Professor Helen Dunstan

MA Oxf PhD Camb. Appointed 1997
Professor; Chair of Department
Room 638 Brennan MacCallum Building A18
helen.dunstan@arts.usyd.edu.au
Phone: +61 2 9351 5516
Fax: +61 2 9351 2319

I am a historian of premodern China, with a primary focus on economic thought and economic policy in the first half of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911). I am particularly interested in the processes through which the central government made economic-policy decisions, and in the interplay between motives of very different kinds in such decision-making. While much of my research to date has focused on state intervention in the grain trade, my interests have now shifted to provincial finance in the Qianlong reign. Other topics on which I have worked include the southwest-Shanxi salt industry, particularly in the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), and Chinese environmental history. I enjoy teaching East Asian gender history, and have always been fascinated by the anthropological study of Chinese society.

• Making Sense of the Accounts: Provincial Finance in Mid-Qing China
• Co-authorship of textbook on Classical Chinese

• Economic thought and policy in late imperial China
• Provincial finance in eighteenth-century China

Books

• State or Merchant? Political Economy and Political Process in 1740s China. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Asia Center, 2006. 523 pp.
• Conflicting Counsels to Confuse the Age: A Documentary Study of Political Economy in Qing China, 1644–1840. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Center for Chinese Studies, 1996. 363 pages.

Article-length studies
Note: all studies in Chinese are published under my Chinese name, 鄧海倫 / 邓海伦.

• “Shilun liuyang zisong zhidu zai Qianlong chao de yishi feichu” 试论留养资送制度在乾隆朝的一时废除 (On the Qianlong-period suspension of the system of reception centers and assisted passage home for famine refugees). In Tian you xiongnian: Qingdai zaihuang yu Zhongguo shehui 天有凶年：清代灾荒与中国社会 (Heaven sends some bad years: natural disasters and Chinese society during the Qing dynasty), ed. Xia Mingfang and Zhu Hu (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 2007), pp. 110–35 (text), 176-84 (notes).
• “Tunhu yu jihuang: shiba shiji gaoji guanliao zouzhe zhong suo fanying tunhu de juese” 囤户与饥荒: 18世纪高级官僚奏折中所反映囤户的角色 (Famine and the hoarder: the role of hoarders as reflected in the memorials of eighteenth-century senior officials). In Ziran zaihai yu Zhongguo shehui lishi jiegou 自然灾害与中国社会历史结构(Natural disasters and social structure in Chinese history), ed. Institute of Chinese Historical Geography, Fudan University (Shanghai: Fudan University Press, 2001), pp. 211–33.
• “The ‘Autocratic Heritage’ and China's Political Future: A View from a Qing Specialist.” East Asian History 12 (1996): 79–104. Actual publication date: 1998.
• “Official Thinking on Environmental Issues and the State's Environmental Roles in Eighteenth-Century China.” In Sediments of Time: Environment and Society in Chinese History, ed. Mark Elvin and Liu Ts'ui-jung (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 585–614.
  Published also as “Shiba shiji Zhongguo guanfang dui huanjing wenti de kanfa yu zhengfu de juese” in Jijian suo zhi: Zhongguo huanjing shi lunwen ji, ed. Elvin and Liu (Taibei: Academia Sinica, Institute of Economics, 1995), vol. 2, pp. 877–916. Translation by Yang Junfeng.
• “‘Orders Go Forth in the Morning and are Changed by Nightfall’: A Monetary Policy Cycle in Qing China, November 1744–June 1745.” T'oung Pao (International Journal of Chinese Studies) 82 (1996): 66–136.
• “Safely Supping with the Devil: The Qing State and its Merchant Suppliers of Copper.” Late Imperial China 13, no. 2 (1992): 42–81.
• “Wang Yuan’s Pingshu: A Late Seventeenth-Century Utopia.” Papers on Far Eastern History 35 (1987): 31–78.

Coursework teaching:

• Premodern Chinese history and culture
• East Asian gender history
• A range of other Chinese Studies subjects, including Classical Chinese.
• Advanced undergraduate and honours / postgraduate subjects offered:
  2006
  ASNS2675: “Gender in East Asian History and Culture”
  2007
  ASNS2611: “China’s Last Dynasties: What Changed?”
  ASNS5981: “Gender and Culture in Premodern East Asia.”

Research supervision
I am best equipped to supervise projects in the history of the Ming and Qing dynasties, preferably within the time-span 1368 to 1800. However, I am also willing to consider well-developed proposals for thesis research on periods both earlier and later than this, and I am available to serve as associate supervisor, as appropriate, on topics that fall outside my research interests as a historian.