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« New Perspectives on the Study of Chinese Culture and Society »
Princeton University (March 24th-26th, 2003)
Towards a Social Approach of the Economic History?
Christian Lamouroux (EHESS, Paris)
Let me begin by recalling a recent experience, supported by the CCK Foundation to which I
express my gratitude for inviting me here to-day. In 1998, I applied for a research program of
3 years: the title of the program is « Water Control and Social Organization in Northern
China ». Northern China here refers to villages in Shaanxi and Shanxi where we have
collected data related to the management of water by associated villages. Unsurprisingly, the
steles and manuscripts collected during the 3 years give a definition of the identity of every
association — among them some are more one thousand years old —, provide rules for the
building and the maintenance of the canals and for controling the distribution and the use of
water, or simply stand as a public marker of the decisions made for solving the unavoidable
conflicts among users1. However, only field surveys shed precise light on the other aspect of
collective management: the social power, including the symbolic dimension, encapsulated in
the control of a resource as critical as water. Thanks to the field surveys, which provided us
the different elements necessary for writing history, we have also discovered the basic social
mechanisms on which the hierarchy of these local societies is still set up to-day. We would
have been unable to shed light on the social function of the very scattered written texts we
found had we not been able to put them back in the micro-level local contexts, sometimes just
to achieve basic understanding of the highly specific vocabulary used: steles or regular copies
of manuscripts give rules for using the irrigation canals (Jingyang, Hongtong-Jiexiu), or
define the control exerted by rotation by each community on the drinking water (Huozhou) or
for the protection of the statue of a deity reputed to provide rain water and other benefits
(Pucheng). In all cases, they constitute official legitimization of the social power of the local
gentry and their families, and they are regularly used as tools for the reassumption of the links
between rural associations (committees of elders or community leaders or of a temple) and the
xian administrative and political level, especially when they are originally the product of
xian-level decisions taken to solve conflicts.
Our results would never have been obtained without the collective research undertaken in the
same spots by Chinese and French scholars, mainly historians and anthropologists. During the
fieldwork inquiries, nobody understood the full complexity of the field, so, whatever the
various specializations and intellectual backgrounds, we had to confront our questions, our
doubts and our analyses in order to make hypotheses that then determined the research agenda
for everyone. Even if this was the ideal process, difficult to realize every time, everybody was
conscious that this is the only proper way to develop our research and collect material. Can
the experience I have gained in the process be useful for my future research? At the very least,
I have become strongly convinced of two realities: first, in China where written texts play
such a central role, a pluridisciplinary approach is the only way to examine texts from
different viewpoints in order to avoid to being manipulated by them. Second, fieldwork
provides the best conditions for that approach. More precisely, the permanent to and fro
motion between texts and field makes it possible to understand the social properties of the
research objects in their local context — for us, the social impact of the canals’ digging,
1
Four books, published by Zhonghua shuju, are forthcoming: the two first volumes are devoted to two spots in
Shaanxi (i.e., Jingyang-Sanyuan and Pucheng), and will appear before 2003 March. The other manuscripts,
devoted to Shanxi spots (i.e., Hongtong, Jiexiu and Huozhou) have just been completed for edition process.
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maintenance and management, or of the cults and their rituals —, and the integration of that
social reality in a legacy, which the texts can transform into a local history.
Since we are invited here for a discussion on some new perspectives, I will now ask, as a
Song historian, which are the historical topics worth approaching through a combination of
written sources and fieldwork, understood from the sociologists’ and anthropologists’
viewpoint as a space of social action and performance. If I try to define the common topic of
our field surveys in Northern China, i.e., the federative link between every written text and the
field, it was obviously the management of water by collective bodies, or the collective
management of a natural resource (Jingyang, Hongtong-Jiexiu), or of the lack of such a
resource (Pucheng, Huozhou). So, viewed from the pluridisciplinary approach, two aspects
emerge from this topic: the social control of material resources; the making of the community
itself, through the definition of the control rules. So it seems that the social or economic
realities that a group can see as possible study objects largely depends on its own
pluridiciplinary capacities. After those remarks drawn from my own experience, I will turn
now to a more concrete discussion.
Unfortunately, the Song historian has no Dunhuang manuscripts to read and, except for the
Song huiyao, which is a textual reconstruction, and epigraphy, the firsthand sources he can
use are very limited, especially if compared to the huge Ming and, above all, Qing archives. If
we turn to archeology, some people are disappointed by the priority too often given to the
sites where the material findings are supposed to be the most prestigious (imperial or
aristocratic tombs), and so by the neglect of everyday life sites, like popular housing or
workshops, even if, for instance, some prospecting and findings in Jiangxi on the ceramic
furnaces shed clear light on the organisation of private ceramic producers on the eve of the
spectacular growth of the Jingdezhen nationwide production. So it should hardly be surprising
that the texts written by Song scholars are the only first-hand sources used by Song historians.
The incomplete and one-sided viewpoint is not the worst consequence of using only Song
texts: the problem would be the same with any written source, and the sinologist is trained to
ask the appropriate questions of this kind of material. The main trouble with these texts is of
course their silence on critical questions. Since I am interested in economic matters, I would
like to elaborate on that point.
Just like political history, which was reduced to an evolutionist history of the State and then
died, economic history is in a sorry state due to its basic conception on «progress» and its
frequent use of concepts unsuitable for premodern societies. In Chinese studies, the problem
is complicated by the fact that the concepts were imported from a different intellectual
tradition, and I view this fact as the direct origin of some approaches like «sprouts of
capitalism», «slow economic development» or «backwardness». How to get out of this dead
end? Li Bozhong’s work is obviously a development of the economic theories of Wu
Chengming, applied to the local history of Jiangnan. Two main ideas emerge from his two
books2: the economic process is viewed from local perspective; since the first book is devoted
to the Tang dynasty and the second one to the Ming-Qing period, Li’s study puts no emphasis
on a continuous, evolutionist process, but firmly links each economic process under study to
its social backgrounds. This approach results in a convincing demonstration of the economic
adaptability of the Yangzi delta region, based on the combination of intensive rice culture and
commercial cropping, a combination which made it possible to support a huge demographic
2
Li Bozhong, Tangdai Jiangnan nongye de fazhan, Peking, Nongye chubanshe, 1990; Agricultural
Development in Jiangnan, 1620-1850, Houndmills, Macmillan Press, 1998.
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growth for a thousand years. So Li concludes on the following point: we cannot view this
adaptative process as stagnation on the pretext that the social and economic organization
never became commercial capitalism and then an industrial revolution. As he mischievously
adds, every attempt at «modernisation and industrialisation» of rural Jiangnan, that is to say
every attempt to break the special linkage between production and commercialisation as it
was produced by the historical process, has had only one consequence: economic and social
decline. The Jiangnan markets are here analysed as a central part of the social relationships of
the region, and they strongly contributed to the longue durée transformation of those
relationships.
It seems to me that some prerequisites of Li’s research offer new methodological approaches
to economic history. The economic process can be analysed from two perspectives: its
emergence in the local context, and the feedback of the local society and the State on this
process, a reaction studied through the making of central policies and regional or local
management. Li’s study of the regional process focuses on some research topics common to
different disciplines and makes good use of all of them. Here are some examples of these
different topics: sociology of demographic attitudes, which uses demographic growth as an
index of the relationship between social actors and not simply as an economic constraint;
sociological and economic approach to the environment, which emphasises the cultural
choices and the social and economic adaptations generated by the use of natural resources,
like water, wood or minerals; institutional history, which makes an analysis of the fiscal
policy as a factor in regional economic choices. In short, I am quite convinced by the richness
of the approach, which is clearly the result of a challenge: to give up general explanation in
terms of economic mechanisms supposed to be universal, i.e., the building of nationwide,
interregional or local economic markets, with general financial tools like money or credit. In
fact, Li’s study takes the sources available into consideration without neglecting their silent
part. Is this silence only a consequence of ideological neglect about economical matters? I
don’t think so. The fact is that economic activity was mainly viewed by the actors from social
and institutional perspectives, and we have to understand why and how this view can have
also supported the economic goals of local people who were always aware of the importance
of economic organization in their search to strengthen local influence, i.e., their power and
their wealth. So Li has also opened a path to a history of the reproduction and transformation
of economic ideas, a history the writing of which depends also on fieldwork, since we need to
make it clear the concrete perceptions of separate interest, private or collective, and the public
good, the Chinese way of distinguishing between micro and macroeconomy, which was the
basis of the development of the «political economy» in XVIIIth century England and France.
Consequently, it is a path that should make possible new comparative perspectives. However,
I would like to put special emphasis here on the pluridiciplinary conditions of this approach.
Considering the kinds of sources available, I believe it is now possible to approach the history
of economic organization in pre-modern China in terms of its own patterns. Roughly speaking,
this pattern can be defined as follow: a multiplicity of economic choices resulting in the
connection of different material cultures; the tension between the official and merchant
networks, due to the complicity and rivalry of these two nationwide networks; the necessity
for these two networks in search of efficiency to rely on the support of an omnipresent figure
on the administrative and economic Chinese stage, the middleman. If we agree with this
starting point, we have to take three aspects into simultaneous consideration: a history of
collective economic organization at the local level which is a part of the social and cultural
identity and is in consequence connected to other identity factors like religious patterns and
material culture; a sociology of the local groups according to their level of action and interest,
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i.e., the analysis of the different attitudes and strategies of the local administration, local
merchants and rural producers towards regional differences with respect to resources,
production of goods, manpower and funding; a social anthropology of economic action in
order to shed light on peasant, merchant and official ideas of material production, I mean the
mental way of transforming a project for the production of some item into an economic action,
which means a clear distinction between production and profit. The necessary prerequisites
for so ambitious a program are: a division of labor between disciplines, as historians,
geographers and archeologists, sociologists and anthropologists would all have a precise
role to play; the presence on every field survey of local scholars or specialists whose help
makes it possible to choose the right places and the right people, to collect material and
written documentation and so, to view history from local perspective. Without any doubt,
these field surveys are only a part of the research program, their scale and intensity should be
different according to the research orientation adopted and the questions raised, but I can
mention some of their advantages.
Considering regional economic history, how can we avoid mentioning Skinner’s work? The
influence of his ideas over the last thirty years is due to the organic linkage he made, thanks to
central place theory, between the three levels of economic activities: the productive activity of
rural families, exchange systems built by regional entities differentiated by economic pattern,
and a stability of the empire wide economic territory. I am convinced that fieldwork
cooperation may give us a chance to put our feet back on the path opened by Skinner in
Sichuan a half century ago: to approach the actors’ views on exchange, to understand the
organisation of production, exchange and consumption of goods. We may raise
simultaneously and precisely questions about economic mechanisms and the social conditions
of their reproduction or transformation at various levels. To do so, just as Skinner did, we
have to choose a survey space, I mean places and scales. Every place is patterned by history:
this is the process of the making of its identity and of territorial hierarchies (this is the point
emphasised by the traditional geographical encyclopedia everyone uses). These hierarchies
are of course still often present and observable: we are in a city, or in a xian environment, or
at the village level, where the collective groups were and are acting everyday. So any
enterprise, private or collective, collective or public, has to deal with these hierarchies to
transform the scale of its economic action: it is obvious when we are dealing with hydraulic
systems, but it is true of any collective undertaking. Since we are interested in subcontracting
systems based on a complex division of labor, which makes a distinction between production
and economic profit, we have to choose one or two particular kinds of production. It is the
only way to make a clear distinction between the scale activity of the entrepreneur and the
direct purpose of the producer activity. Of course, here is one of the central parts of the
program, and one of the main points to be studied by the anthropologists: which cultural
environment is required to undertake an action in order to reach a goal fixed in advance, such
as a work or a trade? How to make a deal, to bargain and to exchange a product for money3?
Everybody is convinced that local rules exist to do this, so the key for acting on things is
nothing but the good choice of the right man: that is my point, when I mention the
omnipresent figure of the middleman, whether he serves the administration or a private
entrepreneur.
Field survey implies making a choice of sites and drawing up questions. How to choose a site?
What is the kind of queries useful for specialists of social and economic history? And what
are the goals to be reached through these queries? There is of course no single answer, and not
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The institution named al-muqāwala, one of the Arab equivalents of our « undertaking », was set up as an answer to theses
questions, after Hélène Vérin (Entrepreneurs, entreprise — histoire d’une idée, Paris, PUF, 1982, p. 20).
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I shall simply mention my answers, derived from the fact that I am interested with other
young colleagues in the social and economic organisation of the production and the
commercialisation of silk and ceramics. Just as we did during the fieldwork on hydraulics,
several basic criteria have to be kept in mind: the sites selected are still in activity, and they
mobilize their legacy in order to enhance the value of their production; so their past is viewed
as a long and prestigious history, and it is consequently quite easy to find some local scholars
or technicians who are proud of this legacy and ready to make inquiries at the village level
where they may find valuable material and written sources. Of course, there is almost no
chance of finding pre-Qing written sources, but local epigraphy and archeology certainly may
shed light on place locations, economic organizations, and above all provide objects and signs
that a patient study by the specialists of techniques can transform into valuable information.
Last but not least, anthropology helps to study vocabulary, ways of thinking, cultural clashes
between contemporary organisations and «traditional» ones, including continuity and rupture.
So fieldwork implies a « regressive » approach. That means it is necessary to ask historians of
different periods, whose sole competence is to be able to read and to interpret texts in the
political, social and intellectual context familiar to them, to work together. This is the way to
analyse the organisation and the transformation of the production, stocking and circulation of
goods, of distribution and consumption patterns, and the image produced by the society of its
own economic activities: which activities were viewed as more necessary than others? How
did the society make a choice? What kind of hierarchy did the society produce? How did
those hierarchies change? In a society organized by hierarchical status what was the meaning
of «undertaking»?
This program is certainly ambitious, even quite utopian, but discussions among different
specialists to-day should be very useful for a definition of common goals, just when the
tools — Geographical Information Systems, including cartography systems, computerization
and the making of huge data bases — are urging us to be more ambitious and utopian.