1985/02/01 by G. William Skinner · 171 citations
Social Sciences · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · #Chinese history and philosophy #Asian Studies and History #Historical Economic and Social Studies #Prosperity #Economic geography #Hierarchy #Devolution (biology) #China #Geography #Population #Interdependence #History #East Asia #Development economics #Economy #Political science #Sociology #Economics #Economic growth #Demography #Social science #Archaeology
paper · doi:10.2307/2055923
published in The Journal of Asian Studies 44(2), 271-292 (Cambridge University Press)
openalex publication_date 1985/02/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/02
Abstracts The developmental trajectories of North China and the Southeast Coast during the middle and late imperial periods are surveyed to illustrate the recurrence of regional macrocycles of development and decline and to show that such cycles may be unsynchronized as between regions. These cases provide a basis for arguing that economic macrocycles are a systemic property—not of provinces or of the empire as a whole but of regional economies viewed as internally differentiated and interdependent systems of human interaction. An exploration of the relation between regional developmental cycles and the Chinese dynastic cycle concludes that the latter was mediated by the former. It is suggested that regional developmental cycles are cycles not only of economic prosperity and depression but also of population growth and decline, of social development and devolution, and of peace and disorder. China's historical structure, then, is seen as an internested hierarchy of local and regional histories whose scope in each case is grounded in the spatial patterning of human interaction, and whose critical temporal structures are successive cyclical episodes. The uses of such an historiographic model are briefly explored.