Overview

Traces China's transformations with a focus on China's incorporation process in the nineteenth century, which help to grasp the historical origins of China's capitalism. As Europe's colonial powers reached China in the nineteenth century, they became so strong that China could no longer ignore them. Given that the unprecedented geographical expansion of the European system undermined a China-centered world order and brought unprecedented changes to Chinese society, an intriguing question—why and how the Chinese empire entered into the capitalist world economy—has attracted increasing attention among historians, historical sociologists, and world-systems researchers. Yet, there has been no comprehensive monograph touching on China's incorporation process into the capitalist world-economy. To rectify this, The Road Taken investigates China's incorporation process. Incorporation studies, based on world-systems analysis, aims to illustrate the long-term integration process of external arenas into the capitalist world-economy. Ru traces China's transformations with a focus on how incorporation process unfolded over the course of a century (1780s–1890s), which represents a watershed era in the relations between China and the capitalist world.

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Reviews

""This is an original contribution to the study of the coming together of two world-systems in the nineteenth century when East Asia was forcibly incorporated into the expanding Europe-centered system producing a nearly global single system for the first time. The book will be of great interest to world historians and to students of the evolution of interpolity systems. It also has important implications for prehending the contemporary situation of global society."" — Christopher Chase-Dunn, University of California, Riverside

Author Information

Sung Hee Ru is Assistant Professor at Bright College, University of Hankyong National University, South Korea.

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