Sugar and Society in China: Peasants, Technology, and the World Market. By Sucheta Mazumdar. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Pp. xx, 657. $49.50

This thoroughly researched history of sugar in Qing China (1644–1911) was published at a fortuitous time. After nearly two decades of “China-centered” history, scholars are again situating China within a global context. In the early 1980s, when Sucheta Mazumdar began her research, many scholars were turning away from questions relating to China's contact with the outside world in order to concentrate on developments within China. Reacting against an established body of scholarship that portrayed late imperial China as technologically stagnant, isolated, and impervious to change, historians set out to document the myriad social, political, and economic transformations underway in China prior to the “Western impact” (Paul Cohen. Discovering History in China. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). The new comparativists build upon these insights. With a wealth of local and regional histories to draw upon, they are now returning to the old question of why China failed to experience its own self-induced industrial revolution (See, for example, the recent exchange of views in the Journal of Asian Studies 61, no. 2 [May 2002]: 501–662). Published on the upstroke of this reinvigorated debate, this book combines “China-centered” and comparative approaches to analyze why China, “universally acknowledged to be one of the most developed economies up through the mid-eighteenth century, paused in this development in the nineteenth” (p. 10).