European and Chinese Histories of Economic Thought Theories and Images of Good Governance

Part I: Chinese Lines of Evolution

Section 1: The Agency of the State

1. People’s Livelihoods and Good Governance in the Past and for the Future
Bin Wong

2. Justifying Office-selling for Famine Relief in Nineteenth-century Qing China
Elisabeth Kaske

3. The Cost of Security: Financing Yellow River Hydraulics During the Late Imperial Period
Iwo Amelung

Section 2: Land, Interest and Usury

4. Outline of the Institutions for Land Transactions in Traditional China
Denggao Long and Xiang Chi

5. Loans and Interest Rates in Traditional China
Qiugen Liu

6. The Progression of Foreign Currencies in Ancient China
Yaguang Zhang, Yue Bi and Zyler Wang

Part II: European Lines of Evolution

Section 1: From Rationalisations of Usury to Deductive Theories of Interest

7. Theorizing Interest: How Did It All Begin? Some Landmarks on the Prohibition of Usury in Scholastic Economic Thought
André Lapidus and Irina Chaplygina

8. Merchants and the New Catholic View on the Economy: Florence and Augsburg Between the 15th and the 16th Century
Monika Poettinger

9.  From Kaspar Klock’s “De aerario” (1651) and Leibniz’s “Meditatio de interusurio simplice” to Florencourt’s “Abhandlungen aus der juristischen und der politischen Rechenkunst” (1781): How Calculus Led from the Logic of a Device for Circumventing the Prohibition of Usury to a Modern Theory of Depreciation
Bertram Schefold

10. Interest on Money, Own Rate of Interest, the Natural Interest Rate and the Rate of Profits: A short History of Concepts – Ultimately Emerging from the Usury Debate
Volker Caspari

Section 2: The Spread of Monetary Relations and the Transition from Poor Relief to the Welfare State

11. Labour and Poverty in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
Cosimo Perrotta

12.  After China, before Sweden and England: the Circulation of Paper Money in Naples
Lilia Costabile

13. European Models and Transformations of the Welfare State
Hans-Michael Trautwein

Part III: Contact, Comparison and Interaction

Section 1: Before the Revolutions

14. Xunzi and Plato on the Economics of Totalitarianism: A Meeting of Distant Minds
Terry Peach

15. Yantie Lun in the Pro-legalist and Anti-Confucian Campaign
Qunyi Liu

16. A Critical Examination of Chinese Influences on Quesnay
Richard van den Berg

Section 2: The Traces of the Past in the Transition to Modernity

17. Rethinking Traditional Attitudes Towards Consumption in the Process of Formation of Chinese Economics (Late Qing and Republican Period)
Olga Borokh

18. China’s Ancient Principles of Price Regulation through Market Participation: The Guanzi from a Comparative Perspective
Isabella Weber

19. Confucian Entrepreneurship and Moral Guidelines for Business in China
Matthias Niedenführ

Part IV: Conclusions and Perspectives

20. Towards a Systematic Comparison of Different Forms of Economic Thought
Iwo Amelung and Bertram Schefold

Biography

Iwo Amelung is Professor at Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. His research interests are: history of knowledge of modern China, bureaucracy and social history of the Qing period, emergence and development of scientific disciplines in modern China.

Bertram Schefold is Senior Professor at Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. He teaches economic theory and history of economic thought. His research interests are: Capital theory, history of economic thought and development.

"I expected this book to shed light on the interactions, similarities, and conflicts between European and Chinese ideas. I am happy to report that it met my expectations...[T]his book is a great starter for comparison research in the development of economic thought across civilizations."

Yue Xiao, History of Political Economy