Book Talk: The Ideological Foundations of Qing Taxation

Mar. 9, 2023
12:10PM - 1:00PM
SLB Room 127
Open to the Public

Please join the Lillian Goldman Law Library for a talk with Professor Taisu Zhang B.A. ’05, J.D. ’08, Ph.D. ’14 about his new book, The Ideological Foundations of Qing Taxation: Belief Systems, Politics, and Institutions, with commentary by Professor Samuel Moyn.

**Online Registration is Required by March 7**

This event will take place on Thursday, March 9, at 12:10 PM in SLB 127.
Boxed lunch will be available for those who register at: http://bit.ly/41dhA7w
This book talk will be recorded and available to watch on the Law Library’s YouTube channel following the event.

About The Ideological Foundations of Qing Taxation:

How states develop the capacity to tax is a question of fundamental importance to political science, legal theory, economics, sociology, and history. Increasingly, scholars believe that China's relative economic decline in the 18th and 19th centuries was related to its weak fiscal institutions and limited revenue. This book argues that this fiscal weakness was fundamentally ideological in nature. Belief systems created through a confluence of traditional political ethics and the trauma of dynastic change imposed unusually deep and powerful constraints on fiscal policymaking and institutions throughout the final 250 years of China's imperial history. Through the Qing example, this book combs through several interaction dynamics between state institutions and ideologies. The latter shapes the former, but the former can also significantly reinforce the political durability of the latter. In addition to its historical analysis of ideological politics, this book makes a major contribution to the longstanding debate on Sino-European divergence.

Sponsoring Organization(s)

Law Library