Traces China's transformations with a focus on China's incorporation process in the nineteenth century, which help to grasp the historical origins of China's capitalism.

As Europe's colonial powers reached China in the nineteenth century, they became so strong that China could no longer ignore them. Given that the unprecedented geographical expansion of the European system undermined a China-centered world order and brought unprecedented changes to Chinese society, an intriguing question—why and how the Chinese empire entered into the capitalist world economy—has attracted increasing attention among historians, historical sociologists, and world-systems researchers. Yet, there has been no comprehensive monograph touching on China's incorporation process into the capitalist world-economy. To rectify this, The Road Taken investigates China's incorporation process. Incorporation studies, based on world-systems analysis, aims to illustrate the long-term integration process of external arenas into the capitalist world-economy. Ru traces China's transformations with a focus on how incorporation process unfolded over the course of a century (1780s–1890s), which represents a watershed era in the relations between China and the capitalist world.