Madeleine Zelin
Affiliation
- Faculty Fellow, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures
Research
Madeleine Zelin is professor of modern Chinese history, director of the East Asian National Resource Center at Columbia University and co-director of the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation Center on Chinese Cultural and Institutional History. She served as director of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute in 1992-93 and from 1995-2001. Professor Zelin received her B.A. from Cornell University in 1970 and her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1979. She teaches Qing history as well as a variety of courses focusing on Chinese legal history and China's early modern social and economic transformation. Professor Zelin's research has taken her to archives in Taiwan, Beijing, Ya'an, Chengdu, Zigong, Shenyang, and Shanghai where she has explored Qing tax reform and state-building, elite formation, business organization and investment, and the development of early modern customary law governing private transactions. Her publications include The Magistrate's Tael, Rationalizing Fiscal Reform in Eighteenth Century Ch'ing China (1984), Rainbow (1992), a co-edited volume, Contract and Property Rights in Early Modern China (2004) and The Merchants Zigong: Industrial Entrepreneurship in Early Modern China (forthcoming). Professor Zelin is currently working on a project with Jonathan Ocko, tentatively entitled Contract Law and Civil Procedure in Qing and Republican China: A Text-Based Approach as well as an exploration of the sources of Chinese legal consciousness in the Qing and Republican periods.
Selected Work
- The Merchants of Zigong: Industrial Entrepreneurship in Early Modern China, Columbia University Press, 2005.
- "Managing Multiple Ownership at the Zigong Saltyard" In Madeleine Zelin, Jonathan Ocko and Robert Gardella, eds. Contract and Property Rights in Early Modern China, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004
- "A Critique of Rights of Property in Prewar China" In Madeleine Zelin, Jonathan Ocko and Robert Gardella, eds. Contract and Property Rights in Early Modern China, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004
- "Economic Freedom in Late Imperial China" In Kirby, William, ed. Realms of Freedom in China, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004
- "The Yongzheng Reign" In Cambridge History of China, v. 9, Willard Peterson, ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003
- "Critique of Scholarship on Chinese Business History in the People's Republic of China and Taiwan" Chinese Studies in History, v.31, numbers 3-4, Spring-Summer 1998
- "The Structure of the Chinese Economy during the Qing Period: Some Thoughts on the 150th Anniversary of the Opium War" In Lieberthan, et al, ed. Perspectives on Modern China, Four Anniversaries, M.E.Sharpe, 1991, reprinted as "Modernization and China's economic structure in the 19th and 20th centuries" in Frederic Wakeman, ed. China's Quest for Modernization—A Historical Perspective, Berkeley: University of California, China Research monographs, 1997
- "China in the World Economy" In A Guide to Asia in Western and World History, Carol Gluck and Ainslee Embrey, eds., M.E. Sharpe, 1997
- "China in the Twentieth Century" In A Guide to Asia in Western and World History, Carol Gluck and Ainslee Embrey, eds., M.E. Sharpe, 1997
See Also
- Featured publications by Madeleine Zelin
