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Manuscript received May 30, 2023; revised January 16, 2024; accepted January 27, 2024; published February 6, 2024
Abstract—The Ming dynasty embarked on a desperate path
of excessive taxation to maintain the faltering state machinery,
and eventually collapsed under the impact of the peasant
rebellion and the Manchu regime. This paper examines the
impact of the Ming Dynasty taxation system on protest and
specifically focuses on the Three Military Campaign Taxes.
Using a novel dataset on 215 prefectures from 1573 to 1644, I
find that increased taxation leads to peasant unrest. The results
suggest that an increase of 1% in taxation in the late Ming
dynasty corresponds to an increase of 3.3% in the number of
peasant unrest. The results are robust to various specifications.
This study thus provides support to the claim that informal
taxation can affect social stability.
Keywords—Ancient China, peasant unrest, social stability,
taxation
Cite: Qixuan Ou, " Taxation and Peasant Rebellion: Evidence from Late Ming Dynasty China," International Journal of Trade, Economics and Finance vol.15, no.1, pp. 14-19, 2024.
Copyright © 2024 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).
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