Yeah,I was discussing the Song Dynasty today. All of them suddenly talked about how the government doesn’t try and prevent land consolidation at all and that’s the reason why it ran out of funds during the war against the Mongols—which was shocking to be honest,considering the fabulous tales about how wealthy the Song Dynasty was.The government don’t manage land, but they can prevent landowners from consolidating land and creating larger, more effective estates.
A particularly notorious case is Ming Dynasty. With it gentry privileges, whenever someone gets a title in the civil service exam, there are always peasants who willingly become their “tenants” to avoid tax. Tax disappears from government revenues, and yet this new “landlord” cannot consolidate these farmlands for more effective use.
Song Dynasty should have been better than Ming.
Nowdays,I‘m trying to find out how exactly did the Mongols outcompete the Song Dynasty in terms of money when the Mongol empire was already divided by the time the Yuan Dynasty was formed.
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