

63 Evelyn Rawski, ‘The Ma landlords of Yang-chia-kou in Late Ch'ing and republican China’, in Ebrey and Watson eds., Kinship organization in late Imperial, 245–73.

64 See for example Duara, Culture, power and the state, 86–117.

65 Campbell, Cameron and Lee, James, ‘Social mobility from a kinship perspective: rural Liaoning, 1789–1909’, International Review of Social History 48:1 (2003), 1–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar. (‘Bannermen’ were hereditary servants of the crown, many of them soldiers, who received stipends and/or land grants in return for their labours.)

66 See for example Duara, Culture, power, and the state, 207–13.

67 Hansen, Negotiating life in traditional China, 74–5.

68 Li and Jiang, Zhongguo dizhu zhi jingji, 336–43; proverbs on pp. 343–4.

69 Li and Jiang, Zhongguo dizhu zhi jingji, 340.

70 Yang, Ming Qing tudi qiyue, 31.

71 Buoye, Manslaughter, markets, and moral economy, 185; Jonathan K. Ocko, ‘The missing metaphor: applying Western legal scholarship to the study of contract and property in early modern China’, in Zelin, Ocko and Gardella eds., Contract and property in early modern China, 197.

72 Keng, Chen, ‘Zhongguo budongchan jiaoyi de zhaojia wenti’, Fujian luntan: wenshizhe ban 5 (1987), 33Google Scholar. The rights of neighbours were apparently given some weight in local custom in those times and places where communities shared responsibilities for meeting a land tax quota: see Liang Zhiping, Qingdai xiguanfa, 61–2. But note that Liang is relying heavily on the late Qing/republican compendium of customary law, Zhongguo min shang shi xiguan diaocha lu, and that that was the peak period for village involvement in assessing and collecting taxes.

73 Buoye, Manslaughter, markets, and moral economy, 185–6.

74 Li and Jiang, Zhongguo dizhu zhi jingji, 344–5.

75 Li and Jiang, Zhongguo dizhu zhi jingji, 346–52.

76 Cited in Cohen, ‘Writs of passage in late Imperial China’, 49.

77 See Kathryn Bernhardt, Rents, taxes, and peasant resistance: the Lower Yangzi region, 1840–1950 (Stanford, 1992), 14–21, on the first wave, and Cao, Jiu Zhongguo Sunan nongjia jingji yanjiu, 28–40, 68, on the second.

78 See examples in Yang, Ming Qing tudi qiyue, 33–4.

79 Cohen, ‘Writs of passage in late Imperial China’, 47.

80 Huang, Peasant family and rural development, 107.

81 See for instance Zhou Yuanlian and Xie Zhaohua, Qingdai zudian zhi yanjiu (Shenyang, 1986), 311–17.

82 John L. Buck, Chinese farm economy (Chicago, 1930; reprinted Ann Arbor, 1971), 47, 53.

83 It should be noted that these are ratios between labour inputs and crop area, not land area per se, and thus are weighted by average number of crops per year. The Chayanovian hypothesis could still hold if we found that smaller farms multi-cropped more and that these additional crops were a significantly less productive use of labour than others. Thus far, however, the available evidence cuts against this hypothesis. See for instance Pomeranz, ‘Beyond the East–West binary’, 546–50, 555–64, and Pomeranz, Kenneth, ‘Facts are stubborn things: a response to Philip Huang’, Journal of Asian Studies 62:1 (2003), 172–5Google Scholar. Lavely and Wong, using data of a different kind and from a different region, also conclude that the rental market did a great deal to bring the land and labour power available to different families into balance, though other mechanisms (e.g. hiring out, sideline occupations) also played a role. See Lavely, William and Wong, R. Bin, ‘Family division and mobility in North China’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 34:3 (1992), 455–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

84 In theory, one could imagine that in the absence of efficient land rental markets, families with less land per capita could use their ‘extra’ labour by doing more non-agricultural work than other families, thus keeping their average return per unit of labour in agriculture at the same level as that of families with more favorable land/labour ratios. But if that were true, one would presumably find that poorer families were more heavily involved in handicrafts than others – and might well find that the families with the most land per capita did almost none of this work. I have looked at some length for evidence of such a pattern (which would have been significant for the debates on alleged ‘agricultural involution’ in China) and found none; nor apparently was any evidence found by the advocates of ‘involution’, whose case would have been strengthened by such evidence. (See Huang, Philip, ‘Development or involution in eighteenth-century China: a review of Kenneth Pomeranz's The great divergence: China, Europe, and the making of the modern world economy’, Journal of Asian Studies 61:2 (2002), 501–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Brenner and Isett, ‘England's divergence from China's Yangzi Delta’.) Indeed, the limited evidence we have suggests that families with more land also had more income per labourer from non-farming activities (e.g. Buck, Chinese farm economy, 116–17), perhaps reflecting better access to capital. See also Ma Junya, Hunhe yu fazhan: Jiangnan diqu chuantong shehui jingji de xiandi yanbian (1900–1950) (Beijing, 2002), 277, indicating that households that owned the land they farmed (and thus had no rent payments to worry about) were slightly more likely to also be involved in making cloth for sale than households that rented at least some of their land.

85 Buck, Chinese farm economy, 106.

86 Buck, Chinese farm economy, 111; Ma, Hunhe yu fazhan, 299–303.

87 Macauley, Social power and legal culture; Buoye, Manslaughter, markets, and moral economy.

88 For a summary of the Chūgoku Nōson materials on this topic, see Duara, Culture, power, and the state, 181–91.

89 See Cohen, ‘Writs of passage in late Imperial China’, 44, for an example in English.

90 Osborne, ‘Property, taxes, and state protection of rights’, 145.

91 Buoye, Manslaughter, markets, and moral economy, 186.

92 Osborne, ‘Property, taxes, and state protection of rights’, 145–6.

93 Ancient land contracts generally refer to ‘witnesses’ and do not assign these people any responsibilities at all. Credit contracts were more likely to refer to a ‘responsible’ witness, guarantors being more important when a vital part of the agreement (repayment) was to be performed in the future. See Scogin, ‘Between heaven and man,’ 1351–2, but for a contrary view see Shiga Shuzo, Shindai Chūgoku no hō to saiban (Tokyo, 1984).

94 Guozhen, Yang, ‘Qingdai Zhejiang tian qi dian yi pie’, Jingji shi 1 (1984), 101–18Google Scholar; Buoye, Manslaughter, markets, and moral economy, 151; Chen, Keng, ‘Zhongguo budongchan jiaoyi de zhaojia wenti’, Fujian luntan: wenshizhe ban 5 (1987), 30Google Scholar.

95 The literature on litigation and civil justice in Qing China has become enormous in the last 20 years, and is very contentious. One good recent summary of procedures, emphasizing that litigation was expensive but nonetheless very popular, is Susumu, Fuma, ‘Litigation masters and the litigation system of Ming and Qing China’, International Journal of Asian Studies 4:1 (2007), 79–111Google Scholar. Philip Huang (Civil justice in China, 183–4) provides twentieth-century figures that suggest somewhat lower costs relative to popular incomes, and gives a more positive impression of litigators’ likely experience overall (11–12, 162–3, 236). However, he also sees a larger gap than some others between popular expectations embodied in customary law and the statutory principles likely to be applied if a case wound up being decided by the magistrate (pp. 78, 221), which would seem to create serious uncertainties for people trying to anticipate what would happen if their transactions wound up leading to disputes. Liang Zhiping, in Qingdai xiguanfa, and Shiga Shuzo, in Shindai Chūgoku no hō to saiban, among others, place more emphasis on the centrality and dynamism of customary law. It is hard to find anyone in the current debates, however, who upholds the once widely accepted idea that the Chinese were so terrified of the magistrate's yamen that they avoided litigating at all costs.

96 Buoye, Manslaughter, markets, and moral economy, 179.

97 Buoye, Manslaughter, markets, and moral economy, 181–2.

98 Huang, The peasant economy of North China, 294–8.

99 On changes in the tax system see Duara, Culture, power, and the state, 198–216.

100 Duara, Culture, power, and the state, 189–91.

101 Niida Noboru, Chūgoku hōseishi kenkyū, Volume 2 (Tokyo, 1960), 2:376–7; Yang, Ming Qing tudi qiyue, 273, 276.

102 Hansen, Negotiating life in traditional China, 98–99, 123–4.

103 Chen, ‘Zhongguo budongchan’, 30.

104 Yang, Ming Qing tudi qiyue, 31–3, 273–9.

105 See for example Chen, ‘Zhongguo budongchan’, 33, for one exceptionally late demand.

106 Yang, Ming Qing tudi qiyue, 34.

107 Cao, Jiu Zhongguo Sunan nongjia jingji yanjiu, 31.

108 Yang, Ming Qing tudi qiyue, 231–4; Buoye, Manslaughter, markets, and moral economy, 96; Macauley, Social power and legal culture, 230–3.

109 Buoye, Manslaughter, markets, and moral economy, 92–5; p. 92, n. 1 suggests that redemption cases accounted for 49 of Buoye's 56 homicides springing from land-sale disputes in Guangdong. See also Macauley, Social power and legal culture, 230–43.

110 In Buoye's sample, rent and eviction disputes led to three times as many homicides as disputes related to land sales; see Manslaughter, markets, and moral economy, 92, 104, 120. Water-rights disputes, leading to roughly twice as many homicides as land sales did, are covered on pp. 82–90. See also Wakeman, Strangers at the gate, 112.

111 Jing Junjian, ‘Legislation related to the civil economy in the Qing dynasty’, in Kathryn Bernhardt and Philip Huang eds., Civil law in Qing and republican China (Stanford, 1994), 67–71.

112 Suzanne Pepper, Civil war in China: the political struggle, 1945–1949 (Berkeley, 1978), 266–7.

113 See for example Yang, Ming Qing tudi qiyue, 237–41.

114 Feng Shaoting, ‘Supplemental payments in urban property contracts in mid to late Qing Shanghai’, in Zelin, Ocko and Gardella eds., Contract and property in early modern China, 209–29.

115 Feng, ‘Supplemental payments in urban property contracts’, 218–21.

116 On Shanghai land prices see Feng, ‘Supplemental payments in urban property contracts’, 222–3, and Wu Chengming, Diguouzhuyi zai jiu Zhongguo de touzi (Beijing, 1955), 71–3.

117 Feng, ‘Supplemental payments in urban property contracts’, 217–18.

118 Feng, ‘Supplemental payments in urban property contracts’, 210.

119 Feng, ‘Supplemental payments in urban property contracts’, 216.

120 McAleavy, Henry, ‘Dien in China and Vietnam’ Journal of Asian Studies 17:3 (1958), 406CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Buoye, Manslaughter, markets, and moral economy, 94; Macauley, Social power and legal culture, 231.

121 Wu Chengming says (Diguouzhuyi zai jiu Zhongguo de touzi, 71) that land that on average went for only 10 taels per mu on average in 1845 went for over 30,000 taels by 1930. More specifically, he says that plots in the area of Nanjing Road, Tibet Road and Guizhou Road (prime locations) went for about 60 taels per mu in 1860 and had jumped to 2,750 taels per mu by 1882 and to over 200,000 taels per mu in 1927. Even if these particular sites were atypical, it is clear that Shanghai real estate prices rose very rapidly over a sustained period – making the small ‘additional payments’ in some mortgage contracts trivial in comparison.

122 Yang, Ming Qing tudi qiyue, 275–6.

123 Cohen, ‘Writs of passage in late Imperial China’, 49–50.

124 Cited in Chen, ‘Zhongguo budongchan’, 29–30.

125 Zelin, Madeleine, ‘The rights of tenants in mid-Qing Sichuan: a study of land-related lawsuits in the Baxian archives’, Journal of Asian Studies 49:3 (1986), 516Google Scholar.

126 There might also be embarrassment over having lost land one had purchased, but to lose land that had been entrusted to you by your ancestors would probably have been seen by many people as particularly blameworthy.

127 Buoye, Manslaughter, markets, and moral economy, 96.

128 See, for instance, Hengyu, Han, ‘Shi lun Qingdai qianqi diannong yongdian quan de youlai ji xingzhi’, Qingshi luncong 1 (1979), 40Google Scholar.

129 Buoye, Manslaughter, markets, and moral economy, 94–5.

130 Shepherd, John, ‘Rethinking tenancy: explaining spatial and temporal variation in late Imperial and republican China’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 30:3 (July 1988), 423CrossRefGoogle Scholar and n. 29; Li and Jiang, Zhongguo dizhu zhi jingji, 424, 436; Chen, Zhejiang sheng tudi wenti, 288, 312, 317. See also Robert Ash, Land tenure in pre-revolutionary China: Kiangsu Province in the 1920s and 1930s (London, 1976), 42.

131 Chen, Zhejiang sheng tudi wenti, 274, 278–9; Shepherd, ‘Rethinking tenancy’, 421–4.

132 Chen, ‘Zhongguo budongchan’, 34.

133 See for instance Yang, Ming Qing tudi qiyue, 35.

134 Macauley, Social power and legal culture, 228–9, 238: Chen, ‘Zhongguo budongchan’, 33.

135 Chen, ‘Zhongguo budongchan’, 33–4.

136 All found in Zhou and Xie, Qingdai zudian zhi yanjiu, 311–17.

137 Yang, Ming Qing tudi qiyue, 92–3; Zhou and Xie, Qingdai zudian zhi yanjiu, 290–2.

138 Yang, Ming Qing tudi qiyue, 131.

139 See for instance Zhou and Xie, Qingdai zudian zhi yanjiu, 297, and Han, ‘Shi lun Qingdai qianqi diannong yongdian quan’, 40.

140 Zhou and Xie, Qingdai zudian zhi yanjiu, 299–301.

141 See for example Zhou and Xie, Qingdai zudian zhi yanjiu, 292, 295.

142 Zhou and Xie, Qingdai zudian zhi yanjiu, 296; Han, ‘Shi lun qingdai qianqi diannong yongdian quan’, 40; Li and Jiang, Zhongguo dizhu zhi jingji, 286, 294; Li Wenzhi, Ming Qing shidai fengjian tudi guanxi de songjie, 98, 100. The last of these refers to examples of tenants who, behind on the rent and fearing eviction, borrowed money to improve the land, since this would improve their claim to permanent tenancy – a move that would be quite counter-intuitive in most Western property systems (in which it would make little sense to improve land you feared losing, and probably more to pay some of your rent arrears) but apparently did make sense in this system. On reclamation, land improvement and permanent tenancy in the twentieth-century Lower Yangzi, see Chen, Zhejiang sheng tudi wenti, 278–9.

143 Chen, Zhejiang sheng tudi wenti, 283–4; Li and Jiang, Zhongguo dizhu zhi jingji, 292–4. A 1949 study by Muramatsu Yujii, cited in Mi-chu Wiens (‘Lord and peasant in China: the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries’, Modern China 6:1 (1980), 29) gives a lower figure (1/3 to 2/5) even for Jiangnan, but this was quite likely affected by the recent wartime disruptions. For the late-nineteenth-century estimate see Han Hengyu, ‘Shi lun Qingdai qianqi diannong yongdian quan’, 38.

144 Li and Jiang, Zhongguo dizhu zhi jingji, 291–2.

145 Li and Jiang, Zhongguo dizhu zhi jingji, 280–1, 283–4, 291; Ash, Land tenure in pre-revolutionary China, 41–2.

146 Li Wenzhi, Ming Qing shidai fengjian tudi guanxi de songjie, 96–103; Chen Qiukun, Qingdai Taiwan tudi diquan, 2nd edition (Taibei, 1997), 145–65; Li and Jiang, Zhongguo dizhu zhi jingji, 272–95; Yang Guozhen, Ming Qing tudi qiyue, 91–133, 268–90.

147 Yang, Ming Qing tudi qiyue, 130.

148 Yang, Ming Qing tudi qiyue, 91–2, 94–100, 130–1. Chen (Zhejiang sheng tudi wenti, 288) suggests another complementary factor, arguing that where prosperity allowed for land improvement (especially irrigation, one assumes), this lessened the risk of disastrous crop failure and made tenants less concerned about assuming the obligations of a fixed rent.

149 Li and Jiang, Zhongguo dizhu zhi jingji, 254, 352, 372–85, 389–400. See also Kishimoto, ‘Ming Qing qiyue wenshu’, 299–300.

150 See for example Mark Elvin, ‘Market towns and waterways: the county of Shanghai from 1480 to 1910’, in G. William Skinner ed., The city in late imperial China (Stanford, 1977), 441–73.

151 Yujii, Muramatsu, ‘A documentary study of Chinese landlordism in late Ch'ing and early republican Kiangnan’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 29:3 (1966), 566–99Google Scholar; Bernhardt, Rents, taxes, and peasant resistance, 138–47, 163–8; Chen, Zhejiang sheng tudi wenti, 300–2.

152 Bernhardt, Rents, taxes, and peasant resistance, 75, 190–1.

153 See for instance Chen, Zhejiang sheng tudi wenti, 445–568.

154 Bernhardt, Rents, taxes, and peasant resistance, 142ff.

155 Ma, Hunhe yu fazhan, 107–14.

156 Bernhardt, Rents, taxes, and peasant resistance, 219–24, 231–2. The argument rests heavily on the way in which landlords were squeezed between stagnant or falling rents and rising taxes during the Depression years and the civil war years of 1945–1949, neither of which seem to me logically necessary culminations of a long-term trend.

157 Cao, Jiu Zhongguo Sunan nongjia jingji yanjiu, 32–6.

158 Buck, Land utilization, 43, 194, 196; Ramon Myers, The Chinese peasant economy (Cambridge, 1970), 235–40; Huang, Peasant family and rural development, 42; Huang, Social change and the peasant economy, 82.

159 Buoye, Manslaughter, markets, and moral economy, 71–128.

160 Buoye, Manslaughter, markets, and moral economy, 111, 115.

161 Zhou and Xie, Qingdai zudian zhi yanjiu, 376–8; Bernhardt, Rents, taxes, and peasant resistance, 27–39, 195.

162 See for example Bernhardt, Rents, taxes, and peasant resistance, 29.

163 Buoye, Manslaughter, markets, and moral economy, 111, 115, 123–7, 192, 225–6.

164 Buoye, Manslaughter, markets, and moral economy, 153–92.

165 For an argument that ‘moral economy’ concerns were very much alive in twentieth-century Guangzhou see Robert Marks, Rural revolution in South China (Madison, 1984).

166 Zelin, ‘The rights of tenants in mid-Qing Sichuan’, 512. The failure to return a deposit may have sometimes reflected that what we call ‘deposits’ were seen by the landlords as a portion of the rent, paid in advance. Zelin (‘The rights of tenants in mid-Qing Sichuan’, 513) cites an instance in which a landlord suddenly demanded that a long-time tenant double his deposit, while at the same time he cut the annual tenant's annual rent by almost 80 per cent. (See also Rawski, Agricultural change, 123.) Moreover, rent deposits were commonly used by landlords as capital for other ventures – and thus might have then been difficult to turn back into cash to return at the moment a dispute with a tenant arose. The authorities seem to have been particularly tolerant of widows who suddenly raised the deposits on land their husbands had owned after their husbands died, often alluding to funeral expenses (Zelin, ‘The rights of tenants in mid-Qing Sichuan’, 514) – which, again, presumably reflects a view of these ‘deposits’ as part of rent rather than simply a hedge against default.

167 Zelin, ‘The rights of tenants in mid-Qing Sichuan’, 524 n. 32.

168 See for instance Robert Allen, ‘Mr Lockyer meets the index number problem: the standard of living in Canton and London in 1704’ (2004; available at http://www.economics.ox.ac.uk/Members/robert.allen/default.htm, accessed 19 March 2007); Robert Allen, ‘Agricultural productivity and rural incomes in England and the Yangzi Delta, ca. 1620–1820’ (2005, available at http://www.economics.ox.ac.uk/Members/robert.allen/default.htm, accessed 19 March 2007). See also Jan Luiten van Zanden, ‘Simulating early modern economic growth’ (2004, available at www.iisg.nl/research/jvz-simulating.pdf, accessed 19 March 2007), 31–3.

169 See for example Li Bozhong, Fazhan yu zhiyue: Ming Qing Jiangnan shengchanli yanjiu (Taibei, 2002), 95–9, 121–2, and Pomeranz, ‘Facts are stubborn things’, 173–4, especially nn. 8–9.

170 See for example Huang, Peasant family and rural development, 77–92.

171 See for example Li Bozhong, Agricultural development in Jiangnan: 1620–1850 (New York, 1998), 125–7; Ellis, E. C. and Wang, S. M., ‘Sustainable traditional agriculture in the Tai Lake region of China’, Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 61 (1997), 185CrossRefGoogle Scholar; David Faure, The rural economy of pre-Liberation China (Hong Kong, 1989), 46–8, 148–50.

172 Li Bozhong, Fazhan yu zhiyue, 93–4, 100–20, 127–8, 137–9; see also Yong, Xue, ‘Treasure nightsoil as if it were gold: economic and ecological links between urban and rural areas in late Imperial Jiangnan’, Late Imperial China 26:1 (2005), 41–71Google Scholar.

173 Dwight H. Perkins (Agricultural development in China 1368–1968 (Chicago, 1969), 315, 324) records an average for 1800–1899 in Guangdong that is more than double that for 1700–1799; there are many problems with these observations, but the general direction they suggest is consistent with what other observers say. Miantang, Huang (‘Qingdai nongtian de danwei mianji chanliang kaobian’, Wenshizhe 198:3 (1990), 33–4Google Scholar) does not provide a rigorous series of yield data, but notes the large increase in double and even triple cropping in both Guangdong and Fujian between the early Qing and the twentieth century. This increase depended in part on increased imports of fertilizer, which boomed in the nineteenth century.

174 See Robert Allen, Jean-Pacal Bassino, Debin Ma, Christine Moll-Murata and Jan Luiten van Zanden, ‘Wages, prices, and living standards in China, Japan, and Europe, 1738–1925’ (2005, available at http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/forums/economics_history_index/allen_et_al.pdf, accessed 30 January 2006); Allen, ‘Agricultural productivity and rural incomes in England and the Yangzi Delta, ca. 1620–1820’; Allen, ‘Mr. Lockyer meets the index number problem’. For an analysis of why real wages might have compared much less favourably with Western figures than real incomes for tenant farmers did, see Kenneth Pomeranz, ‘Standards of living in rural and urban China: mid-eighteenth and early twentieth centuries’, paper for session 77, International Economic History Congress, Helsinki, August 2006 (available at www.helsinki.fi/iehc2006/papers2/Pomeranz.pdf, accessed 19 March 2007).

175 On the substantial size of that surplus, even in the 1930s, see Carl Riskin, ‘Surplus and stagnation in modern China’, in Dwight Perkins ed., China's modern economy in historical perspective (Stanford, 1975), 49–84.

176 van Zanden, Jan Luiten, ‘Rich and poor before the Industrial Revolution: a comparison between Java and the Netherlands at the beginning of the nineteenth century’, Explorations in Economic History 40:1 (2003), 1–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

177 Allen, ‘Mr. Lockyer meets the index number problem’.

178 For example Huang, Peasant family and rural development, 106–10; Brenner and Isett, ‘England's divergence from China's Yangzi Delta’.

179 See, for instance, Charles Greer, Water management in the Yellow River Basin of China (Austin, 1979); David Pietz, Engineering the state: the Huai River and reconstruction in Nationalist China, 1927–1937 (London, 2002).

180 Bernhardt, Rents, taxes, and peasant resistance, 161–208 (see pp. 200–3 for an account of the atypically violent period 1927–1929, when landlord–tenant issues were swept up in Nationalist–Communist struggle); Chen, Zhejiang sheng tudi wenti, 311–16.

181 Qing statutory law on water rights does seem to have been rather imprecise and, at least in some areas, water was a frequent source of conflict. But thus far we know too little about how local societies allocated water for any strong generalizations.

182 Buoye, Manslaughter, markets, and moral economy, 193–218; see also Osborne, ‘Property, taxes, and state protection of rights’, 156.

183 Wakeman, Strangers at the gate, 09–116, 135, 139, and passim.

184 Macauley, Social power and legal culture, 274–5.

185 See for example David Fryson, ‘Blows and scratches, swords and guns: violence between men as material reality and lived experience in early nineteenth century Lower Canada’, paper presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association, Sherbrooke, 1999 (available at http://www.hst.ulaval.ca/profs/dfyson/Violence.htm, accessed 23 March 2007), citing data for England, France, Canada and the United States.

186 G. William Skinner, ‘Cities and the hierarchy of local systems’, in Skinner ed., The city in late Imperial China, 314–17.