Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rcrh6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T08:31:51.106Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Last Thousand Years of Chinese History

Changing Patterns in Land Tenure*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Mark Elvin
Affiliation:
Department of Economic History, The University, Glasgow, W.2.

Extract

It is immediately apparent to anyone who juxtaposes those two massive works of scholarship and patient investigation, Sudō Yoshiyuki's History of Land Tenure Systems in China, which is mostly concerned with the Sung dynasty, and John Lossing Buck's Land Utilization in China, which describes the early 1930s, that in the intervening thousand years the character of Chinese rural society changed, and changed radically.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1970

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Yoshiyuki, Sudō, Chūgoku tochi seido shi kenkyū (History of Land Tenure Systems in China), Tokyo, 1954.Google Scholar

2 Buck, John Lossing, Land Utilization in China, 3 vols., Chicago, 1937.Google Scholar

3 Hinton, W., Fanshen, A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village, New York, 1967, pp. 209, 592.Google Scholar

4 Maspero, Henri, Mélanges posthumes sur les religions et l'histoire de la Chine, Vol. III, Paris, 1950, pp. 147–92.Google Scholar

5 Yoshiyuki, Sudō, Sōdai keizai-shi kenkyū (Studies on the Economic History of the Sung Period), Tokyo, 1962, especially pp. 73205.Google Scholar

6 Ibid., pp. 542–3.

7 Hsiao-t'ung, Fei, Peasant Life in China, London, 1939, especially pp. 189–90.Google Scholar

8 Muramatsu, Y., ‘A Documentary Study of Chinese Landlordism in Late Ch'ing and Early Republican Kiangnan’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 29, 1966, pp. 566–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Smith, T. C., The Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan, Stanford, 1959.Google Scholar

10 Yoshiyuki, Sudō, op. cit., (1954), pp. 118–20.Google Scholar

11 Which provided for the arrest and return of tenants absconding from official manors in K'uei-chou province, and from private properties in Shih and Ch'ien prefectures.

12 Yoshiyuki, Sudō, op. cit., (1954), p. 114.Google Scholar

13 Ibid., pp. 116–17. (My italics)

14 Smith, R. E. F., Enserfment of the Russian Peasantry, Cambridge, 1968, p. 4.Google Scholar

15 I-ling, Fu, Ming-tai Chiang-nan shih-min ching-chi shih-t'an (An Enquiry into the Economy of the Urban Population of Kiangnan during the Ming Dynasty), Shanghai, 1963, p. 61.Google Scholar

16 Ibid., p. 33.

17 I-ling, Fu, Ming-Ch'ing nung-ts'un she-hui ching-chi (Rural Society and Economy in the Late Ming and Early Ch'ing), Peking, 1961.Google Scholar

18 Ibid., p. 179.

19 Takanobu, Terada, ‘Yōsei-tei no semmin kaihō-rei ni tsuite’ (‘The Yung-cheng Emperor's Edicts Liberating Persons of Mean Status’), Tōyōshi kenkyū, XVIII, iii, 12 1959, pp. 124–41.Google Scholar

20 In his Shin-an shōnin no kenkyū’, (A Study of the Merchants of Hsin-an) Tōyō gakuhō, XXXVI, i, 1953, part I.Google Scholar

21 Ping-ti, Ho, Chung-kuo hui-kuan shih-lun (A Historical Survey of Landsmannschaften in China), 1966.Google Scholar

22 Quoted in Masaaki, Koyama, ‘Minmatsu Shinsho no daitochishoyū toku ni Kōnan deruta chitai no chūshin ni shite’, (‘Large Land-ownership in the Late Ming and the Early Ch'ing with Especial Reference to the Kiangnan Delta’), Shigaku zasshi, LXVI, xii (1957) and LXVII, i (1958), part 2, p. 59.Google Scholar

23 I-ling, Fu, op. cit., (1961), p. 189.Google Scholar

24 Ibid., p. 179.

25 Yoshihiro, Hatano, Chūgoku kindai kogyō shi no kenkyū (Studies on the History of Early Modern Industry in China), Kyoto, 1961, pp. 1617.Google Scholar

26 Lien-sheng, Yang, Money and Credit in China, Cambridge, Mass., 1952, pp. 73–4.Google Scholar

27 I-ling, Fu, op. cit., 1961, p. 162.Google Scholar

28 Ibid., p. 156.

29 Ibid., pp. 188–9. By the twentieth century between one-third and two-fifths of the land farmed by tenants in the lower Yangtze valley was held in permanent tenure according to Yūji, Muramatsu, Chūgoku keizai no shakai taisei (The Social Structure of the Chinese Economy), Tokyo, 1949, p. 318.Google Scholar

30 Ibid., especially pp. 284–337.

31 Chung-li, Chang, The Chinese Gentry: Studies on Their Role in Nineteenth-Century Chinese Society, Seattle, 1955,Google Scholar and The Income of the Chinese Gentry, Seattle, 1962.Google Scholar

32 There is a useful bibliography of the main Japanese articles on water conservancy organizations in Akira, Morita, ‘Kanton-shō Nankai-ken Sang-yuan-wei no chisui kikō ni tsuite’, (‘The Structure of Water Control in Sang-yuan Polder in Nan-hai County in Kwangtung’) Tōyō gakuhō, XLIV (1964), p. 65.Google Scholar For an extensive discussion see M. Elvin, ‘Market Towns and Waterways. The County of Shanghai from 1480 to 1910’ in Skinner, G. W. (ed.), The City in Late Imperial China, Stanford, 1970 (forthcoming).Google Scholar

33 On the collection of the tribute grain see Ayao, Hoshi, Mindai sōun no kenkyū (Studies on the Ming Grain Tribute System), Tokyo, 1963, Chapter III;Google Scholar and Teruo, Nakahara, ‘Shindai ni okeru sōryō no shōhinka ni tsuite’, (‘The Mercantilization of the Tribute Grain under the Ch'ing Dynasty) Shigaku zasshi LXX (1958).Google Scholar

34 Op. cit., p. 51.Google Scholar

35 Yūji, Muramatsuop. cit., (1949), p. 237;Google ScholarEberhard, Wolfram, Social Mobility in Traditional China, Leiden, 1962, pp. 41et seq.Google Scholar

36 Ping-ti, Ho, The Ladder of Success in Imperial China, Aspects of Social Mobility, 1368 to 1911, New York, 1962.Google Scholar

37 Kung-ch'üan, Hsiao, Rural China: Imperial Control in the Nineteenth Century, Seattle, 1959.Google Scholar

38 Chih, , Te-i lu (Te-i Records, 1869), XIV, 1 pp. 18a19b. I am indebted to Mr Piet van der Loon for drawing this remarkable book to my attention.Google Scholar

39 Elvin, M., ‘The Gentry Democracy in Shanghai, 1905–1914’ (Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Cambridge), 1968, pp. 115–16, 130–5.Google Scholar

40 von Finckenstein, H. W. Graf Finck, Die Entwicklung der Landwirtschaft in Preussen u. Deutschland, 1800–1930, Marburg, 1960, pp. 99100.Google Scholar

41 Smith, T. C., op. cit., Chapters VIII to XI.Google Scholar