Christoph Hess

Christoph’s research specialises in the economic history of early modern China and East Asia. For his doctoral work, he reconstructed the institutional framework of inheritance in pre-industrial China through thousands of documents gathered from rural household collections in China. He is currently turning the findings from his doctoral dissertation into his first book, which examines how inheritance interacted with other institutions regulating marriage, migration, and the land market, to limit long-term capital accumulation. His main project as the Mervyn King Research Fellow at King’s will be a comprehensive study of living standards and wealth inequality in China between 1650 and 1950. He is especially interested in the effect of changes in wealth on broad measures of human welfare, such as nutrition, housing quality, and education. Christoph’s other interests include the rise of intellectual pragmatism in late imperial China, servantship and slavery, and rural entrepreneurship in post-reform China.

Christoph received his PhD from the University of Cambridge. Prior to that, he read for an MPhil in Cambridge and a BA in Philosophy and Economics at the University of Bayreuth. Other stations included Zhejiang University, Keio University, the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science, and the Max-Planck-Institute for Demographic Research.