On The Economy Studies Of Guizhou’s Small-and-middle-sized Towns In Ming And Oing Dynasties

Town is the product at the certain stage of social and economic development and human’s important gathering place. This thesis starts from investigating all elements of Guizhou’s social economy in Ming and Qing Dynasties to study the development of internal economies in small-and-middle-sized towns in this province.This article are divided into three parts:Part one trims Guizhou’s specific situations according to political system, land-hoarding system and transportation, starting from the rising of local towns. The stable political system provided these low-grade markets with proper environment, land-hoarding system led to a huge amount of land exploitation, which strengthened the economic function of Weisuo system (a military system in Ming Dynasty), the improvement of transportation and entering of migrants ended the isolation so that the places where had convenient transportation and population gathering were rising first. The combination of all the elements mentioned above are illustrated directly in the rising of towns in Guizhou province.Part two does an independent analysis of supply-typed towns in Guizhou province, discussing the internal economic activities in this kind of cities. Through analyzing the questions such as the number and circle of supply-typed towns and markets, this thesis demonstrates that this kind of towns was widespread throughout Guizhou province. The goods and logistics at that time showed variety and supply of the products, and the production of handcraft industry revealed the urban development imbalances, meanwhile, the supply-typed town’s internal population composition reflected its supply characteristics and position.Part three analyzes the distributed towns, mainly discussing the basic information of market and population in this kind of towns. Start from analyzing distributed towns, many things are linked to this part including discussing the distribution of this kind of market, commodity circulation and its advantages and management accordingly. Besides, this part focuses on the internal population of distributed market and analyzes its settled and floating population to illustrate the role that distributed towns and markets play in the economic development.