Étienne Fortier-Dubois

the Song came to depend increasingly on taxes on trade and so systematically encouraged it.

This massive economy led to rich trading ties with a large number of its neighbors - including Japan, Korea, and the Indian Ocean marketplace. But the most significant economic ties across the totality of the Song Dynasty would be those not of its own making. Rather, they would be it its competitor and rival states to the north - first the Liao Dyn... See more

Why did this happen? The simple explanation is the Mongol conquest. However, China recovered from that disaster under the Ming by most measures, and the institutions created under the Song were still extant when the Mongols were expelled in 1368.

China and Europe are different in many ways, but one is that after the Mongol conquest in the 12th century, China remains a unified empire run by a single Mandarin bureaucracy.

So, that shifts under the Song policy to a policy of "hey maybe let's not tax the pants off of the peasant farmers, and instead try something craazy." That "crazy" idea is to tax trade - both internal & with foreign entities.

purely contingent and accidental reasons. Pomeranz puts great stress on one factor, that China’s coal reserves were both geologically inaccessible and geographically remote, making a steam-powered industrial revolution like the one in Europe impossible

Decline set in instead over the course of Mongol rule. While the Chinese market economy did not collapse, the serious damage inflicted during the Mongol conquest, the burden of ill-fated major invasions of Japan and Vietnam, ruinous inflation in the paper currency and a system of official discrimination against southern Chinese all contributed to t... See more