Before the Western Zhou: An Outline of Shang Political Economy

Abstract

This paper provides a diachronic context for the discussion of the Western Zhou economy by focusing on the period immediately before it and raising the question of how the Western Zhou political economy fits into the larger developmental trends of the Chinese Bronze Age. This paper deconstructs some aspects of the elite-redistributive model of the Shang economy, specifically the idea that Central Plains Bronze Age political economies of the 2nd millennium BCE were centralized and uncommercialized. Beginning from the assertion that historically specific institutions and their multi-scalar diachronic changes are entangled with the agency and practice of political economic actors, this paper rejects simplistically derived evolutionary stages and insists on tracing the multi-scalar processual and institutional causes and impacts of historical change.