About this talk

This talk presents a suite of novel historical household data from China’s economic core, the Lower Yangzi Region, to analyse the relationships between inheritance practices, social structure, and economic development between 1650 and 1950. It describes this set of relationships as the 'inheritance complex' and draws on documents from private household collections (minjian wenshu 民间文书) to map out the interaction of three feedback loops within the inheritance complex: (1) an 'inheritance loop' linking household capital to household formation through inheritance; (2) a 'reproductive loop' running from household capital to fertility; (3) and a 'productive loop' connecting household capital to investments and thereby to further capital formation. Dr Hess argues that the interaction between these three feedback loops explains a series of key stylised facts about the long-run economic development of the Lower Yangzi Region: how the simple but powerful mechanism of equal partible inheritance, consistently practised across pre-industrial China, was associated with large co-resident families, a constant dispersion of wealth, low levels of migration and urbanisation, and high demand pressure on the rural credit market. Christoph Hess is the Mervyn King Fellow in Economic History at King’s College, Cambridge. He is currently completing the manuscript for his first book, The Inheritance Complex: Households, Markets, and Rural Development in the Lower Yangzi, 1650–1950, which reconstructs the institutional framework of inheritance in pre-industrial China through thousands of documents gathered from rural household collections in China. Other ongoing projects concern servantship and slavery in the Ming and Qing and a new individual-level dataset on infectious disease in the Qing. He received his PhD from the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge. Prior to that, completed an MPhil in Cambridge and a BA in Philosophy and Economics at the University of Bayreuth. Other stations included Zhejiang University, Keio University, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research.

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