Week 4

Plan of action

Week 4 Discussion Questions

Please prepare your written reading response to turn in before our Week 4 meeting. I propose you circulate your papers to the class via the class website email option. My goal is to foster a more fruitful and engaged conversation in this manner. It means aiming to finish your preparations for the meeting on Monday night rather than on Tuesday afternoon—I realize that will be difficult for some of you and therefore understand if you cannot but ask that you try for the benefit of all of us as a group.

You may choose between the issues centered on Maarten Prak’s work in the first cluster remarks below and the issues raised by juxtaposing the relationships between cities and states in the Skinner in Tilly readings. I consider the second far more difficult than the first and can appreciate why many will opt for the Prak-centered reading response. I make a special plea if you want to take on the Skinner-Tilly set of cities & states issues to feel free to reach out through email before our Tuesday class if you want to bounce your ideas or raise questions before you write. Of course, I am open to engaging your questions or concerns about the Prak-centered reading response of for that matter any other concerns you have related to the course!

This week we want to consider the role of cities in Chinese political and economic history drawing upon Skinner’s observations on two distinct and interlinked administrative and commercial urban hierarchies. To gain perspective on cities and the state in early modern and modern China we consider how historians of early modern Europe view those cities in relation to national state formation and economic change across the early modern & modern eras. The Maarten Prak article addresses the key role of urban ‘citizens’ to early modern urban social and political organization that is followed by a transition to national citizenship after the French Revolution. My article is an evaluation of the book in which Prak fleshed out his approach to explain variations in European formations of national citizenship and also proposed a broader perspective on ‘citizenship’ in other world regions. In his response to points raised by Katherine Lynch, an early modern French social historian, Jack Goldstone, a wide-ranging historical and comparative sociologist, and myself, he explains his reluctance to embrace the critique I made because it seems to rule out the comparison. This is both an understandable and curious response since I am seeking to address the challenge of somewhat incommensurate situations—a feature of the relationship between cities and states that we confront in this week’s readings. Be prepared to discuss how you choose to navigate the concerns both Prak and I raise, one response to which can certainly follow the line of reasoning Prak presents in his ‘response.’ In the article Van Zanden & Prak wrote, the economic history implications of citizenship are explained in fuller terms than Prak has room to discuss in his ‘response.’ How do you as a student of Chinese history think what they write can be useful for approaching Chinese history, consider that ‘useful’ can include what to avoid when approaching Chinese history as well as what to consider?

Next, please turn to grapple with the very different juxtapositions of cities and state(s) in the Skinner and Tilly readings. Tilly recognizes that cities have different relations to economic networks than they do to the formation of national states; his concern is principally the latter and he sets out the problematic that Prak explains in his ‘response’ that he was engaging (Prak was strongly influenced by Tilly’s writings, especially after spending a year at the University of Michigan as a young visiting scholar in the early-to-mid 1980s). Given that Skinner also is distinguishing administrative and economic networks (specifically hierarchies for Skinner) how do you explain what the dynamics of change that each scholar observes seems largely unrelated to what the other is concerned with? (Hints: think about the spatial scales of concern in these two readings as well as the kinds of temporal dynamics each of them stresses; for Skinner refer back to his week 1 reading in addition to the week 2 Skinner reading).

Finally, with what little energy you likely have left, ponder the argument one of the most eminent Song historians in China today has recently argued regarding urban and rural society and 市民 in Song China. Note that his urban culture includes both an economic dimension (merchants and craftsmen) as well as socio-political dimension (scholar-gentry). But while we often speak of certain social and economic and political changes in Chinese history starting in the Song (especially the Southern Song), it is important for our purposes to realize that the urbanization rate in China falls from its Song height to a much lower level by the nineteenth century; Harriet Zurndorfer drawing on an article regarding population in the Cambridge Economic History of China vol. 1 by Cao Shuji notes in her essay on cities & urban economy that “By 1820, when China’s urbanization rate was around 5 percent and the population 383 million, the total number of urban dwellers was not much larger than the roughly 17 million urban residents during the Southern Song, when the population was only 124 million.” (Cambridge Economic History of China vol.1, p. 544) Consider the traits Bao associates with 市民 and how well it fits with Prak’s use of “citizen.”