Richard Von Glahn
Richard Von Glahn
Distinguished Professor
Email: vonglahn@history.ucla.edu
Office: 9278 Bunche Hall
Phone: 310-825-3087
Class WebsiteBiography
Economic and social history of China, 10th-18th centuries; monetary history; comparative economic history; global economic integration, 1000-1800; East Asian maritime history, 1000-1800.
After completing an undergraduate degree majoring in Chinese at Connecticut College, I pursued graduate study in Chinese history at UC Berkeley (M.A.) and Yale University (Ph.D., 1983). I held postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard and the University of Rochester and an assistant professorship at Connecticut College before I joined the UCLA faculty in 1987. My primary field of research is the economic and social history of premodern China, with a particular focus on the period 1000-1700. My publications include four monographs in Chinese history, several edited books, and a co-authored textbook in world history. My research has been supported by a number of awards, including National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships (twice) and a Guggenheim Fellowship. My most recent book is The Economic History of China from Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2016). Among my current projects, I am co-editing (with Debin Ma of the London School of Economics) The Cambridge Economic History of China (scheduled for publication in 2021) and serving as a senior editor for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia for Asian History, an on-line resource for scholars. In addition, I continue to pursue research in Chinese monetary history, especially the interrelationship between China’s monetary system and wider spheres of monetary circulation within Asia and on a global scale, and have embarked on a new project on the economic history of maritime East Asia from the ninth to the eighteenth centuries.
In addition to teaching courses on all periods of Chinese history, I teach a range of undergraduate and graduate courses in world history.
Publications
Books
- The Country of Streams and Grottoes: Expansion, Settlement, and the Civilizing of the Sichuan Frontier in Song Times. Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1987.
- Fountain of Fortune: Money and Monetary Policy in China, 1000-1700. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996.
- The Song-Yuan-Ming Transition in Chinese History. Co-edited with Paul Jakov Smith. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003.
- Monetary History in Global Perspective, 1470-1800. Co-edited with Dennis O. Flynn & Arturo Giráldez. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Press, 2003.
- The Sinister Way: The Divine and the Demonic in Chinese Religious Culture. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004.
- The Economic History of China from Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
- World in the Making: A Global History. Co-authored with Bonnie Smith, Marc van der Mieroop, and Kris Lane. Oxford University Press, 2019.
Recent Articles
- “Modalities of the Fiscal State in Imperial China.” Journal of Chinese History 4.1 (2020): 1-29.
- “The Political Economy of the East Asian Maritime World in the Sixteenth Century.” In East Asia in the World: Twelve Events that Shaped the Modern International Order, pp. 44-64. Ed. Stephan Haggard and David C. Kang. Cambridge University Press, 2020.
- “The Changing Significance of Latin American Silver in the Chinese Economy, 16th-19th Centuries.” Revista de Historia Económica – Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History (2019): 1-32.
- “The Maritime Trading World of East Asia from the Thirteenth to the Seventeenth Centuries.” In Picturing Commerce in and from the East Asian Maritime Circuits, 1550 to 1800, pp. 57-85. Ed. Tamara H. Bentley. Amsterdam University Press, 2019.
- “Economic Depression and the Silver Question in Nineteenth Century China.” In Global History and New Polycentric Approaches: Europe, Asia, and the Americas in a World Network System (XVI-XIXth Centuries), pp. 81-117. Ed. Manuel Pérez García and Lucio de Sousa. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
- “Paper Money in Song-Yuan China.” In Money, Currency and Crisis: In Search of Trust, 2000 bc – ad 2000, pp. 248-66. Ed. R.J. van der Spek and Bas van Leeuwen. Routledge, 2018.
- “Beyond the Great Divergence: Current Scholarship on the Economic History of Premodern China.” In A Companion to Chinese History, pp. 315-26. Ed. Michael Szonyi. Wiley/Blackwell, 2017
- “State Formation in China from the Sui through the Song Dynasties.” In The Cambridge History of the World, vol. 5, pp. 505-524. Ed. Benjamin Z. Kedar and Merry Weisener-Hanks. Cambridge University Press, 2015.
- “Chinese Coin and Changes in Monetary Preferences in Maritime East Asia in the 15th-16th Centuries.” In Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 57.5 (2014): 629-68.
- “The Ningbo-Hakata Merchant Network and the Reorientation of East Asian Maritime Trade, 1150-1300.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 74.2 (2014): 251-81.
