The Road Taken

<p><b>Traces China's transformations with a focus on China's incorporation process in the nineteenth century which help to grasp the historical origins of China's capitalism.</b></p><p>As Europe's colonial powers reached China in the nineteenth century they became so strong that China could no longer ignore them. Given that the unprecedented geographical expansion of the European system undermined a China-centered world order and brought unprecedented changes to Chinese society an intriguing question-why and how the Chinese empire entered into the capitalist world economy-has attracted increasing attention among historians historical sociologists and world-systems researchers. Yet there has been no comprehensive monograph touching on China's incorporation process into the capitalist world-economy. To rectify this <i>The Road Taken</i> investigates China's incorporation process. Incorporation studies based on world-systems analysis aims to illustrate the long-term integration process of external arenas into the capitalist world-economy. Ru traces China's transformations with a focus on how incorporation process unfolded over the course of a century (1780s-1890s) which represents a watershed era in the relations between China and the capitalist world.</p>