West Africa was affected by European expansion and exploration decades before the European discovery of the Americas. In some ways, then, West Africa was already connected to the New World the moment Europeans discovered it. The relationship between the territory that is now the US and West Africa developed rapidly in the 1600s as West Africa and North America both became hubs of British trade. In its early phases, the connection between West Africa and what was to become the US centered around slavery and the growing number of enslaved Africans brought to North America in slave ships. The arrival of more than 400,000 African people between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries through the transatlantic and intra-American slave trades infused the early American republic with important African cultural elements. At the same time, the transatlantic slave trade shaped West Africa’s political, economic, and cultural history. The struggles of African and African-descended people to regain their freedom and pursue political and social gains shaped American legal, political, and social life.

In the sixteenth century, Iberian kingdoms claimed extensive territories in North and South America and the Caribbean Sea. The Portuguese sailed from Lisbon to the Azores to Brazil while developing trade routes to Africa, India, Southeast Asia, and Japan. Castilians shipped silver mined in New Spain and Peru across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans to Seville and Manila. In this transformative period, the nascent nation states of Spain and Portugal integrated the human and natural resources of the Americas into a global network of labor and exchange. Iberia represented the cutting edge of Europe’s overseas expansion. The surge in military-mercantilist activity was driven more by merchants, companies, investors, and free agents than by royal initiative. Iberians also led Europe in adapting laws and theories of governance designed to incorporate new subjects and to maintain control of distant lands. In the sixteenth century, Iberian institutions sponsored innovative projects to collect knowledge on the “new world” and its peoples. In many ways, then, Iberia had set the stage for Europe and America’s engagement with the wider world by 1600.

As President James Monroe’s secretary of state, John Quincy Adams spent most of 1819 elucidating all the ways in which US dealings with Spain over Florida proved America’s commitment “to observe toward Spain, and all other nations, a just and candid, and single-hearted course of conduct, free from fraud, artifice, or disguise.” Surprising both friends and critics, Adams defended General Andrew Jackson’s controversial 1818 invasion of Florida – and execution of two British subjects thought to be aiding Native Americans in the area – as a vindication of principles “written in every page of the law of nations, as well as in the first law of nature, self defense.”

Race was never far from conversations about empire. In 1911 an international collection of ethnologists, social scientists, and reformers gathered at the University of London to discuss the problem of the color line. Had the Universal Races Congress functioned as nothing but a “World Grievance Committee” – to borrow a phrase from the sociologist and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) co-founder W. E. B. Du Bois – it would have served a vital role. Yet for all the value of fostering discussion between “so-called white and so-called coloured people,” as conveners labeled them, the Congress’s greatest contribution came in its intellectual interventions. Speakers like Du Bois and Sioux physician Charles Eastman arrived with cornerstone American legacies of dispossession and chattel slavery weighing heavy on their minds. What scholars now might frame as ravening settler colonialism, Du Bois, Eastman, and others discussed in terms of expansion, independence, development, and disfranchisement. Though the organizers called them “inter-racial problems,” Du Bois recognized the very notion of race as the concept that made these problems all of a piece. He welcomed the conference’s rejection of race as a scientific fact, and of racial differences as immutable or tethered to innate capacity. For too long, he noted, scientific racism had provided cover for “widespread and decisive political action” in service to white supremacy – from “the disfranchisement of American negroes” to “the subjugation of India and the partition of Africa.” For too long, racial discourses had reinforced racialized power.1

The Cambridge History of America and the World (CHAW) offers a far-reaching and novel account of American engagement in the world from 1500 to the present day. CHAW takes as its interpretive starting point a deceptively simple insight: adopting frameworks that cut across rather than stop at the nation’s borders could upend established stories and generate new interpretive possibilities. What might happen, as nineteenth-century American historian Thomas Bender asked in a seminal 2002 essay, if historians followed “the movement of people, capital, things, and knowledge” across borders in ways that ignored artificial and state-defined boundaries? An outpouring of work over the last two decades has followed this transnational turn in US history to deprovincialize how we understand the American past. It has now produced a fundamentally new history of America and the world.

Industrialization in China has followed complicated paths over the last century and a half. China, like Russia, Germany, and Japan, followed in the footsteps of the pioneering industrial nations. For the first pioneering generation, industrialization developed indigenously, building on preindustrial handicraft traditions, inventing new technologies using water and steam power, and creating new corporate management systems. The new technologies of steamships, railroads, the telegraph, and the telephone transformed transportation and communication networks. Private entrepreneurs played central roles in the development of the new industrial systems, aided by protective tariffs and other state measures designed to promote industrial and commercial development.

When considering the question of China’s external economic relations during the Mao era, the dominant narrative in the literature underscores the following view: Mao’s China pursued a foreign economic policy that was autarkic, isolated from the global economy, and locked into a Soviet-inspired planned economy that provided limited incentives for economic interdependence with the outside world. For some, China’s isolation from the global economy was the result of its position in the Soviet bloc, which was “heavily biased against foreign trade,” and from its adoption of a centrally planned, socialist economic model that prohibited private interests from pursuing foreign investment or trade. For others, Mao-era policies of autarky were inspired by a form of xenophobia that stemmed from the country’s experience of Western predations during the nineteenth century, resulting in fear of economic dependence on foreign powers. Finally, others emphasize the role of Mao’s revolutionary ideology in explaining China’s isolation from the global economy; Mao’s tendency to view major international economic institutions and norms as counterrevolutionary and “hostile” to the Chinese state led him to disengage from international trade and other economic opportunities.

China’s rise as the world’s second-largest economy surely is the most dramatic development in the global economy since the year 2000. But China’s prominence in the global economy is hardly new. Since 500 bce, a burgeoning market economy and the establishment of an enduring imperial state fostered precocious economic growth. Moreover, contrary to the view that China’s economy withered under the dual constraints of Western colonialism and Chinese tradition after 1800, recent scholarship has identified the onset of modern economic growth in response to new incentive structures, investment opportunities, ideas, and technology, laying the foundation for the post-1978 economic miracle. China’s combination of market-led growth under the firm hand of the state has produced a model of economic development that challenges conventional theories of capitalism and economic growth. The spectacular growth of the contemporary Chinese economy also spurred deeper investigation into the Chinese economy – long a neglected field of study, at least in the Western academy. Scholarship on Chinese economic history has now developed to the stage where a Cambridge History devoted to the subject is appropriate and feasible.

When visited by the British trade mission led by Lord George Macartney, who aimed to show off the best of Western trade and technology, the Qianlong Emperor of Qing China was known to have famously replied in 1792, “Our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its borders. There is therefore no need to import the manufactures of outside barbarians in exchange for our own produce.” Qianlong’s statement came at the height of Qing’s glory, overseeing a remarkable tripling of population and a doubling of territory between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. No single political entity at the time achieved such size in both geography and population under such stability and durability.

While China’s rural economy predominated during the imperial era, some of the world’s largest cities were part of the Chinese landscape. From the Song dynasty (960–1279) onward, the number of cities and towns rose, the urban population expanded, and the urban sector of the economy became a significant indication of the wealth and prosperity of the Chinese empire. Even though large cities such as Chang’an and Luoyang had existed both before and during the Tang dynasty (618–907) and featured sites of production and services, they were founded and functioned primarily as political capitals. In the Song era an extensive array of types of cities besides capitals – maritime ports, provincial transport hubs, manufacturing and commercial centers – flourished as trade and cultural metropoles. Chinese cities took on a different configuration during the Song – one may speak of a “new urban paradigm”: in contrast to the cities of the Tang era with their enclosed wards, gridiron streets, tightly controlled markets, and sharp hierarchical social structure, the Song-era city was shaped by mercantile society and managed by pragmatic bureaucrats.

The genesis of Chinese political economy can be traced to the Warring States era (453–221 bce), which was marked on one hand by rapid economic progress (the spread of iron metallurgy, advances in agricultural productivity, the invention of coinage, and the emergence of a private merchant class) and on the other hand by the rise of autocratic states (accompanied by the centralization of political power and mass mobilization for war). The economic principles and policies that later shaped the formation of the first unified empires – what I will designate the militarist–physiocratic state – were enunciated by leading ministers of the most successful autocratic states, such as Li Kui in Wei and Shang Yang in Qin, and set down in works such as The Book of Lord Shang and Han Fei Zi.

“Political economy” is a Western term that carries its own, evolving ideological baggage. For John Stuart Mill, political economy was a science – that which “traces the laws of such of the phenomena of society as arise from the combined operations of mankind for the production of wealth, in so far as those phenomena are not modified by the pursuit of any other object.”1 Adam Smith used the word “science,” but meant what Mill would have called “art”: for him, “political oeconomy” could be “considered as a branch of the science of a statesman or legislator” and had as its objectives “enabl[ing]” the people to prosper through their own efforts and “supply[ing] the state or commonwealth” with means of payment for “the public services.”2 Smith takes us closer than Mill to what the authors mentioned in this chapter understood as their mission. It is not that Chinese writers were incapable of identifying infallibly observed regularities, but construction of a disciplinary edifice through the systematic “tracing” of such regularities in economic behavior was not a premodern Chinese project.

The long transition – often marred by violence – between Tang and Song discerned by Naitō Konan marked the advent of a new world. The An Lushan Rebellion (755–763) triggered profound political and military crises that shattered the institutions of the Tang dynasty, but also set in motion the slow progression of the market economy, which the Tang leadership began to see as the necessary means to restore its fiscal authority. With the collapse of the equal-field system of state land allocations in the wake of the rebellion, the Tang abandoned the principle of uniform, in-kind taxation of farming households as the basis of its fiscal and military systems. Urgent necessity prompted the adoption of new and more flexible fiscal strategies to secure revenues from commerce and consumption. The expansion of the market economy mitigated the Confucian elite’s traditional hostility toward commerce and acted as a key catalyst for the mercantilist policies pursued by the southern kingdoms during the first half of the tenth century.

In this chapter we will examine how key institutions were mobilized to shape China’s early modern business practices under weak state engagement of the economy, and a growing foreign presence. Business practices in the late imperial period rested on four pillars, each a fundamental part of the institutional framework that structured social and economic life. The first, family, provided templates for the utilization of capital and labor and the mobilization of trust, tools that proved as useful for China’s late imperial commercial economy as for the early modern economy of industrial enterprise and global engagement. The second might be termed the system of private ordering that served generations of Chinese merchants and others in combining capital and establishing the terms of economic interaction, often through written contracts whose provisions established highly flexible forms of partnership that continued to form the basis of most Chinese business until the early PRC. The third, native place, in significant ways mirrored the intangible assets provided by ties of kinship, offering a predetermined basis for co-operation, nurturing and protecting group interests and skills and, like the fourth, grounding these intangibles in very tangible organizations catering to inhabitants of a particular city, region, or province.

Continental East Asia during the first millennium bce transitioned from a redistributive “gift-giving economy” (or “prestige-good economy”) to a thriving market economy that was at least partly monetized. This transformation – gradual but all-encompassing and irreversible – led to a veritable “economic miracle” during the Warring States period (c. 450–221 bce), which brought unprecedented prosperity to large portions of the population. It will here be discussed through its reflections in the material record, spanning the eight centuries from c. 1000 bce down to approximately the time of the Qin unification in 221 bce.1 During this period, the Zhou kingdom and its constituent polities formed a relatively homogeneous culture area encompassing the middle and lower Yellow River basin and the middle Yangzi basin. Archaeological discoveries attest that, over time, many of the surrounding smaller and sociopolitically less complex regional cultures – defined by archaeologists on the basis of their material remains – were increasingly drawn into the Zhou orbit.