The Chinese Sugar Cane

Download or read book Sugar and Society in China written by Sucheta Mazumdar and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 682 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this wide-ranging study, Sucheta Mazumdar offers a new answer to the fundamental question of why China, universally acknowledged one of the most developed economies in the world through the mid-eighteenth century, paused in this development process in the nineteenth. Focusing on cane-sugar production, domestic and international trade, technology, and the history of consumption for over a thousand years as a means of framing the larger questions, the author shows that the economy of late imperial China was not stagnant, nor was the state suppressing trade; indeed, China was integrated into the world market well before the Opium War. But clearly the trajectory of development did not transform the social organization of production or set in motion sustained economic growth.