UCI Department of History: FACULTY

My research has moved in three separate but related directions. The first is the study of the reciprocal influences of state, society, and economy in late Imperial and twentieth-century China. My first book, From Core to Hinterland, uses one region of North China as a prism through which to view several related themes: the re-orientation of the Chinese state from a focus on social reproduction (especially in ecologically marginal areas) to an emphasis on survival in a world of competing nation states; changing relations between the national government, regional interests and legal society; economic (especially agricultural) and ecological change; peasant protest and collective violence; and the effects of imperialism on state-making, regional disparities, and pre-existing conflicts in Chinese society. Further projects in this area include a large collaborative study of the eighteenth and nineteenth century Chinese grain trade and the study of 200 years of protests (from tax riots and corvee resistance to the patronage of "heterodox" pilgrimage centers) in one city and its hinterland.

A second set of projects develops similar themes on a much larger scale, attempting to understand the origins of a world economy as the outcome of mutual influences among various regions, rather than the simple imposition by a more "advanced" Europe on the rest of the world. A first volume on this subject, which analyzes early industrialization in the context of ecological constraints shared by most of the world's most densely populated and commercially sophisticated regions, and the unique exit from those problems given to Europe by its privileged access to the New World as by any unique and internally- generated advantages. The book combines a comparative economic and ecological history, which attempts to assess the importance for those trajectories of social, political and cultural differences among various world regions, with an attempt to re-think the importance (particularly for ecology) of connections among these regions. thus it tries to move beyond the study of a self-contained "China" in two ways, which I hope prove complentary. Some further work alon gthese lines has led me to article-length comparative studies of gendered labor and economic change in Europe and East Asia, the long-term significance and global context of environmental change in Qing and 20th century China, and other topics. I have also co-authored--with Steven Topik, also at UCI--The World that Trade Created, a book for a more general audience which seeks to re-frame the growth of the world economy as the intersection of efforts emanating from many places, and to trace its surprsiging and sometimes perverse impacts on the lives of so-called "ordinary people."