Webinars

Boqun Zhou offers new insights into the mechanics of levers in the Mohist Canon and the scale markings on Chu balance beams. Join us to gain a more precise understanding of how lever mechanics were conceptualized in the Pre-Qin period.

Ran Zhang explores the role of Chinese ceramics in the Indian Ocean trade within the broader framework of archaic globalisation, focusing on maritime networks linking China with the Persian Gulf, East Africa, and South Asia (8th–19th centuries).

Join as Zhiwu Chen explores the historical shift of China’s socioeconomic core from North to South triggered by Arab and Persian Muslim traders in the late seventh century. Explore how maritime trade transformations reshaped the region, influencing population growth until the maritime trade ban of 1371 CE.

Felix Schaff explains how the seemingly egalitarian institution of partible inheritance can counterintuitively increase broader inequality in pre-modern economy by exploiting a sharp border between partible and impartible inheritance areas in southwest Germany, together with household-level data from the registers of the 1545 Turk Tax.

Meredith Paker of Grinnell College and her co-authors introduce a new method, based in established machine learning techniques, to peer into the past despite the increasing scarcity of data. The key intuition is that, just as data in the future are unknown to today’s modelers, data in the distant past are unknown to historians. They can therefore use state-of-the-art predictive modeling methods and best-practice forecasting techniques to make predictions of historic economic time series with improved accuracy and generalizability. 

Nuno Palma shows, using a new dataset, that scholars educated in Confucian academies became a key force in the suppression of the Taiping. The civil service examinations system helped maintain political stability and associated rents by endowing elites with a stake in the Qing status quo.