Dr. Christoph Hess

Biography

Christoph Hess is a Mervyn King Research Fellow in Economic History at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on economic history, particularly in early modern China and East Asia. In his doctoral work, he reconstructed the institutional framework of inheritance in pre-industrial China by analyzing thousands of documents collected from rural household archives throughout the country. Christoph is particularly interested in the interconnectedness of these documents, complemented by ethnographic fieldwork, to reconstruct past rural communities. His initial findings will contribute to a book examining how inheritance interacted with institutions regulating marriage, migration, and the land market, which ultimately constrained long-term capital accumulation. His comprehensive study aims to analyze living standards and wealth inequality in China from 1650 to 1950, with an emphasis on how changes in wealth affected broader measures of human welfare, including nutrition, housing quality, and education. His research interests also encompass the rise of intellectual pragmatism in late imperial China, themes of servanthood and slavery, and rural entrepreneurship in post-reform China. Christoph has received his PhD from the University of Cambridge and holds an MPhil from Cambridge and a BA in Philosophy and Economics from the University of Bayreuth. He has also worked at Zhejiang University, Keio University, the Max Planck Institute for History of Science, and the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. Christoph welcomes supervision requests from undergraduate and prospective postgraduate students interested in the economic and social history of late imperial and Republican China.

Research Interests