Chapter 1 provides the background for a discussion of Chinese economic thought in the Qing period, introducing its most important ideas, terminology, and tropes. In this context, it stresses the unique centrality of economic issues in Qing politics. It also illustrates how dismissing imperial tropes related to the notion of “nurturing” and “pacifying the people” (yangmin and anmin) as mere empty rhetoric prevents historians from fully understanding important political and economic objectives of the Chinese imperial government. This chapter also examines two important debates on the role of the state in the economy of the empire, the Debate on Salt and Iron (81 BCE) and the controversy surrounding Wang Anshi’s New Policies (1069–76). It further analyses the pro-market trends that accompanied the commercial growth of the Song dynasty – the beginning of a process of commercialization that was to come to maturation in the late Ming and early Qing periods.

Chapter 2 focuses on the expansion of pro-market trends and how it came to influence Qing policies. It also discusses the economic developments that inspired the rise of pro-luxury consumption ideas from the late Ming period to the early nineteenth century. In this context it examines the writings of a variety of scholars and intellectuals including Lu Ji (1515–52) and Tang Zhen (1630–1704), the two most prominent pro-luxury advocates.This chapters also illustrate the elasticity of the Confucian discourse on the economy and its ability to adapt to actual changes in the economy of the empire, challenging the notion that Confucian ideology led to intellectual immobility.

Chapter 4 illustrates the developments of the trends originated in the late Qing in support for state intervention on the economic and how they came to influence the political thought of the 1920s and 1930s. These trends led to economic solutions that tended to marginalize the market, including Jiang Jieshi’s New Life Movement (1935) – a fascist vision of frugal modernity – and various projects of economic cooperation (the Cooperative Society Movement). This period witnessed an intensification of the tension between treaty-port consumerist trends and economic decline in the rural hinterland, as well as that between the nation-building perspective of the state – which focused on developing the country as a whole – and the treaty port-based view of consumerist modernity. In addition, an escalating sense of crisis and need of decisive action to save the nation from the mounting threat from Japanese expansionist imperialism brought to a special admiration of fascist models of “controlled economy” (tongzhi jingji) such as Italy, Germany, and Japan.

Chapter 3 examines the early nineteenth-century return of the idea of limited resources and the decline of the notion that market-based luxury consumption could have a positive effect on the economy. It is at this time that population growth, together with the rural–coastal gap, appeared to require curbing of luxury consumption of resources and a return to state intervention. By this time trade and manufacturing had been widely accepted as an important component of the economy. Chinese intellectuals and reformers, however, believed that the stimulating power of consumption should be channeled away from luxury goods and deployed in support of the production of daily-need goods as a means of solving the poverty crisis. This chapter also discusses the early impact of Western ideas of economic liberalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and how these ideas were received by Chinese intellectuals and reformers. Western imperialism led to a shift in the main conceptual parameters of the economic discourse from dynastic stability to defensive nation-building. Pro-frugality policies acquired a new popularity in the context of confrontation with Western models of evolutionary modernity, the rise of defensive economic nationalism, and the return of the idea of economic scarcity (poverty).

This chapter opens Part IV on ecological-economic modelling. It starts with a brief synopsis of the history of economic thought that leads on to an outline of the subdisciplines of environmental economics and ecological economics. Major achievements highlighted include, among others, the development of market-based instruments to protect the environment, the consideration of the dynamic complexity of coupled ecological-economic systems, and the development of the concepts of resilience and sustainability. The chapter concludes with recommendations for ecological-economic modelling, which include the consideration of uncertainties, non-linearities, feed-back loops, evolution and adaptation and the use of adeqate models of human behaviour.