{"id":{"repo_id":"cambridge","oai_identifier":"oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/387891"},"canonical_url":"https://search.dev.ndltd.org/etd/cambridge/oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/387891","repository":{"repo_id":"cambridge","name":"Cambridge University","base_url":"https://api.repository.cam.ac.uk/server/oai/request"},"display":{"title":"Inheritance, Family Structure, and Economic Development in the Lower Yangzi Region, c.1650-1950","abstract":"Inheritance lies at the heart of contemporary debates on wealth inequality and economic development. Warnings of political corruption, deprived, unstable families, and long-term economic stagnation are at the centre of appeals to limit inequality through the taxation of inheritance and wealth. Other arguments insist that wealth should be passed on freely, and claim that this freedom maintains the integrity of family ties, and that it encourages the kind of long-term thinking among parents and family enterprises that is vital to economic growth. This dissertation uses historical data from China’s economic core, the Lower Yangzi Region, to analyse the relationships between inheritance practices, social structure, and economic development between 1650 and 1950. It describes this set of relationships as the “inheritance complex” and draws on a suite of historical data map out the interaction of three feedback loops within the inheritance complex: (1) an “inheritance loop” linking household capital to household formation through inheritance; (2) a “reproductive loop” running from household capital to fertility; (3) and a “productive loop” connecting household capital to investments and thereby further capital formation. The study argues that the interaction between these three feedback loops explains a series of key stylised facts of the long-run economic development in the Lower Yangzi Region: how the simple but powerful mechanism of equal partible inheritance, consistently practised across pre-industrial China, was associated with large co-habiting families, a constant dispersion of wealth, low levels of migration and urbanisation, and a credit market with very high interest rates upwards of 20 percent per annum. Much of the surge in scholarly interest in China’s economic past following the publication of Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence was carried by efforts to collect large amounts of historical macroeconomic data to respond to the question that Pomeranz raised: when exactly did living standards in North-Western Europe start to outperform the economically most advanced regions of China? My research follows the agenda of this newer literature of finding ways to quantify the long-term economic development of China. But I direct this quantification at the micro-level question that was the dominant research paradigm in Chinese economic and social history before Pomeranz’s intervention. That is, how did the social structure, the institutional setup, of local society in pre-industrial China relate to its long-term economic development? The dissertation analyses the economic implications of equal partible inheritance by drawing on the exceptionally rich documentary evidence that has survived for one prefecture in the Lower Yangzi Region, Huizhou Prefecture. These sources were used to construct three databases. A first database, drawing on inheritance contracts (fenjia shu 分家書), provides detailed evidence on the wealth and structure of 307 households in late imperial and Republican China. Second, geographic data from lineage genealogies (zupu 族譜) are used to trace the migration trajectories of 23,082 men and the demographic characteristics of these men. Last, data from 3,441 credit contracts form the empirical basis for an assessment of the conditions on the credit market. The representativeness of each database is checked carefully against census-like surveys from the early twentieth century. The argument developed with these sources goes, in broad strokes, as follows: equal partible inheritance was practised with next to no exception across Huizhou and other regions of pre-industrial China. That is, all heirs inherited equal portions of the household property. Ritual imperatives and a political interest in maintaining a smallholder peasantry held this system in place. Because richer households had more sons than poorer ones, their property was divided among more heirs. The average heir of a wealthy household therefore dropped further in the wealth distribution than heirs to poorer households (Chapter 1). Due to the rarity of migrant labour, households had only limited leeway to decouple their fertility from the possession of land, although this changed with the onset of a mobility transition in the late nineteenth century (Chapters 2 and 3). Instead of migrating, poor households eased pressure on their finances by mortgaging property, thereby bidding up the price for liquid funds in the rural economy. Contrary to the common idea that corporate kin groups such as lineages could provide preferential access to funds by pooling resources collectively, there is no evidence that such arrangements were widely implemented (Chapter 4). The findings of this thesis contribute to debates on the long-term drivers of wealth inequality and economic divergence. They demonstrate that wealth and poverty are not dictates of resource endowments but, by providing a detailed institutional analysis, the thesis shows that institutions are the key factor explaining the distribution of wealth within and across societies.","abstract_html":"Inheritance lies at the heart of contemporary debates on wealth inequality and economic development. Warnings of political corruption, deprived, unstable families, and long-term economic stagnation are at the centre of appeals to limit inequality through the taxation of inheritance and wealth. Other arguments insist that wealth should be passed on freely, and claim that this freedom maintains the integrity of family ties, and that it encourages the kind of long-term thinking among parents and family enterprises that is vital to economic growth. This dissertation uses historical data from China’s economic core, the Lower Yangzi Region, to analyse the relationships between inheritance practices, social structure, and economic development between 1650 and 1950. It describes this set of relationships as the “inheritance complex” and draws on a suite of historical data map out the interaction of three feedback loops within the inheritance complex: (1) an “inheritance loop” linking household capital to household formation through inheritance; (2) a “reproductive loop” running from household capital to fertility; (3) and a “productive loop” connecting household capital to investments and thereby further capital formation. The study argues that the interaction between these three feedback loops explains a series of key stylised facts of the long-run economic development in the Lower Yangzi Region: how the simple but powerful mechanism of equal partible inheritance, consistently practised across pre-industrial China, was associated with large co-habiting families, a constant dispersion of wealth, low levels of migration and urbanisation, and a credit market with very high interest rates upwards of 20 percent per annum. Much of the surge in scholarly interest in China’s economic past following the publication of Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence was carried by efforts to collect large amounts of historical macroeconomic data to respond to the question that Pomeranz raised: when exactly did living standards in North-Western Europe start to outperform the economically most advanced regions of China? My research follows the agenda of this newer literature of finding ways to quantify the long-term economic development of China. But I direct this quantification at the micro-level question that was the dominant research paradigm in Chinese economic and social history before Pomeranz’s intervention. That is, how did the social structure, the institutional setup, of local society in pre-industrial China relate to its long-term economic development? The dissertation analyses the economic implications of equal partible inheritance by drawing on the exceptionally rich documentary evidence that has survived for one prefecture in the Lower Yangzi Region, Huizhou Prefecture. These sources were used to construct three databases. A first database, drawing on inheritance contracts (fenjia shu 分家書), provides detailed evidence on the wealth and structure of 307 households in late imperial and Republican China. Second, geographic data from lineage genealogies (zupu 族譜) are used to trace the migration trajectories of 23,082 men and the demographic characteristics of these men. Last, data from 3,441 credit contracts form the empirical basis for an assessment of the conditions on the credit market. The representativeness of each database is checked carefully against census-like surveys from the early twentieth century. The argument developed with these sources goes, in broad strokes, as follows: equal partible inheritance was practised with next to no exception across Huizhou and other regions of pre-industrial China. That is, all heirs inherited equal portions of the household property. Ritual imperatives and a political interest in maintaining a smallholder peasantry held this system in place. Because richer households had more sons than poorer ones, their property was divided among more heirs. The average heir of a wealthy household therefore dropped further in the wealth distribution than heirs to poorer households (Chapter 1). Due to the rarity of migrant labour, households had only limited leeway to decouple their fertility from the possession of land, although this changed with the onset of a mobility transition in the late nineteenth century (Chapters 2 and 3). Instead of migrating, poor households eased pressure on their finances by mortgaging property, thereby bidding up the price for liquid funds in the rural economy. Contrary to the common idea that corporate kin groups such as lineages could provide preferential access to funds by pooling resources collectively, there is no evidence that such arrangements were widely implemented (Chapter 4). The findings of this thesis contribute to debates on the long-term drivers of wealth inequality and economic divergence. They demonstrate that wealth and poverty are not dictates of resource endowments but, by providing a detailed institutional analysis, the thesis shows that institutions are the key factor explaining the distribution of wealth within and across societies.","abstract_has_math":false,"creators":["Hess, Christoph"],"institution":"University of Cambridge","degree_name":"Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)","degree_level":"Doctoral","degree_discipline":null,"degree_department":null,"school":null,"contributors":[],"advisors":["van de Ven, Hans","Ogilvie, Sheilagh"],"committee_chairs":[],"committee_members":[],"year":2024,"date_issued":"2024-11-11","date_published":"2024-11-11","updated_at":"2026-07-22T22:24:14Z","subjects":["Inheritance","Economic history","Historical demography","China","Agricultural capitalism","Migration","Marriage","Credit"],"languages":[],"rights":[],"rights_urls":["https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/8b6a5bc3-ecd2-40da-82a2-32dacfbe1ae2/download","http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved"],"identifier_entries":[]},"links":{"outbound_url":"https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.120499","outbound_label":"DOI","outbound_source":"dc:identifier.doi"},"metadata_groups":[{"id":"people","label":"People","entries":[{"key":"dc:contributor.advisor","label":"Advisor","values":["van de Ven, Hans","Ogilvie, Sheilagh"]},{"key":"dc:contributor.sponsor","label":"Sponsor","values":["Cambridge Trust German National Academic Foundation"]},{"key":"dc:creator","label":"Author","values":["Hess, Christoph"]}]},{"id":"academic_context","label":"Academic Context","entries":[{"key":"dc:date.issued","label":"Date","values":["2024-11-11"]},{"key":"dc:publisher.institution","label":"Dc Publisher Institution","values":["University of Cambridge"]},{"key":"dc:relation.isreferencedby.uri","label":"Dc Relation Isreferencedby URI","values":["https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/387891"]},{"key":"dc:type","label":"Dc Type","values":["Thesis"]},{"key":"dc:type.qualificationlevel","label":"Dc Type Qualificationlevel","values":["Doctoral"]},{"key":"dc:type.qualificationname","label":"Dc Type Qualificationname","values":["Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)"]}]},{"id":"subjects_keywords","label":"Subjects and Keywords","entries":[{"key":"dc:subject","label":"Dc Subject","values":["Inheritance","Economic history","Historical demography","China","Agricultural capitalism","Migration","Marriage","Credit"]}]},{"id":"language_rights","label":"Language and Rights","entries":[{"key":"dc:rights","label":"Dc Rights","values":["https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/8b6a5bc3-ecd2-40da-82a2-32dacfbe1ae2/download","http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved"]}]},{"id":"identifiers","label":"Identifiers","entries":[{"key":"dc:identifier.doi","label":"DOI","values":["https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.120499"]},{"key":"dc:identifier.uri","label":"Identifier URI","values":["https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/71af7de0-e71f-4fc9-ba84-b355c4605a99/download"]}]},{"id":"additional","label":"Additional Metadata","entries":[{"key":"dc:description.abstract","label":"Abstract","values":["Inheritance lies at the heart of contemporary debates on wealth inequality and economic development. 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It describes this set of relationships as the “inheritance complex” and draws on a suite of historical data map out the interaction of three feedback loops within the inheritance complex: (1) an “inheritance loop” linking household capital to household formation through inheritance; (2) a “reproductive loop” running from household capital to fertility; (3) and a “productive loop” connecting household capital to investments and thereby further capital formation. The study argues that the interaction between these three feedback loops explains a series of key stylised facts of the long-run economic development in the Lower Yangzi Region: how the simple but powerful mechanism of equal partible inheritance, consistently practised across pre-industrial China, was associated with large co-habiting families, a constant dispersion of wealth, low levels of migration and urbanisation, and a credit market with very high interest rates upwards of 20 percent per annum. Much of the surge in scholarly interest in China’s economic past following the publication of Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence was carried by efforts to collect large amounts of historical macroeconomic data to respond to the question that Pomeranz raised: when exactly did living standards in North-Western Europe start to outperform the economically most advanced regions of China? My research follows the agenda of this newer literature of finding ways to quantify the long-term economic development of China. But I direct this quantification at the micro-level question that was the dominant research paradigm in Chinese economic and social history before Pomeranz’s intervention. That is, how did the social structure, the institutional setup, of local society in pre-industrial China relate to its long-term economic development? The dissertation analyses the economic implications of equal partible inheritance by drawing on the exceptionally rich documentary evidence that has survived for one prefecture in the Lower Yangzi Region, Huizhou Prefecture. These sources were used to construct three databases. A first database, drawing on inheritance contracts (fenjia shu 分家書), provides detailed evidence on the wealth and structure of 307 households in late imperial and Republican China. Second, geographic data from lineage genealogies (zupu 族譜) are used to trace the migration trajectories of 23,082 men and the demographic characteristics of these men. Last, data from 3,441 credit contracts form the empirical basis for an assessment of the conditions on the credit market. The representativeness of each database is checked carefully against census-like surveys from the early twentieth century. The argument developed with these sources goes, in broad strokes, as follows: equal partible inheritance was practised with next to no exception across Huizhou and other regions of pre-industrial China. That is, all heirs inherited equal portions of the household property. Ritual imperatives and a political interest in maintaining a smallholder peasantry held this system in place. Because richer households had more sons than poorer ones, their property was divided among more heirs. The average heir of a wealthy household therefore dropped further in the wealth distribution than heirs to poorer households (Chapter 1). Due to the rarity of migrant labour, households had only limited leeway to decouple their fertility from the possession of land, although this changed with the onset of a mobility transition in the late nineteenth century (Chapters 2 and 3). Instead of migrating, poor households eased pressure on their finances by mortgaging property, thereby bidding up the price for liquid funds in the rural economy. Contrary to the common idea that corporate kin groups such as lineages could provide preferential access to funds by pooling resources collectively, there is no evidence that such arrangements were widely implemented (Chapter 4). The findings of this thesis contribute to debates on the long-term drivers of wealth inequality and economic divergence. They demonstrate that wealth and poverty are not dictates of resource endowments but, by providing a detailed institutional analysis, the thesis shows that institutions are the key factor explaining the distribution of wealth within and across societies."]},{"key":"dc:format.checksum.md5","label":"Dc Format Checksum Md5","values":["07783b1661137bebd9aec4bdf00c109f","87eda9de84448d1f82354d60eee3eb5f"]},{"key":"dc:title","label":"Title","values":["Inheritance, Family Structure, and Economic Development in the Lower Yangzi Region, c.1650-1950"]}]}],"canonical_facts":{"dc:contributor.advisor":["van de Ven, Hans","Ogilvie, Sheilagh"],"dc:contributor.sponsor":["Cambridge Trust German National Academic Foundation"],"dc:creator":["Hess, Christoph"],"dc:date.issued":["2024-11-11"],"dc:description.abstract":["Inheritance lies at the heart of contemporary debates on wealth inequality and economic development. 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It describes this set of relationships as the “inheritance complex” and draws on a suite of historical data map out the interaction of three feedback loops within the inheritance complex: (1) an “inheritance loop” linking household capital to household formation through inheritance; (2) a “reproductive loop” running from household capital to fertility; (3) and a “productive loop” connecting household capital to investments and thereby further capital formation. The study argues that the interaction between these three feedback loops explains a series of key stylised facts of the long-run economic development in the Lower Yangzi Region: how the simple but powerful mechanism of equal partible inheritance, consistently practised across pre-industrial China, was associated with large co-habiting families, a constant dispersion of wealth, low levels of migration and urbanisation, and a credit market with very high interest rates upwards of 20 percent per annum. Much of the surge in scholarly interest in China’s economic past following the publication of Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence was carried by efforts to collect large amounts of historical macroeconomic data to respond to the question that Pomeranz raised: when exactly did living standards in North-Western Europe start to outperform the economically most advanced regions of China? My research follows the agenda of this newer literature of finding ways to quantify the long-term economic development of China. But I direct this quantification at the micro-level question that was the dominant research paradigm in Chinese economic and social history before Pomeranz’s intervention. That is, how did the social structure, the institutional setup, of local society in pre-industrial China relate to its long-term economic development? The dissertation analyses the economic implications of equal partible inheritance by drawing on the exceptionally rich documentary evidence that has survived for one prefecture in the Lower Yangzi Region, Huizhou Prefecture. These sources were used to construct three databases. A first database, drawing on inheritance contracts (fenjia shu 分家書), provides detailed evidence on the wealth and structure of 307 households in late imperial and Republican China. Second, geographic data from lineage genealogies (zupu 族譜) are used to trace the migration trajectories of 23,082 men and the demographic characteristics of these men. Last, data from 3,441 credit contracts form the empirical basis for an assessment of the conditions on the credit market. The representativeness of each database is checked carefully against census-like surveys from the early twentieth century. The argument developed with these sources goes, in broad strokes, as follows: equal partible inheritance was practised with next to no exception across Huizhou and other regions of pre-industrial China. That is, all heirs inherited equal portions of the household property. Ritual imperatives and a political interest in maintaining a smallholder peasantry held this system in place. Because richer households had more sons than poorer ones, their property was divided among more heirs. The average heir of a wealthy household therefore dropped further in the wealth distribution than heirs to poorer households (Chapter 1). Due to the rarity of migrant labour, households had only limited leeway to decouple their fertility from the possession of land, although this changed with the onset of a mobility transition in the late nineteenth century (Chapters 2 and 3). Instead of migrating, poor households eased pressure on their finances by mortgaging property, thereby bidding up the price for liquid funds in the rural economy. Contrary to the common idea that corporate kin groups such as lineages could provide preferential access to funds by pooling resources collectively, there is no evidence that such arrangements were widely implemented (Chapter 4). The findings of this thesis contribute to debates on the long-term drivers of wealth inequality and economic divergence. They demonstrate that wealth and poverty are not dictates of resource endowments but, by providing a detailed institutional analysis, the thesis shows that institutions are the key factor explaining the distribution of wealth within and across societies."],"dc:format.checksum.md5":["07783b1661137bebd9aec4bdf00c109f","87eda9de84448d1f82354d60eee3eb5f"],"dc:identifier.doi":["https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.120499"],"dc:identifier.uri":["https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/71af7de0-e71f-4fc9-ba84-b355c4605a99/download"],"dc:publisher.institution":["University of Cambridge"],"dc:relation.isreferencedby.uri":["https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/387891"],"dc:rights":["https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/8b6a5bc3-ecd2-40da-82a2-32dacfbe1ae2/download","http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved"],"dc:subject":["Inheritance","Economic history","Historical demography","China","Agricultural capitalism","Migration","Marriage","Credit"],"dc:title":["Inheritance, Family Structure, and Economic Development in the Lower Yangzi Region, c.1650-1950"],"dc:type":["Thesis"],"dc:type.qualificationlevel":["Doctoral"],"dc:type.qualificationname":["Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)"]},"updated_at":"2026-07-22T22:24:14Z"}