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prosperous regional economy. There most conspicuously were found the cash-cropping and the specialized markets
so characteristic of China's late imperial economy. So specialized were
these local economies, in fact, that grain production was much too
low to sustain the population. As a result, a vast interregional grain
entrepot sprang up in Kiangnan cities and market towns. By the
eighteenth century rice imports sufficient to feed between three and
four million people a year were flowing from the upper- and midYangtze provinces to the market towns around Soochow, Sungchiang, and T'ai-ts'ang.7 This rice made its way to grain-deficit areas
all around east China. According to an early eighteenth-century
observer,

    Fukien rice has long been insufficient to supply the demands of Fukien.
Even in years of abundant harvest much has been imported from
Kiangsu and Chekiang. What is more, Kiangsu and Chekiang rice has
long been insufficient to supply Kiangsu and Chekiang, so that even in
abundant years they have looked to Hunan and Hupei. For several
decades, rice from Hunan-Hupei has collected at the market town of
Feng-ch'iao in Soochow Prefecture [just west of Soochow city]. By way
of Shanghai and Hsu-p'u, this Feng-ch'iao rice makes its way to Fukien.
Therefore, even though a year's harvest may be blighted, there will be
no inflation of rice prices.,,
    In manufacturing, the basis of Kiangnan's wealth was textiles.
Cotton products of the lower Yangtze reached a national market. Silk
was the leading export product and clad the increasingly luxurious
bureaucratic, scholarly, and commercial elites. These huge industries
were built on the handicraft labor of millions of peasant families. So
tightly was the peasant household bound to the marketing network
in Kiangnan's highly commercialized society that no "isolated" or
"cellular" local economies were conceivable (to cite an old misconception about village China). In its extreme form, this integration of
village with market town meant a kind of slavery to handicraft work.
For a swelling population to survive in this densely populated region
on ever-smaller parcels of farmland, every family member was mobilized to produce for some niche of the market. As early as the
fifteenth century, we find an account of such lives in the cotton
industry:
    Cotton-cloth production is not limited to the villages, but also is done
in the cities. At dawn the country women carry yarn they have spun
into the city, where they exchange it for raw cotton; the next morning
they come in with another load, without any respite. A [peasant] weaver
can produce about a roll (p'i) of cloth a day, and some work all through
the night without going to bed. After payments of taxes and interest, a
farming family's resources are exhausted before the end of the year,
and they rely for living expenses entirely on the cotton industry.9
    Not only in highly commercialized Kiangnan but in less developed
areas as well, intimate connections between village and market town
formed the texture of late imperial society.1' The suffusion of the
late imperial economy by monetized silver and copper made possible-and in fact required-a constant flow of people to and from
urban centers. Virtually every peasant household traded in a local
market, and through it was linked to regional and even national
markets. What this meant for China's premodern industry was that extensive, highly rationalized production could proceed without
large-scale urbanization. Although large factories and urbanized
work forces did exist in some regional metropolises such as Nanking,
the more general pattern was of an intricate putting-out system, based
on handicraft labor by the wives and children of land-poor farmers,
who could participate in large production systems while still living in
villages.

    The Emancipation of ' Labor
    The growth of commerce since the sixteenth century had been
accompanied by a freer market