The Sung fiscal administration

Golas, Peter J.

doi:10.1017/cho9781139193061.004

Cited by 8 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…44 Peter Golas calls the monopolies and commercial tax of the Song "one of the most striking developments of the Song period" because "for the only time in pre-nineteenth-century Chinese history, revenue from nonagricultural sources equaled and even surpassed agricultural revenues in the central government's budget." 45 Unlike their predecessors in the Han Empire, moreover, Song officials of every conviction agreed that money and commerce were indispensable to common welfare; some even argued that finance was the basis of governance. 46 Whereas opponents of the activist economic policies under Emperor Wu rejected the monopolies and even advocated the abolition of money, none of the opponents of economic activism in the eleventh century objected in principle to monopolies or commercial taxes, let alone to the use of money.…”

Section: Intellectual Optimism: the Search For The Universal Patternmentioning

confidence: 99%

Circulation and flow: Immanent metaphors in the financial debates of Northern Song China (960–1127 CE)

Pee

2018

Hist Sci

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The Song Empire (960-1279 CE) had a larger population, a higher agricultural output, a more efficient infrastructure, and a more extensive monetary system than any previous empire in Chinese history. As local jurisdictions during the eleventh century became entangled in empire-wide economic relations and trans-regional commercial litigation, imperial officials sought to reduce the bewildering movement of people, goods, and money to an immanent cosmic pattern. They reasoned that because money and commerce brought to imperial subjects the goods they required to survive, money and commerce must be beneficent, and because they were beneficent, they must conform to the immanent pattern of the moral cosmos, as did everything else that was enduringly sustaining of life and wellbeing. And because money and commerce conformed to the moral cosmos, officials attempted to understand their workings by analogy with other phenomena that sustained human life, such as the flow of water and the circulation of vital essences through the human body. During the 1030s and 1040s, officials and scholars believed that knowledge of the cosmic pattern lay within their grasp, and that this knowledge would allow them to align culture with nature, and the present with hallowed antiquity. By the 1080s, however, this intellectual optimism had been defeated by irreconcilable disagreements about financial and economic policy. The failure of the attempt to understand finance by natural analogy draws attention to the underlying ideological insistence on moral learning as the basis for political power, and to the very limited range of economic discourse that has been preserved in eleventh-century texts.

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Section: Intellectual Optimism: the Search For The Universal Patternmentioning

confidence: 99%