COMPTES RENDUS - AFEC

Comptes rendus
world (a perhaps debatable point, in view of the lack of reliable statistics);
it was an intensely urban corner of a vast agrarian empire; and during the
Ming period China was transformed into a Suzhou-centered world System.
His book has the following chapters (I list only the subtitles, more
informative): Introduction; 1. Suzhou and its hinterland in the Ming; 2.
Suzhou to 1367; 3. Suzhou under Hongwu; 4. Suzhou, 1398-1430; 5.
Suzhou from Zhou Chen to Wang Shu [1430-1484]; 6. Economy and
society in fifteenth-century Suzhou; 7. Suzhou's élite and the rise of Wu
School culture; 8. Suzhou, 1506-1550; Epilogue: Suzhou from the wokou
crisis to the fall of the Ming; Conclusion. There are two appendices, one
on population and one on examination graduâtes.
In essence, Marmé's book is a socio-economic history of Suzhou
during the first two Ming centuries, described mainly through the analysis
of the state's tax structure and its conséquences in Suzhou préfecture. This
largely économie approach is combined with a few chapters on society, in
which a sample of patrilines is investigated in order to show how individual
households experienced this history. Suzhou as an actual urban city is
touched upon rather summarily: questions such as how the city related to
the state apart from its tax structure, or how it was governed locally, are
barely touched upon. For example, there is no discussion on the possible
influence on governance of Suzhou's uncommon situation where one
prefectural and two county yamens existed within its city walls, each with
its own separate hinterland. Marmé ends his book when the first problems
of the wokou pirates arise, and with the (in his view) concomitant beginning
of urban social control by dahang gang members. In his conclusion,
Marmé places Suzhou's early and mid-Ming history within a larger Ming-
Qing framework, in which he again stresses the importance of particular
state tax régulations that forced Suzhou to commoditize. Finally, Marmé
concludes with a comparison of Suzhou's development with that of
Europe's post-medieval cities: China is seen as a "proto-industrial," but
not necessarily proto-capitalist imperium, since its élite did not seize control
of, nor tried rationalizing the production process. In thèse comparisons
between China and the West, Marmé on the one hand largely equates
China's development with the Western model of "Smithean growth" (Le.,
415