I co-edited a volume with Zhiwu Chen and Debin Ma Quantitative History of China: State Capacity, Institutions, and Development that has just been published by Springer.
It is available open access: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-96-8272-0
From the description:
This volume showcases a collection of new findings concerning China’s political, social, and economic history and typically based on newly constructed large historical datasets. Most of the work has involved an interdisciplinary team of economists, sociologists, political scientists, historians and econometricians, demonstrating how new big data and quantitative methods may be brought to bear on some of the biggest questions related to China’s development over the past three millennia and on the implications of distant past events on contemporary China. Topics covered range from the roles of war, state formation, religion, culture, finance and institutions in long-run development and technological innovations, to regicide history, to the organization and capacity of the bureaucracy. Contributors include leading figures in the quantitative study of China’s long-run socioeconomic and political history.
I contributed two chapters, both co-authored with students.
Chapter 6, lead-authored by Chen Jun, now a PhD student at Renmin University, examines the spatial origins and allocation of military officers in the late Qing. Here is the abstract:
We investigate changes over time in the distribution by province of current post and province of origin for Qing military officers from the late eighteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth century. During this period, the Qing faced a variety of military challenges, including domestic conflicts and foreign incursions. The most important was the Taiping Rebellion (1851–1864), which is already known to have led to large changes in the composition of the Qing military leadership. In turn, senior Hunan-origin military officers leveraged their networks to dominate officer appointments in the coastal provinces. We examine how the Taiping Rebellion, the First Opium War and other crises affected the allocation of officers between provinces, and the recruitment of officers from different provinces. For the analysis, we use the quarterly rosters of military officers Zhongshu beilan, which have been transcribed into a database as part of the China Government Employee Dataset-Qing Jinshenlu (CGED-Q JSL). We show that the allocation of officers by province did not change during the First Opium War, but changed dramatically after the Taiping Rebellion, with a substantial increase in the share of officers allocated to the southeastern coastal provinces, reflecting heightened importance of maritime defense. We also show that there were two phases to the increase in the share of Hunan-origin officers, one at the end of the eighteenth century, and the other, better-known one following the Taiping Rebellion. Finally, we show that exceptions to the rule of avoidance in the appointment of senior military officers became more common for all types of officers from the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century, and that afterward, low-, mid-, and high-level officers followed different trajectories. We conclude with an assessment of the implications of our findings for our understanding of the Qing in the nineteenth century.
Chapter 7, co-authored with Shuaiqi Gao, examines the influence of disasters on the careers of officials. Here is the abstract:
We investigate one dimension of state capacity in the late Qing Dynasty period: enforcement of regulations for the evaluation of officials. For this, we examine how natural disasters and harvest outcomes influenced the careers of county magistrates between 1820 and 1911. County magistrates were responsible for reporting disasters and dealing with their aftermath. Their response was assessed during their performance evaluations. The clearest rules were for locust infestations: as their occurrence was considered prima facie evidence of negligence and was supposed to result in termination. We show that an infestation increased the chances that an official would cease service. Among disasters with more complex origins and where blame was harder to ascribe, including floods, droughts, epidemics, and famine, only famine increased the risk of ending careers. We conclude that the state enforced these personnel regulations before 1880, but not afterward. Effects of infestation and famine did not vary by whether an official had an examination degree or by the rated difficulty of the county. No systematic time trends in effects of famine or infestation were apparent. Our analysis makes use of career histories of officials in the China Government Employee Database-Qing (CGED-Q) Jinshenlu (JSL) dataset, linked to records of disasters and harvests transcribed from a published compilation.