Profile

R. Bin Wong is Distinguished Professor of History at UCLA where he served as the founding Director of the Asia Institute. Working in both Chinese and Global history, his work has addressed issues of economic development, state (trans)formation, political economy, and collective action.  Two of his books appear in Chinese and English-- China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (1997) [转变的中国：历史变迁与欧洲经验的局限] and with Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, Before and Beyond Divergence: The Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe (2011) [大分流之外：中国和欧洲经济变迁的政治].   He has written or co-authored more than one hundred articles published in Chinese, English, French, German and Japanese. His most recent books are a volume co-edited with Masayuki Tanimoto, Public Goods Provision in the Early Modern Economy (University of California Press, 2018) and Jingwang zhilai (鏡往知来) [Understanding the Past & Pursuing the Future] (國立交通大學出版社2019). He was previously Chancellor’s Professor of History and Economics at UC-Irvine (2000-2004) and Distinguished Guest Professor at the Fudan University Institute for Advanced Study in Social Sciences (2009-2013).  Currently, he serves on the Conseil Scientifique of the Paris School of Economics and the External Research Evaluation Committee for Japan’s National Research Institute for Humanity and Nature. His current research includes studies of the ideologies and institutions of the political economies in different world regions and a project on contemporary Chinese, European, and American multi-level water governance in historical perspectives.  

Selected Publication

Articles since 2015:

• with Kaoru Sugihara. “Industrious revolutions in early modern world history,” in Jerry Bentley, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, and Merry Wiesner-Hanks, eds., Cambridge World History, vol 6 part 1
  2015 pp.283-309
• “Self-strengthening and other responses to the expansion of European economic and political power,” in John McNeil and Kenneth Pomeranz, eds., Cambridge World History, vol. 7 part 2 2015 pp. 366-94
• “Asian Connections and Chinese Comparisons: The Unconquered East,” in Hamish Scott,ed., Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History 2015 vol. 2.
• “Revisiting Bureaucratie et Famine en Chine au XVIIIe Siècle: Notes for Revising Contemporary Notions of Governance within and beyond China,” Etudes Chinoises 34.2 (2015):23-35.
• “Possibilities of Plenty and the Persistence of Poverty: Industrialization and International Trade,” in Sebastian Conrad and Jürgen Osterhammel eds., An Emerging Modern World. Harvard
  University Press, 2018. pp. 249-409.
• “Principles and Practices of Chinese Governance a Millennium Ago” China Review International 23.4 (2016): 323- 333.
• “The early modern foundations of the modern world: recent works on patterns of economic and political change.” Journal of Global History 11 (2016): 135-146.
• “Divergence Displaced. Patterns of Economic and Political Change in Early Modern and Modern Global History.” Comparativ 26.3 (2016): 71-100.
• Review of Ji-young Lee, China’s Hegemony: Four Hundred Years of East Asian Domination in H-Diplo: ISSF Roundtable, V. X.no.8 (2018): 20-25 (Permalink:http://issforum.org/roundtables/10-8-China
• “The Last Millennium of Chinese Imperial Rule and the Emergence of China’s Modern Economy,” Chinese Sociological Review, (2018) DOI: 10.1080/21620555.2018.1503932
• “China’s Emerging State in Historical Perspective,” in Takashi Shiraishi and Tetsushi Sonobe, eds. Emerging States and Economies: Their Origins, Drivers and Challenges Ahead. Springer. 2019. pp. 119-138
• “Coping with Poverty and Famine: Material Welfare, Public Goods, and Chinese Approaches to Governance, in Masayuki Tanimoto and R. Bin Wong, eds., Public Goods Provision in the Early Modern Economy: Comparative Perspectives from Japan, China, and Europe. University of California. 2019. pp. 130-144.
• “Public Goods and Economy in the Early Modern Era—New Perspectives on Modern Economies and Contemporary Environmental Concerns,” in Masayuki Tanimoto and R. Bin Wong, eds., Public Goods Provision in the Early Modern Economy: Comparative Perspectives from Japan, China, and Europe. University of California. 2019. Pp. 292- 313.

Research Interests

Wong’s research has examined Chinese patterns of political, economic and social change both within Asian regional contexts and compared with more familiar European patterns, as part of the larger scholarly efforts underway to make world history speak to contemporary conditions of globalization.

Teaching