Preface

The papers in this volume were written in the past three decades, which represent part of my work in Chinese history, particularly Chinese economic history.

My study of Chinese history embarked in the period of 1966-76. In the beginning of the period, I was a high school student. I was dispatched to the countryside in order to be “re-educated”. Upon my return to my hometown, I had to support myself with various odd jobs. But it was in such very diff icult years that I began my study of Chinese history. Since no college would accept a young man with a “bad” family background such as mine, I had to rely on myself. During this painful decade, under the close-door instruction of my father, who was a famous historian but condemned as the “ghosts and monsters” and deprived of the rights of teaching during these anxious years, I f inished most Chinese history courses offered to undergraduate students before the “Cultural Revolution”.

After the “Cultural Revolution” ended, China experienced signif icant changes. Many unimaginable things have become possible. As one of the f irst graduate students since 1964 in the PRC, I spent seven very happy and fulf illing years at Xiamen University and became one of the f irst two persons who have earned a Ph. D. degree in Premodern Chinese History in the PRC since 1949. Although I dreamed of going abroad to connect with the mainstream of international scholarship more directly and deeply, it all seemed impossible until then. Things f inally got better and better afterward, and my dream came true. In the past three decades, I worked as a Visiting Professor and Visiting Fellow in different world famous academic institutions in the USA, UK, Japan, France and Hong Kong of China. I also had the great fortune to be invited to give lectures on different international occasions, such as the keynote speeches at the Opening Sessions of The Twenty-f irst International Congress of the Historical Sciences (August 22, 2010, Amsterdam, the Netherlands), The Eighth Annual World History Association International Congress (June 27, 1999, Victoria, Canada), The Thirty-f ifth Economic and Business Historical Society Conference (May 27, 2010, Braga, Portugal). The Fourth Congress of Asian Association of World Historians (January 5, 2019, Osaka, Japan), and so on. Along with these experiences, I have produced many lecture papers, journal articles, and conference papers. In addition, I have published two books on Chinese economic history in the UK.

Interestingly, when I was a student in primary and secondary schools, the only forign language taught was Russian. Along with my realization that English was the most useful language if I ever wanted to get into the mainstream of international scholarship, I made up my mind to learn English starting from scratch, from the alphabet. My journey of learning English also started at the least expected location, a remote village in the Sino-Burmese border area where I was sent to be “re-educated” and work as a peasant. Since no teachers, textbooks, dictionaries, and tapes were available, the learning was extremely challenging. To my benef it, luck favored my curiosity, and I came across a book that had changed my academic career. It was an old textbook that had been published in the Soviet Union to teach the Russians English, in Russian. Like many Soviet publications, the book cover carried an icon of Sickle and Axe, the logo of the Communist Party internationally. This icon became the periapt, immune to any scrutiny, and was crucial to my English learning. Using this textbook, I acquired basic knowledge of English, without listening to any spoken English words and touching any English works published in the West.

During my years at Xiamen University, I took courses of English and Japanese languages. Since the knowledge of the English language of most of my classmates was poor, we had to focus on learning Common English during the M.A. study period and Advanced English in the Ph.D. study period. During the latter period, the course was mainly on studying masterpieces of English literature, such as King Lear by William Shakespeare, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, and the like, under the supervision of Professor Zheng Chaozong, a famous scholar who studied English literature in Cambridge University before 1949. Because none of my classmates had read such masterpieces of English literature, the study was very diff icult. Moreover, no works of economic history published in the West were available in the university’s library. The only piece of work of economic history I had was Dwight Perkins’ Agricultural Develop-ment in China, 1368-1968, which was sent to my father by Professor John Israel when he visited Kunming in the early 1980s. I read this book many times, not only just learning the new approaches to economic history applied in this book, but also mastering the terminology and expressions of English in the economic history context. But until then, my English training only provided me the opportunity to write some short essays as part of the assignments, and I still had no exposure to how to write real academic work.

After I graduated from Xiamen University in 1985, I worked in the Institute of History of Zhejiang Academy of Social Sciences in Hangzhou. In early 1986, I received a letter from Professor Thomas Rawski and Professor Lillian Li along with their invitation to attend the Workshop and Conference on Economic Methods for Chinese Historical Research sponsored by the Henry Luce Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Science Foundation and held in Honolulu, Hawaii, on January 2-6 1987. Regarding it as a great opportunity to come into contact with the international scholarship, I decided to accept the invitation. But this seemingly obvious decision didn’t come without challenges and headaches: I had to present a paper to the meeting in academic English.

It was a daunting task for me to write such a paper. Firstly, without any formal training in academic writing before, I simply had no experience of how to write it. Secondly, in the institute where I was working then, there were not any reference works published abroad available; the only reference book was the copy by Perkins I brought with me. Even the English-Chinese dictionary was diff icult to f ind, and I could only use the one I had. Moreover, without typewriters, I had to write by hand and then type it with a borrowed typewriter. After months of hard work, my f irst academic paper on economic history was f inally f inished in 1986, titled “The Development of Agriculture and Industry in Jiangnan, 1644-1850: Trends and Prospects” in this volume. Though it seemed quite raw or rudimentary with the academic standard, it was the f irst signif icant step in my English writing of economic history. Since then, I have written dozens of papers on economic history, including journal articles, book chapters, conference papers, lecture papers and so on. I have selected twenty-six papers to create this volume, consisting of both published and unpublished. The former includes Journal articles and book chapters, while the latter includes conference and lecture papers.

The twenty-six essays in this volume were written in the period between 1986 and 2021. Three of them were translation of my works which were written in Chinese. One of the translations, performed by Professor Mark Elvin, is excellent. The other two were performed by translators appointed by the journal editorial departments and the quality of the translations is unsatisfactory because the translators are not experts in this f ield and the translations were not sent to me to check and approve. The rest were written by myself in English and the quality varied. In addition, the papers were written in different periods, using different writing software (in particular, the WPS and Word Perfect, which were overwhelmingly used in China in the 1990s). The transition wasn’t seamless, and there were some technical problems in converting these works later on. Therefore, some of my early writings still cannot be converted well into the Word system that I am using today. Regardless of their quality, however, these papers are part of my academic products. When they are collected in this book, all of them basically remain the same as their original forms, and the revisions are primarily the correction of misspellings and typing errors. I think that they have become history, and, as a historian, I have to respect it.

Although some of these works seem to be old or even “crappy”, I still treasure them to this day. From them, one can get a glimpse of my unique experience as a scholar, a shared experience of many Chinese scholars of my generation. Our journey as a scholar may be unthinkable for many scholars of the younger generations, but I expect that they could benef it from it. It will surely be valuable to them if they want to follow Max Webber’s teaching of “Wissenschaft als Beruf” and to be a true scholar.

In addition, I am grateful for the anonymous reviewers for their very professional scrutiny and valuable suggestions. So am I to Professor Xu Zhihao of Tsinghua University who read the manuscripts and provided very helpful suggestions. My gratitude is also sent to Dr. Liang Fei and Li Yiqing, the executive editors of this book who made very careful copy editing works, not just correcting spelling errors and mistakes, but also standardizing spellings and notes. Following the suggestions and the pertinent regulations, the editors made necessary changes in terms, expressions, and made several cuts and deletions in the manuscript. The efforts made by the reviewers and editors are key to the publication of this book.

Finally, I’d like to extend my gratitude to the History Department of Tsin-ghua University and Tsinghua University Press. It is their efforts to make this book published.

Li Bozhong

Beijing, May 2022