Matthew Lowenstein will join the Hamilton School as an Assistant Professor of Humanities in academic year 2026-2027. Lowenstein is a Hoover Fellow at the Stanford University Hoover Institution. He studies the economic, social, and political history of modern China from the Qing dynasty to the early People’s Republic. Prior to entering the academy, Lowenstein worked as a securities analyst in Beijing, where he covered the Chinese financial and shadow-banking sectors.
Lowenstein is currently working on his first book, Capital and Finance in Late Imperial China: The Shanxi merchant system, under contract with Cambridge University Press. The monograph offers the first comprehensive study of traditional Chinese finance and reveals the intricate complexity of traditional Chinese financial structures. Its findings suggest that China’s indigenous financial system may help explain its phenomenal convergence with western economies over the past four decades.
“Rotating Savings and Credit Associations (ROSCAs) in Prewar China: Communal Finance and the Roots of Economic Development,” Economic History Review (2023).
“Risk management in prewar China: A study of rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs) in Qing dynasty and Republican-era Shanxi province,” Business History (2023).
“Business Accounting at Fengshengtai in Late Imperial China: Is there New Evidence of Double-entry Bookkeeping?” Business History Review (February 2023): 1-33.
“The China United Assurance Society and the Making of Chinese Life Insurance, 1912–1949,” Enterprise & Society (21), no. 3 (2020): 681–715.
“Return to the Cage: Monetary Policy in China’s First Five-Year Plan,” Twentieth Century China (Volume 44:1, January 2019).
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