The Use of Quantitative Data in Studying Antiquity: Building Up a Case of Economic Growth in Late Bronze Age China

Recorded: April 11, 2025
Event: Whither Global Antiquity? Retrospection and Future Directions
Citation: Li Feng. “The Use of Quantitative Data in Studying Antiquity: Building Up a Case of Economic Growth in Late Bronze Age China,” Global Antiquity: Whither Global Antiquity (April 11, 2025).

by Li Feng (Columbia University)

“Economic Growth” has been a key question in the study of the Greco-Roman world in the past twenty years, emerging from the desire to understand Classical economic performance. This paper aims to build up a comparable case of economic growth in late Bronze Age China, using urbanization as an important proxy. The paper discusses ways in which quantified archaeological data can be used to measure and represent increases in urbanization and production, and this is augmented by considerations of textual/documentary evidence for population growth. By bringing the two lines of analysis together, the paper projects a tentative figure of per-capita economic growth, which can serve as a starting point for future studies to improve and correct. After all, the paper is concerned with the feasibility of the methodology herewith used to establish the case of economic growth based on the imperfect archaeological and documentary data.

About the Speaker

Li Feng, Professor of Early Chinese History and Archaeology at Columbia University, is both a historian and an archaeologist of Bronze Age China. His past research focused on early state organization, workings of bureaucracy, early writing, economic dynamics of early state and empire, and comparative historiography. Li Feng engages broadly inscriptional-textual sources and material evidence, and he directed the archaeological survey and excavation of the Guicheng city-site in Shandong, China. His published books include Landscape and Power in Early China (Cambridge University Press, 2006); Bureaucracy and the State in Early China (Cambridge University Press, 2008); Writing and Literacy in Early China (co-editor; University of Washington Press, 2011); Early China: A Social and Cultural History (Cambridge University Press, 2014); Studies of Bronzes and Inscriptional Calligraphy (Shanghai Classical Books, 2018); Guicheng: A Study of the Formation of States on the Jiaodong Peninsula in Late Bronze-Age China, 1000–500 BCE (co-editor; Science Press, 2018).