Frédéric Constant 梅凌寒
The Economic and Social History of Late Imperial China in the Light of Chinese Archives: State of Research and Perspectives
The historiography of the Western world has been a demonstration of how the wealth of information in legal archives can be mobilized in the service of social history. In recent decades, many works on Qing history also have been produced from local and central archives as collections have been made public. Much of this research has been used to deepen our understanding of the operation of justice and the culture of conflict in China, while many others have focused on more social issues, including economic, family, or social relationships. I will discuss here the methodological difficulties and challenges posed by the structuring and dispersal of Chinese court records in order to conduct research similar to what has been done with Western judicial archives. In particular, I will discuss the issue of quantitative studies and, more broadly, the type of investigation that can be conducted given the nature of the information available in the Chinese archives.