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Labour relations and work ethics in China, 1500 to 1800
| In the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties, the dominant Confucian concept on work and status was captured in the notion of “four occupations”, scholar-officials, farmers, artisans, and merchants, and in the gender-specific attribution of ploughing, i.e. agricultural work in the fields, for men, and weaving for women. The degree of unfree labour in the form of bondservice increased during the last hundred years of the Ming dynasty, and then subsided. The demand of tributary work for the government followed a centuries-old pattern of stronger extortion of corvée labour in the early years of the dynasties and commutation to monetary taxes in the later phases. „Free“ wage labour, implying that employees could choose and leave their employers at their own volition, can be traced to the cities of the Ming dynasty and more remote periods, but in a sustained form rose from the eighteenth century onwards. This paper will present a quantitative appraisal of these tendencies in the conceptional framework of the Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations, and the concomitant changes in the valuation of labour and the self-understanding of those who worked.
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