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The article presents the historiography of Chinese capitalism, focusing on the study of the late Qing tea trade. Topics covered include the basic materials describing the tea merchants of Huizhou, China in the late Qing period, an exploration of how a form of abstract time regulated the tea production process, and an analysis on the use by labour overseers in Huizhou of incense sticks to regulate the efficient completion of tasks.

I use data covering 267 prefectures over four centuries to investigate two questions about historical China. To what extent did weather shocks cause civil conflict? And to what extent did the historical introduction of (drought resistant) sweet potatoes mitigate these effects? I find that before the introduction of sweet potatoes, exceptional droughts increased the probability of peasant revolts by around 0.7 percentage points, which translates into a revolt probability in drought years that is more than twice the average revolt probability. After the introduction of sweet potatoes, exceptional droughts only increased the probability of peasant revolts by around 0.2 percentage points. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, western physicians and medical observers became fascinated by the Chinese practice of emasculating young boys and men to serve as palace eunuchs. As a result of interaction and encounters between western physicians and Chinese eunuch patients at western hospitals and dispensaries in Peking, emasculation became a serious subject of medical inquiry that also shed light on Chinese-western mutual perceptions. The writings of these western physicians are the only known historical accounts of the emasculation procedure from the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) extant today. More than just voyeuristic commentaries on another Orientalist stereotype of ‘exotic’ China, these accounts presented readers with what their authors perceived to be textual evidence of the efficacy and/or superiority of western medicine and even offered insight and medical data of importance for topics being debated in the West, such as the use of castration to resolve sexual and psychological deviancy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]