ABSTRACT
In foreign trade, Song China exported a wide range of goods, including textiles, porcelain, tea, precious metals, lead, and tin, while importing incense, perfumes, spices, pearls, ivory, coral, amber, shells, agates, crystal, and other luxury goods. This chapter aims to describe a summary sketch of some principal features of China’s economic history. The reason for the end of the medieval economic revolution, therefore, is to be sought in the weakening of the social, political, and economic forces that sustain invention and innovation. The renewed economic expansion between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries opened new opportunities for the propertied classes in pawnbroking, moneylending, and urban real estate as well as in the expanding domestic trade. In keeping with the new sources of income, and attracted by the security as well as the amenities of urban living, by the eighteenth century most landlords of any substance had become urban residents. The middle peasants typically had enough land to produce a subsistence income.
