Supeng Wang*

University of Oxford

Rural Women’s Economic Lives in Qing Dynasty China, 1644–1911

The bursary’s financial support came at a crucial stage of my PhD thesis project and sustained steady progress in my collection of all court cases involving women from the Nanbu Archive, a uniquely large and challenging Qing-era dataset located in Sichuan, China. This substantial body of material underpins my future work, which seeks to relate Qing women’s economic lives to broader debates on institutions, labour, and development. During the same period, I also drafted the first chapter on Qing rural institutions and women, and undertook further training in teaching and Chinese economic history at Oxford.