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.

The book is a study in comparative legal and economic history. It asks why early modern property institutions in rural China and England went down distinctly different paths—and whether these institutional differences had any macro-level economic effects. The book’s central thesis ties together cultural analysis with law and economics—two theoretical paradigms that have had virtually no interaction over the past several decades—but also engages the growing literature on global economic divergence.