Research on the Economic Development of Towns along the Middle Yangtze River during the Ming and Qing Dynasties

Author: Ren Fang
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-11-01
Features: Dr. Ren Fang is one of the outstanding young scholars of socio-economic history in China, mentored by Professor Chen Feng. This book is the result of repeated revisions, additions, deletions, and refinements based on his doctoral dissertation. As it is about to be published, the author asked me to write the preface. I am not a specialist in town history and was initially reluctant to claim expertise in writing a preface for this book. However, after reading the manuscript, I found it to be a highly valuable monograph in socio-economic history, whose scope far exceeds the narrow study of town history. Therefore, I took the liberty of offering some brief insights from the perspective of socio-economic history.
Since the late 1970s, the study of town history had been a major field of historical research in China. However, in the 1990s, this research trend declined. On one hand, socio-economic historians increasingly shifted their focus to areas outside town history. On the other hand, in the study of town history, methods became increasingly rigid, with few new insights, and the phenomenon of "research cloning" intensified—where merely changing the names of towns mentioned in certain papers could transform them into "research" on other towns. The number of researchers decreased, and there was no significant improvement in research quality. Thus, the decline of town history research was inevitable.
To reverse this trend and restore its former prominence, multiple approaches are needed. One of the most important is to overcome the limitations of past research and expand the field of town history into broader areas. Specifically, this involves two aspects: first, "moving beyond Jiangnan" by expanding town history research to other regions of China; second, "transcending towns" by moving beyond the narrow confines of "towns" and integrating town history more closely with other parts of socio-economic history research. Since this book has excelled in both aspects, it has also achieved accomplishments that surpass previous works.