A world where everything has a price

The Ming economy was not one where everyone had to buy everything in order to make a living. Many produced the food they needed to eat, and the textiles they needed to wear. But it was an economy in which, perhaps for the first time in Chinese history - perhaps even for the first time in the history of the world - everything could be bought and sold, and everything had a price. It was the price that determined which goods were put on the market and which were kept out of reach of potential buyers. In the first lecture, "A world where everything has a price", we asked to what extent the Ming economy could be said to have become a "price economy". Several authors from the late ^16th and early ^17th centuries confirm that Ming subjects were well aware of the influence of prices on their existence as producers and consumers, and that they were concerned about their vulnerability to price fluctuations. Some intellectuals liked to imagine that it would be nice to live in a "moral economy" where the household produced what it consumed; others were tormented by the instability of economic values, which they saw as a harbinger of the erosion of moral values, and they questioned what for everyone else was "the good life". The ubiquity of commercial relations, the number of people involved, and the levels reached by the national product under the Ming could only make such concerns obsolete.