RESEARCH INTERESTS

Comparative state formation, early-modern China, early-modern Britain, history of political economy

DISSERTATION

The Politics of State Finance in Seventeenth-Century China and England

BIOGRAPHY

I am a doctoral candidate studying the history of the state in modern China and Western Europe. I have fundamental research interests in comparative histories of institutions and political processes and the histories of political economy and political thought. I began graduate studies at Chicago in September 2020.

My dissertation is a comparative study of fiscal politics and state formation in seventeenth-century Ming-Qing China and Stuart England. I argue for the period as a crucial moment of crisis and transformation in each polity’s developmental trajectory, using materials drawn from 21 archives in Mainland China, Taiwan, and Britain. I examine the fiscal-political origins of China and England’s general crises, as well as parallel conflicts over fiscal policy and authority, in the decades before the Ming-Qing transition and English Revolution. I then compare the fiscal and political dynamics of state breakdown and reconstruction, exploring institutional paths not taken in both early-Qing China and Restoration England. I conclude with a comparative account of the divergent settlements achieved in each polity by century’s end, which shaped the terms of fiscal politics and state-financial institutions for centuries to come: the emergence of a precociously extractive, public fiscal state in post-1688 England, and the consolidation of a distinctly autocratic and self-limiting tax state in China after 1683.

My research has been supported externally by fellowships from the Economic History Association, the Huntington Library, and the Beinecke Library, and internally by the Nicholson Center for British Studies, the Center for East Asian Studies, and the Center for International Social Science Research. At Chicago I have coordinated the East Asia: Transregional Histories Workshop and the Empires Forum and served as a student representative to the Deans Advisory Council and History Graduate Student Association. Before coming to Chicago, I studied history, Chinese literature, and classics at Yale University, graduating in 2019. In AY 2019-20 I was a Richard U. Light Fellow at National Taiwan University, where I studied Classical Chinese.

Please feel free to contact me with questions about common intellectual interests or about studying history at Chicago.